What You Need To Know About The Knock-Down, Drag-Out Race To Lead Democrats Out Of The Wilderness

When a fired-up and fractious group of Democratic state party leaders, veteran operatives, activists, and labor leaders assembled to elect a new chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2017, a few short months after Donald Trump was first elected president, the race to lead the party attracted the national attention and ideological infighting one might expect from a high-profile Democratic Senate primary.

Eight years later, Trump is back in the White House — this time with a popular vote win, a sweep of all seven battleground states and gains among voters of color, who had leaned toward Democrats for decades.

But the November election results have not generated the kind of ideologically-tinged “battle for the soul” of the party that occurred in 2017.

Notwithstanding a pre-election forum on Thursday interrupted by left-wing activists, the DNC’s 450 members are set to elect a new DNC chair in National Harbor, Maryland, on Saturday based less on ideology and more on whose personality and résumé best equips them to manage the DNC’s fundraising and organizing bureaucracy, ensure a fair and seamless 2028 presidential primary and make the party’s case to the public.

The top contenders are Ken Martin, chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party; Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

Faiz Shakir, a former presidential campaign manager to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), entered the race two weeks ago out of frustration with the lack of deeper discussion about the party’s vision and message for winning back working-class voters. He is, by his own admission, an extreme longshot for the top spot, but he has used his candidacy to call for a renewed focus on economic populism that is unafraid to identify corporations and other monied interests as enemies of workers.

Overall, though, the technical focus of the DNC chair’s race is part of a Democratic shift away from harnessing grassroots activism and a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach to ideological disagreements. The most senior Democratic elected officials and potential contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination have largely declined to participate in public conversations about what policy or ideological direction the party should pursue going forward, or what mistakes former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris made in the run-up to Trump’s win.

And even many Democrats who want to see the party engage in deeper introspection believe that the DNC chair race is the wrong forum for those kinds of conversations.

Here is a look at each of the top contenders, their campaigns, and their odds of winning:

Ken Martin

Martin, Wikler, and O’Malley broadly agree on two of the core problems the party is facing: declining support among working-class voters, and the right’s ability to outmatch them in the new media ecosystem.

Likewise, none of the candidates has said whether they think Biden should have dropped out of the presidential race sooner, or expressed a preference for a particular presidential primary schedule. The latter question is sure to be a pressing matter on the next chair’s agenda, though it is not entirely up to the chair; any plan must come out of the DNC’s bylaws committee and receive approval from the broader party membership.

Where they disagree most, though, is on who the best person to tackle the job is. Martin, who has led Minnesota Democrats since 2011, has run on “getting the DNC out of D.C.” — by, among other things, giving more money and power to state parties. That platform, and Martin’s tenure as chair of the Association of State Democratic Committees, an umbrella group for state parties, have given Martin a strong base of support among the state party chairs and vice chairs who make up a sizable chunk of DNC members. Martin has a history of leading state parties in intraparty fights with the DNC’s leadership in Washington.

To those in need of persuasion, Martin has touted his work turning around his state party’s finances, his flawless record in statewide races since taking over, and the construction of a two-year trifecta in Minnesota state government that enabled passage of a host of progressive reforms. His supporters also hail his work campaigning with and for Democrats across the country.

Sandra Williams, deputy political director of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union and a DNC member from Georgia, met Martin while he was campaigning for Democrats in Georgia during the 2018 and 2022 election cycles.

“I am convinced he is not just here as a figurehead. He is here to be the voice of the Democrats,” Williams said. “To me, I can see Ken going all over the 50 states and the territories just to … have a close connection with us, to hear us, to listen.”

Minnesota Democrats’ electoral record is not exactly perfect under Martin. The party sent five Democrats to the U.S. House when Martin started and now has only four. Minnesota Democrats also lost their majority in the state House of Representatives last year — first by tying Republicans’ number of seats in November, and then by temporarily losing a safe Democratic seat when a vetted candidate was disqualified for not actually living in the district.

Ben Wikler

Wikler, a former Washington director of the liberal group MoveOn, is pitching DNC members on his record in Wisconsin, where he’s been party chair since 2019. He and his allies are keen to note that his experience is in a battleground state, rather than a light-blue state like Minnesota.

Wikler quickly scaled up his party’s fundraising, enabling him to hire more people and professionalize the party’s staff structure. His biggest coup came in 2023, when he decided to bet big on a liberal takeover of the state supreme court that led to the striking down of the state’s Republican-gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts. Democrats went on to flip 14 legislative seats in 2024.

Bryan Kennedy, mayor of Glendale, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb, and the representative of Democratic municipal officials on the DNC, marveled at how transformative Wikler’s tenure had been in his Democratic city alone. The state party, which had never provided him significant help in the past, assigned an organizer to work on his campaign, cut his canvassing turf and funded direct-mail and digital ads on his behalf.

“Both Ben and Ken have a really strong skill set for this position, but one of them has built the infrastructure in the state and raised more money in less time than the other,” Kennedy said. “We have two really good choices and one is a little bit better than the other.”

In statewide races, in particular, Wikler’s record is not flawless. Then-Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes narrowly lost his Senate race in 2022 — a defeat Wisconsinites tend to blame on the national party — and Harris failed to carry the state in November. Wikler and his allies respond that Harris overperformed in Wisconsin relative to the other six battleground states, all of which she lost by more votes than Wisconsin.

Wikler’s biggest advantage has been a surge of support from national Democratic leaders and groups, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the biggest public-sector labor unions, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Third Way.

These national Democratic power brokers see Wikler as something of a fundraising and digital organizing wunderkind, properly tested in battle as leader of a swing-state party. Some quietly see Martin’s deeper ties to state party leaders as a liability, rather than an asset, fearing he may be too deferential to state officials and provide them funding without insisting on a say in the state party’s electoral strategy.

Wikler is “more or less saying, ‘I’m not just going to say what you want, and here’s money,’” said someone close to Wikler who requested anonymity to protect their relationship with Martin and his supporters.

Wikler’s strategy, as this ally put it: “Hey, let us come in there and talk to you about what the best option is. And let’s get agreement on a race that you could win here.”

Martin O’Malley

Of the top three DNC chair candidates, O’Malley is by far the underdog. A former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, he cannot claim to speak for a purple or even a light-blue state. His last bout in national politics was a largely forgotten presidential run in 2016.

But O’Malley and his supporters argue that he has an edge in executive experience, having run a large city, a state and, from 2023 to 2024, a Social Security Administration plagued by customer-service problems. That kind of work better prepares him to manage a large organization than running a state party would, his backers say.

“Once Martin O’Malley becomes the DNC chair, I think there’s going to be a sense of relief that people have, that we have an adult in the room who’s ready to hit the ground running,” said Yvette Lewis, a DNC member from Maryland, who chaired the state party while O’Malley was governor.

Lewis also pointed out that O’Malley sounds a lot more like a seasoned politician. He’s comfortable in front of TV cameras, and thus may be better equipped to make Democrats’ case in the media.

“After this election is over, the national shows are going to come calling,” Lewis added. “Who do we see as the person who can go right away on ‘Meet the Press’ or ABC’s ‘This Week’ and deliver the message of the way forward for the DNC? Martin O’Malley is the only one.”

As is typical of a contender not leading the pack, O’Malley has shown a greater appetite for risk than Martin and Wikler. He’s admitted that Biden communicated his accomplishments poorly, and that Harris would have been better served by focusing more on her economic message.

He has also engaged in his share of attention-getting populist moves related to campaign finance. Unlike Martin and Wikler, he has joined the lesser-known candidates in committing to barring the DNC from accepting corporate PAC donations.

And in mid-January, he challenged his fellow contenders to join him in revealing their donors, something that is not required for DNC chair candidates. Martin acquiesced to his challenge, but Wikler, who Martin has attacked for his relationship with billionaire mega-donor Reid Hoffman, agreed only to disclose his donors at midnight before the vote on Saturday.

Following the candidate forum on Thursday night, O’Malley played coy when asked whether he was concerned about Wikler’s loyalty to Hoffman.

“I don’t know who his billionaires are,” O’Malley said. “Neither do you, because he won’t reveal who donated to him.”

Where Things Stand

Martin was the early frontrunner shortly after announcing his bid in November with what he said were 100 commitments from voting DNC members, and he remains the frontrunner going into voting on Saturday. On Friday night, Martin announced that he had pledges of support from over 200 voting DNC members. If all 450 members show up to vote on Saturday, that puts him 26 votes shy of the number he’d need to win outright on the first ballot.

Wikler, who picked up the endorsement of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Friday, said he had 183 pledges of support.

O’Malley said he had 137 commitments from DNC voting members.

Martin is the only one of the three to publicize a complete list of endorsers, making him the one to beat ahead of voting.

If Martin doesn’t get an outright majority in the first round, however, some observers expect Wikler to gain the upper hand in the second round of voting. O’Malley’s camp maintains that he is well-poised to become a consensus candidate in that scenario, but it seems unlikely that such a path would open up for him where it hadn’t before.

Should O’Malley drop out after the first round of voting, Martin and Wikler are sure to jockey aggressively for his endorsement. He would be in a position to secure a future political favor from either candidate, should he choose to do so. Even if O’Malley decides against an endorsement and the concomitant dealmaking it would likely entail, his voters’ alternative choices would likely determine the winner.