The outcome of the Michigan primaries calls Democratic conventional wisdom into question. Just don’t expect Ken Martin to do anything about that.
By any sane measure, Democrats should be extremely bullish on the electoral prospects ahead. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to crater into the mid-thirties, now placing him roughly in the same territory that Richard Nixon was on the eve of his resignation. The GOP’s disastrous war in Iran clocks an even lower approval rating, and the associated escalation in the cost of living now has voters saying they trust Democratic handling of the economy over the GOP’s for the first time in a decade. Three-quarters of the respondents in a recent CNN poll agree that Trump isn’t in touch with the problems ordinary Americans are facing, while nearly that quotient says that he’s neglecting the country’s most important problems. Given these trend lines, the GOP’s razor-thin six-vote majority in the House of Representatives is unlikely to survive November’s midterm balloting, and Democrats are now plausibly competitive in enough Senate races for a majority there to be thinkable—a scenario that would never have been imaginable this time last year.
There’s also considerable energy convulsing the party’s base, as left-reformist candidates continue to run up key primary victories. Last night’s close election in Michigan saw Abdul El-Sayed, a strong advocate for Medicare for All, a critic of US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a scourge of the plutocratic takeover of our politics, land the US Senate nomination—a key seat in the battle for a Democratic Senate majority. El-Sayed overcame the 12-to-1 spending advantage of his establishment opponent, Representative Haley Stevens. William Lawrence, founder of the Sunrise Movement, also won the nomination for Michigan’s seventh House district, while Justice Democrat Donavan McKinney defeated centrist millionaire incumbent Shri Thanedar in the state’s 13th district. Coming off of big wins for Democratic socialist candidates in New York and Colorado, the Michigan results not only demonstrate that insurgent left candidates are viable in statewide races in the Midwest; they also show a strong ability on the part of grassroots organizers to galvanize an activist base to a reform cause. That factor was notably lacking in the Democrats’ dismal 2024 showing, but became a vital source of strength in a low-turnout midterm cycle. One clear measure of this heightened grassroots enthusiasm: Jocelyn Bennet, the winner of the gubernatorial primary who ran all but unopposed, garnered half a million votes more than the winner of the contested GOP primary did—a 60 percent increase in voter participation.
Yet at the leadership level, the opposition party continues to be stuck in doldrums mode. In political terms, Democrats are still on their back feet before the MAGA right’s multifront series of putsches yielding a brownshirt immigration police state, an open-auction model of Beltway corruption, and a concerted bid to place the toxic fable of a Christian nationalist ethno-state at the center of the country’s civic discourse. The Democrats’ fallback narrative is a pitch to return to normalcy—a fanciful evasion of the fundamental power shifts roiling the American polity since 2016, and an anemic overture to voters who crave basic changes to a top-heavy and oligarchic political economy. You can’t keep robotically invoking a return to “kitchen-table” issues when the kitchen table’s on fire.
This misguided messaging bespeaks a deeper structural malaise in the party. Just as the Democrats currently lack a popular leader to lend greater focus to the party’s anti-Trump appeals, they also possess a party infrastructure that’s failing the basic tests of political organizing. There are many culprits behind this failure, from the errant consultant class atop many of its pivotal campaigns to the corps of centrist politicians and pundits who continue to fetishize a nineties-branded agenda of “triangulation” in a moral and intellectual vacuum. But one organization serves as a clearing house for this self-inflicted folly: Ken Martin’s Democratic National Committee.
Even in the best of times, the DNC has been a flawed vessel of party strategizing. Its chair is elected by the leaders of the fifty state Democratic parties, and is often a consensus figurehead whose primary mandate is to please the party fundraisers who bear a heavy investment in status-quo political arrangements. (The recent exception to this rule, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, served to prove it over the longer haul, when the donor-led party establishment nixed his 50-state-strategy of keeping the party competitive in traditionally conservative districts and states.)
Martin, a former leader of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party who won his post after withstanding a Dean-style challenge from Wisconsin party leader Ben Wikler in 2024, has largely hewed to the caretaking demands of the job, ensuring that the committee disburses funds more widely among the state organizations that elected him. After another insurgent challenge to the DNC’s inert rollout of resources at the behest of then-committee vice chair David Hogg, who sought to establish his own PAC to promote younger and more left-leaning candidates, Martin moved successfully to purge Hogg from leadership, after revising the organization’s bylaws to find him in violation of new strictures of electoral neutrality for group leaders. Once again, the DNC had outflanked the prospect of far-reaching change with a procedural putsch from on high.
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But the committee’s charge to sustain a Borg-like forcefield of donor cash doesn’t really suit election cycles like this one, which are steeped in a fundamental change mandate. This state of affairs has been confirmed by the committee’s most influential cohort: big-money Democratic donors. Disenchantment with the party’s overall direction—and its laggard response to the mandate to fight the Trump White House in a more sustained and militant fashion—has the donor class voting with their feet, stiffing the DNC in favor of targeted individual races, along with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
The trend has become so pronounced, the Wall Street Journal reports, that donors joke that the committee’s initials actually stand for “Do Not Contribute.” It’s true that the party out of power in Washington always lags the dominant party in election fundraising, but “this year’s chasm is extraordinarily large,” write New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein. “The party is $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee has $125.8 million in cash on hand.” To help cover the shortfall, the committee has taken out a loan on its DC headquarters—a not-uncommon practice in past election cycles—and has also asked vendors to refrain from billing it for services until after the midterms. Meanwhile, Martin himself is starting to resemble The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg, roundabout the film’s third reel. He’s been largely absent from the media, save for a 3,000-word Substack entry he penned to defend his track record in office. He has reportedly joked mordantly about his own pending dismissal, while unconvincingly urging DNC employees to buck up and smile more; in a burst of frustration, he hurled a phone at the desk of an almost certainly unsmiling subordinate, earning him three consultations with the DNC’s human resources arm.
The money woes at the committee are of a piece with its state of near-permanent ideological drift. Every major donor on the GOP side has a clear fix on what will be delivered in exchange for a major outlay of cash—that’s why, to take but one squalid example, Elon Musk is directing at least another $100 million to support MAGA candidates in 2026. But disenchantment with the direction of the Democrats after the overlapping debacles of Joe Biden’s cognitive reversals and Kamala Harris’s rushed stand-in candidacy—which netted a cool $1 billion in donations—has left the Democrats’ financial backers loath to throw good money after bad. So big donors are not only thronging to select campaigns; they’re backing more entrepreneurial campaign initiatives, such as former Democratic super PAC chair Guy Cecil’s New Horizons Project, which seeks to forge “a forward-looking coalition of voters” that can “build sustainable majorities”—a pair of objectives that, by rights, should be the front-of-mind preoccupations of the DNC.
It’s striking that big-ticket money figures in the Democrats’ orbit are starting to sound like David Hogg. Politico’s own glum account of how the DNC is ill suited for the major challenge of the 2028 cycle quotes Bob Kerrigan, a Florida attorney who’s given more than $2 million to the Democrats in past cycles, lamenting that “they have never figured out how to be a party of opposition.” And “there’s a more fundamental issue,” he continues: “What the hell do they do? They are all in the beltway bubble and they are all important and they collect all sorts of money but what do they do?” An unnamed bundler for the party’s fundraising operations continues the dirge: “Nobody wants to give [Martin] or DNC money at this point, but worry is focused on the day after the midterms, because the DNC is more of a presidential player. It’s beyond embarrassing and it’s not going to get better until he is gone.”
Martin never really recovered from the botched release of the DNC’s autopsy of the 2024 election, which he initially canceled altogether, and then issued in partial form. Just this week, in fact, Paul Rivera, who wrote the autopsy, charged that Martin excised a key chapter from the long-delayed public version—one that assessed the fallout from both Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to run for reelection, the critical loss of Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian-American support, and the insulation of the party’s well-heeled consultant class from the actual conditions of getting by in these United States. (Martin denies ever having seen the chapter in question, even though Rivera insists that he printed it out in a separate binder and hand delivered it to the DNC chair.)
“It is…possible the people ‘in the room’ at the highest levels of 2024 decision making misunderstood the mood and practicalities facing everyday America,” the report concluded about the party infrastructure’s capture by the consultant class. If that was the message Martin got from the binder he now disputes the existence of, it’s not hard to understand why he had it disappeared: It’s an autopsy of his own DNC tenure as well as of the ill-starred Harris campaign.
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