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
And so that's half the battle, right? And I think that also means we can't be afraid to go to spaces By the way, you're not going on Fox News to appeal to Republican voters, right? You're going on Fox News to appeal to independent voters, right? You're going on Joe Rogan to appeal to nonpartisans and independents, not to just talk to Republicans that happen to be on there.
So I understand people when they try to criticize someone for saying, well, why would you go on Fox News? You're just going there to try to win over Republican voters? No. That's not the point. There's a lot of people who listen to Fox News that aren't Republicans that we should, you know, give them the countervailing opinion.
I think part of the challenge with social media right now is given your algorithm, you're only fed the information that you want to see. And so, so many Americans are in this information bubble that they're only getting fed the information they want. And we have to try to find ways to break through that.
And that means appearing on environments and in platforms that might not make sense to the Democratic Party, but makes sense to cut through the noise and give people a sense of what the other side actually believes.
Well, here's what I would say. State party chairs don't have the luxury to just focus on one race, right? We can't just focus on the governor's race or the top of the ticket. We have to focus on the state legislature as well, as well as other down ballot races for city council, school boards, county boards, et cetera.
And so one of my critiques of the Democratic Party, especially the DNC, is that they focus way too much on federal races. Of course, we've got to win back Congress, the Senate, and the presidency. It's not an either or. But we can't be a national party that just focuses on seven battleground states, right? And and some federal races.
We've got to be more prescriptive and holistic about how to build power around this nation. That's one thing, again, that the conservative movement in this country realizes. They're not just focused on federal races. They're also focused on school boards, right? And we've seen the dangerous result of our indifference of actually
investing in trying to compete in every race in this country as a national party when the conservative movement has taken over school boards and they're banning books and whitewashing history and attacking our children. We cannot afford as a national party to ignore these public policy arenas anymore and so
One thing state party chairs can teach the national party is that you have to compete everywhere. The second piece is you have to make sure that you're actually building coalitions and bringing partners into that conversation, right? And part of that, to me, state parties don't have the luxury to do this work alone because they're some of the most under-resourced entities in politics.
We don't get enough funding from either the national party or from others We are usually the last people getting funding. So that means we actually have to be smart in how we spend our money and then build coalitions with allies and organizations on the ground who are working in electoral spaces to elect people who share our values. And so
The third thing I would say that state parties do that the national party doesn't do, which drives me crazy, is state parties don't just focus on one election cycle. We have to build infrastructure that is beyond just the upcoming election cycle. We have to look to 26, 28, 30, and beyond, right? This is one of the things that I have in my plan. I want to write a 10-year plan for the DNC.
People think I'm crazy to say that, but the reality is we have to not be myopically focused on just this election cycle because what that means is then we're recreating the infrastructure every two or four years as a national party. Look, we are part of a movement, of course, of people who are fighting for social justice and economic justice. But political parties have one very clear role, right?
It is our only role, and it is to win elections. But to do that, you have to build long-lasting and durable infrastructure that sees beyond just one election cycle. And if you'll allow me to use a hockey analogy, because I'm from Minnesota, and Wayne Gretzky, the great one right there in LA, said once that you have to skate to where the puck will be, not where the puck is, right?
Yet our party just keeps skating to where the puck is. Who's looking at the fact that in 2030, our map is gonna completely change underneath of us as all the power shifts to the south and the Southwest. And who's preparing for that moment right now as we go into 25 and 26? It should be the National Party that has a longer-term lens for this work and a longer-term arc on how we do that.
So I guess those are the three things that state parties are doing that the National Party's not doing.
I take no credit for it. But let me say this. We've had wonderful candidates on the ballot. I mean, I will never claim credit for their victory. But what I do claim some amount of credit for is building infrastructure that they've relied on, right? We've built probably the strongest state party in the nation. I'm sure...
There's others that would disagree, but both from fundraising and building the infrastructure on the ground. Our candidates, for instance, all of them, from Governor Walz to Senator Klobuchar to local candidates, they rely on our party's infrastructure. Our turnout machine is... is second to none, right?
In terms of IDing and persuading, mobilizing voters, we always have the top voter turnout in the nation. If not, we're number two or number three. Most importantly is that our candidates don't have to build that infrastructure themselves. They can rely on the state party to actually run the field program so they don't have to do that. And I think that's why we've been winning, right?
I mean, there's a lot of reasons. I mean, but the other part of winning is the fact that our party and our elected officials are delivering on the promises they made to voters, right? And
There's no greater example of that than what Tim Walz and our legislative leaders did with the trifecta the last two years to actually focus on an agenda that will help working people that are struggling in this state and then using the power they had when they had it to make a difference for those folks.
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