Ken Martin
speaker
651 appearances
10 recordings
7 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 21 May
Ken Martin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The MeidasTouch Podcast · DNC Chair Ken Martin Reacts to Trump’s Disaster Shutdown · 29 Oct 2025
podcast
GOTV to 43367.
Apple News Today · Everything is about to get more expensive. Here’s what to know. · 3 Feb 2025
podcast
The fight's not in here. The fight is for our values. The fight is for working people. The fight right now is against Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought this country.
So I have to admit that I have my own white privilege here. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing the phobias that exist throughout our communities, both in Minnesota and, frankly, throughout this country.
Thank you so much.
Well, let me just start by saying thanks for having me. And isn't it a little crazy that this race is coming down to two middle-aged white guys from the Midwest with three-letter first names? Ken and Ben. Who would have thought, right?
No, it's great. And Ben's a wonderful friend. He's doing great things in Wisconsin, for sure. Look, you know, for me, I've always said being a party chair is the political equivalency of being a fire hydrant, right? You get pissed on by everyone. Like you said, you get none of the credit when you win, all the blame when you lose.
And of course, if you're doing your job the right way, you're saying no more than you're saying yes. So by the time it's over, you have far fewer friends. So I'm eyes wide open about this. I've been the chair of the Minnesota DFL the last 14 years, came in
to this job right after the disastrous midterm elections in 2010 where we suffered you know throughout the country as you remember John one of the worst shellacans we faced as a party in in years and that was true in Minnesota we lost a 40-year senate majority we lost the state house
We lost the longest held congressional seat in Congress in the Eighth District with Jim Overstar, and many races up and down the ballot. I happened to help run a campaign for governor that year where we were successful in getting Mark Dayton elected by just 8,750 votes.
And so to your point, I mean, we had to at that point, the morale was low, the finger pointing was high, the name calling, the blaming, people, the morale was so low and people were fleeing the party, right? All of our stakeholders, donors, progressive partners and allies, candidates, no one wanted anything to do with the party.
And what it took is when I came in as party chair, it took someone to be able to bring all those groups back to the table and realize if we're going to build power again, We had to figure out a plan to win. And we did that. And we got back in power within two years. And we haven't lost since.
And we're in a similar moment right now, right, where there's low morale, a lot of finger pointing, a lot of people trying to place blame. I'm, by the way, not here to win the argument. I want us to win elections again. And that's what we've done in Minnesota. And so there's a lot of reasons why I'm running. I'm very clear-eyed about what this job isn't. It's not a pathway to glory.
For people thinking that this is a pathway to relevancy, it really isn't that either. The next DNC chair has to focus relentlessly on building the infrastructure throughout this country to put us on a path to win again. And so that's why I'm running.
I think both are accurate, right? They're both accurate. It was a close election, right? And we think about the presidential race, 114,000 vote swing of three battleground states. And we'd be talking about a Kamala Harris presidency right now. Same with the House races, right? 7,000 votes between three battleground districts. We'd be talking about Speaker Jeffries. So it was a close election.
But there's no doubt that what you said, the second part of that is absolutely accurate. We lost ground with big parts of our coalition. And there's a whole host of reasons for that. Many of them we don't know at this point. Of course we know we lost ground with Latino voters. We lost ground with younger voters. We lost ground with working class households, with women.
We lost ground with every demographic group with just a couple, and I'll get to that in a moment. But the reality is that we have to figure out the how and why we lost ground. We have to look at ad spend. We have to look at messaging. We have to look at our organizing tactics, right? Before we're too prescriptive with the solutions, we have to really dig into why those groups left us.
And I would say one of the big lessons from this last election was the spring of 2024, there was research that came out that showed for the first time in American history, the perceptions of the two political parties have actually changed.
The majority of Americans now feel that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is a party of the wealthy and the elites. And the only two groups, by the way, Just to prove the point that we actually over-performed with, we're wealthy households and college-educated voters. That is a damning indictment, John, on who we are.
That's not who we are as a party. We have always been the party that's fought for the working class and the poor. We've always been the party that's fought for the oppressed and marginalized. And so we have a lot of work to do, right? And it's not going to change overnight.
And the other thing we need to acknowledge, and you know this, you've been involved for a long time, this wasn't a singular occurrence, all those groups leaving us. This has been happening underneath our nose for some time. And we have to stem the tide and reverse the tide. We need to get those groups to come back to us.
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