DNC chair candidate Ken Martin makes pitch to labor as party struggles to regain footing with blue-collar workers

WASHINGTON — DFL Party Chair Ken Martin, who is facing tough competition from his counterpart in Wisconsin, made an impassioned plea for labor support in his bid to lead the national Democratic Party during a candidate forum Monday evening. 

“We need to have party members talk to workers instead of celebrities,” said Martin, who graduated from Eden Prairie High School in 1991.

There was little disagreement that the Democratic Party was losing the support of the blue-collar workers who had once been a loyal constituency.

In the aftermath of their party’s devastating electoral losses, Martin and all the other candidates running to head the Democratic National Committee agreed the party needs to reconnect with the nation’s union members, many of whom drifted to Donald Trump in November’s election.

During the virtual forum hosted by the DNC’s labor council, there was unanimity that the DNC has to do more to include more union members among the party’s decision-makers and recruit more union members as political candidates.

Martin said he’d make sure labor is well represented on a “national coordinated campaign table” he promised to establish at the DNC that would work year-round to boost candidates.

Like others who took questions from rank-and-file union members during the forum, Martin decried that in November’s election, working-class voters believed the Republican Party was more in tune with blue-collar America and that the Democratic Party had become the party of wealthy elites.

“I’ve always said ‘if the DFL isn’t supporting working people, then working people should not support the DFL,’” Martin said.

He also spoke of a hardscrabble background as the child of a teen mother and member of a family who “spent periods in and out of shelters.”

This was the first of four candidate forums to be held before the Feb. 1 election for a new DNC chairman who would replace current chair Jaime Harrison.

Martin is considered a frontrunner. But so is Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and others are in the race, too, including Marianne Williamson, an author who ran two longshot Democratic presidential campaigns.

O’Malley said the new DNC chair must be on “a wartime footing” to take on Trump “on day one.”

Wikler, 43, has spent his life as a Democratic activist. After graduating from Harvard, he helped create and produce a radio show for Al Franken in 2004, before Franken was elected to the Senate. He worked for the online petition site Change​.org in New York, then became the director of the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org in Washington, D.C., in 2014.

Martin, 51, has also worked in politics for most of his adult life. In 1990, he was an intern for the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and, two years later, organized college campuses in the South for the Clinton/Gore presidential campaign. He also worked in Kansas politics, moving back to his home state of Minnesota in 1998 and beginning a long career with the DFL.

While both Martin and Wikler have similar backgrounds and are natives of neighboring states, they differ on strategy. Martin has campaigned on returning power and resources to state Democratic parties, which have been slighted in favor of national campaigns for president.

Meanwhile, Wikler may be favored by the party insiders who are influenced by major donors and Democratic consultants.

Last week, Wikler’s campaign received an important boost with the endorsement of U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Democrat to endorse a candidate in the race.  

Martin touted the DFL’s ability to capture both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s office while he was head of the state party. Wikler boasted of flipping Wisconsin’s Supreme Court to a Democratic majority and of his efforts to win re-election for Sen. Tammy Baldwin, one of the most vulnerable Senate candidates in last year’s election.

The last time there was a competitive race for DNC chair was eight years ago. That’s when the several hundred party insiders who will vote for a new leader elected former Obama administration Labor Secretary Tom Perez over Keith Ellison, who is now Minnesota’s attorney general but was then a member of Congress.

The other participants in the candidate forum were Nate Snyder, a former Homeland Security official; Quintessa Hathaway, a teacher who lost an Arkansas congressional race in 2022; and Massachusetts lawyer Jason Paul.

---

Editor’s note: Ana Radelat wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C., correspondent. 

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

MinnPost is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization whose mission is to provide high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota.