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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Well, I'll use some personal examples of that. My brother, who's a union carpenter, he voted for Obama in 8 and 12, and Trump in 16, 20, and 24, right? My father-in-law is a beef cattle farmer in southern Minnesota. Same thing, voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. So we know that there are people who are moving away from our party. And I think part of the challenge- Did you ask them why?
What was the change? Each of them had different reasons, right? And I'm happy to get into them. But I think the larger point you're making is that we have continued to lose ground with non-college educated voters. And part of that is, I believe, we've allowed our party to essentially devolve into smaller and smaller messages, right? To appeal to- different parts of our really big tent coalition.
And as a result, we've lost the narrative, right? We've lost the thing that connects all of the disparate parts of our coalition. And what is that? Well, I'll tell you. Paul Wellstone, my first boss in politics, understood this. He understood that what connected a corn farmer in Southern Minnesota with a steel worker on the Iron Range and a new refugee in the Twin Cities was economics, right?
kitchen table issues, bread and butter issues that at the end of the day, people are worried about. And let me just give you an example of this. For me, when we talk about working people and labor as an example, we just talked about this the other night, too many people feel like we only show up when we're asking them for their vote.
And then we never deliver on the promises we make to actually make a difference in their lives. I think we, last year, we were defending the Biden economy, of course, and it was a great economy. One of the best economies we've seen in years, right? From a GDP perspective, a job growth perspective, from unemployment and real wage growth.
But the reality is, as we were trying to defend Joe Biden and talk about all these things, we were ignoring the pain that average everyday working people in this country were facing, right? By working class, by the way, it's not code for white people. For me, we know that the working class in this country is black, brown, and white people who are working their asses off.
working harder than they ever have, can barely afford their lives, right? And when gas prices are high and grocery prices are high, and we're talking to them about the GDP, we've already lost them because we're not acknowledging the economic pain that they're facing. So for me, part of this is getting back to the narrative that connects all parts of our Big Ten coalition, right?
And that is a working class agenda that unites everyone, whether you're a corn farmer or you're a new refugee in the Twin Cities.
Well, first, you need to figure out what that brand is. And I think that should be a working class, focusing on a working class agenda, right? So, but even We need to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about specifically what that looks like as it relates to the policy prescription. But let me tell you why I don't think it's an abandonment of our message or our policy agenda, right?
Think about Missouri. They passed a minimum wage increase, paid family leave, and abortion protections all by wide margins, yet those same voters went down the ballot and voted for Trump and the Republicans. It seems to me that we see these issues, they're very popular throughout the country, passing in ballot initiative and referenda by wide margins. They're very popular, right?
Yet those same voters aren't necessarily connecting the dots between the issues that they support that will actually make a difference in their lives and are Democratic candidates. So that's not a message problem. It's a messaging problem. We're clearly not connecting the dots for voters.
And so let me back up to one of the other lessons we've learned in this election is that the Republicans have done a much better job than Democrats on competing in this new information environment. right? And this is the other challenge we have. We allowed the Republican Party to define us before we ever started to define ourselves. Think about this.
They started right after the 20 election, John, as you know. The Republican Party started beating the hell out of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in all of these non-traditional information spaces, right? And you've heard a lot of folks talk about it, gaming platforms, podcasts, streaming services, right? even online dating apps, for God's sake.
Anywhere there's an online community, the Republicans were paying micro-influencers to essentially spew out their misinformation and disinformation. And we didn't start in any real way our communications infrastructure until the election year.
We have to realize we need a permanent campaign, not only a permanent organizing campaign that's talking to voters year round, but also a permanent communications infrastructure that is not waiting until we get to an election cycle to start communicating with voters. We got beat to the punch by the Republicans who realized that we live in a new information environment where it's 24-7, 365.
And that's where we got our Buds kit. So for us, part of this is, of course, the brand. The other part is how we're messaging. The other part of it is making sure we realize 40% of Americans say they avoid the news at all costs, right? Yet they're getting barraged by information. And you know this better than probably anyone, John.
They're getting barraged by information all the time on their phones. So we have to be more sophisticated in how we message and when we stand up all of our operations.
What I would say is I agree with you that we should be in all those spaces, right? And we shouldn't be afraid to go on Joe Rogan's show or on Fox. We should be confident enough in both our values and, of course, our message that we go wherever we need to. You know, people ask me, I'm a hunter. They ask me where I'm going to go hunt, right?
And they think I'm going to give them my favorite hunting spot or, you know, say I'm going to the woods. No, I go where the deer are, right? And you know this. We need to go where voters are. And, you know, this idea that, you know, we have consultants in D.C. still spending or steering so much of our ad spend to broadcast TV. I mean, shoot, I'm 51 years old, John, right? I'm an old man.
I still read a hard copy of a newspaper, but the one thing I don't do is watch broadcast TV. I don't know anyone my age that watches broadcast TV, yet we still keep spending so much money on outdated tactics, right? Of course, I know why, because people make all their money there, but that's wrong. If we want to win again, we need to realize we need to go where voters are getting their information.
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