Is D.N.C. Chair the Worst Job in Washington?
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In December, 1996, Bill Clinton, having just won a second term as President, repeatedly asked Terry McAuliffe, his top fund-raiser, to consider stepping into the role of chairman of the Democratic Party. McAuliffe memorializes this in his memoir—an exuberant book about his decades in Democratic politics, titled “What a Party!”—by cataloguing all the times he said no. During a flight on Air Force One, he tells Clinton, “I just don’t think it’s right.” The next week, during a 12 A.M. meeting in the President’s study on the second floor of the Executive Residence, he tells Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore, “I just don’t want to do it.” A day or two later, when Gore calls McAuliffe’s wife, Dorothy, to enlist her in winning him over, she tells him, “I just don’t think it’s a good thing for Terry.” The night after that, at a White House Christmas party, when Clinton invites Dorothy to slow-dance so that he can ask her himself, she says, pleadingly this time, “Please don’t do this to my husband, Mr. President.” Clinton later recalled that conversation by saying, “She made me feel like I had sentenced Terry to death or denied him the right of habeas corpus.”
McAuliffe was able to avoid the job that year. The reason he was so resistant, he told me recently, was that Democrats held control of the White House at the time, making the role of the Party chair largely nominal. “If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you would call the White House political director and ask permission,” McAuliffe said. “It’s just not my personality.” McAuliffe later agreed to take the job during George W. Bush’s first term. But the truth about leading the Democratic National Committee is that, no matter who holds power, the job of chair can be, to borrow McAuliffe’s word, “miserable.”
Ken Martin, the Party’s current chair, is experiencing this right now. Martin is fifty-three and brings a low-profile approach to the job. He keeps his hair in a neat side part and wears a combination of navy suits, dress shirts, and fleeces. His overwhelming quality, in his speech and demeanor, is his Minnesotan-ness; he ran the state Party in Minnesota for fourteen years. During that time, Democrats never lost a statewide race. As chair, Martin has not been a regular presence on national television attacking Donald Trump, or an ideological leader trying to shape the future of the Democratic Party. He has positioned himself instead as a man who knows how to operate the mechanics of the Party in service of winning. Martin previously served as both a vice-chair of the D.N.C. and the head of the Association of State Democratic Committees. In short, he was supposed to understand the job. Yet, eighteen months into his tenure, the difficulties of the role appear to be winning out. Few seem happy with Ken.
Martin’s woes include claims of financial mismanagement and general dysfunction. As of the end of June, the Republican National Committee had about a hundred and twenty-eight million dollars in the bank and no debt. The D.N.C., by contrast, had about sixteen million dollars in cash—and eighteen million in debt. Last year, Martin took out a loan to support the D.N.C.’s activity, then bought Kamala Harris’s e-mail list of supporters for a staggering six and a half million dollars. (The Party has also absorbed millions of dollars of debt, since late 2024, from Harris’s failed campaign.) At the same time, Martin has been funding monthly payments to every state Party, an initiative he has described as “a fifty-seven-state-and-territory strategy.” Most of the payments are equal, meaning that territories such as Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which don’t cast electoral votes for President, are receiving the same investment as a state like Wisconsin.
Late last month, the Times reported that, amid aggravation over these decisions, Martin has become increasingly insulated and paranoid inside the Party’s headquarters, a pinkish-yellow building near Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., where he relocated after taking office. In mid-July, according to the Times, he threw his phone at the desk of a staffer during a “pique of frustration,” an incident that resulted in a human-resources complaint. It was the kind of leak, other Democrats reasoned, that could have come only from Martin’s own team.
Then there is the matter of the D.N.C. “autopsy” report. The document was supposed to examine why Democrats lost to Trump in 2024. Martin had commissioned it himself, and made an explicit promise to release it to the public. “Of course it will be released,” he said soon after he became chair, in 2025. Later that year, he reneged on that promise, saying the autopsy would be a “distraction” from winning key races. The following spring, he asked to appear on the podcast “Pod Save America” to defend his decision to keep the report private. The interview, an uncomfortable conversation with the host Jon Favreau, did not help his cause. A few weeks later, Martin released the autopsy. The hundred-and-ninety-two-page document appeared to be an incomplete draft, and was filled with annotations, in bright-red text, about factual errors and unsourced claims. The report’s author, a Democratic operative named Paul Rivera, who had been friends with Martin for years, recently accused him of omitting a key chapter from the autopsy, a section questioning Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term “instead of passing the torch.” After Rivera provided the chapter to the Times, Martin disputed his account, claiming that he had never been given the missing section. Martin has since disappeared from national television and declined almost all interview requests, including one from this magazine. Instead, he took to Substack to write a three-thousand-word post defending his tenure. In it, Martin asserts that—setting aside the D.N.C.’s negative balance sheet—the Party has raised more money than during any previous Republican Administration. “There is a story being told about the Democratic National Committee that is simply wrong,” he argues.
All of this has led to a swirl of negativity around the Party—even as Democrats are positioned to perform well in the midterms this fall. The actual functions of the D.N.C. are process-oriented: they include fund-raising, overseeing the Presidential-nominating process, planning the National Convention, supporting state Parties, and, ultimately, presiding over a voting body of about four hundred and fifty D.N.C. members, each with their own interests and loyalties. I covered the D.N.C. for years. Complaints about the organization have a way of reflecting whatever problems or rifts exist within the Party. Their annual meetings, in turn, are messy, gossip-filled affairs that are liable to go haywire in some small way. Under D.N.C. rules, it takes only one member to bring a motion up for debate. This can lead to meaningful discussion, but it can also lead to petty drama. The R.N.C., on the other hand, is more controlled, with limited press access to regular meetings. Republicans haven’t made significant changes to their Presidential-primary calendar in years. Democrats have been in a near-continuous overhaul of their nominating process since they reformed the system in 2018. Some of the differences between Republicans and Democrats are merely procedural. But even those procedures seem to speak to something ineffable about the cultures of the parties. Republicans fall in line. Democrats do so only after other possibilities have been exhausted.
Even by D.N.C. standards, it has been a difficult summer. By the time I reached out last week to Donna Brazile, a longtime Party leader who twice served as interim D.N.C. chair, she told me that she was tired of talking about it. “I genuinely need a break,” she said. “I’m heading to the gym for physical therapy and don’t feel like discussing the D.N.C. today.” In more good timing, she was scheduled to give an inspirational speech to the D.N.C.’s summer interns the following day.
Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who became chair after his 2004 Presidential campaign, told me that part of the job is learning how to tune out the complaints, something Martin has apparently not yet mastered. “I think he’s got a thin skin,” Dean said. “But he’s on the right track.”
People are quick to compare Martin’s tenure with that of Tom Perez, the only other chair to serve while Trump has been President. When Perez took over, the Party was in a dismal state. Hillary Clinton had lost the election. Progressive voters felt that the D.N.C. had tipped the scales in Clinton’s favor during a bitter primary against Bernie Sanders. The D.N.C. had just been humiliated by a hack of its e-mail system. The staff had been reduced to fewer than a hundred people. Morale at D.N.C. headquarters was nonexistent. “You can’t overestimate how bad it was,” Sam Cornale, Perez’s chief of staff at the time, told me. Perez, a former Labor Secretary, took over promising a “turnaround job.” When they arrived at Party headquarters, they couldn’t even find a key to the chair’s office. At one point, as they searched the building, Cornale recalled, they opened a drawer and found a multimillion-dollar unpaid invoice from a polling firm.
Perez had run for chair in a crowded field of candidates, which included Pete Buttigieg, a little-known mayor from South Bend, Indiana, at the time. His main opponent in the race was Keith Ellison, then a Minnesota congressman beloved by Sanders voters. The race between Perez and Ellison was treated as an extension of the Clinton-Sanders primary. After Perez won the race, he named Ellison as his deputy and embarked on a “unity tour” with Sanders. Inevitably, at almost every stop on the tour, Perez would be booed. “It will never go down as one of my favorite jobs—period, hard stop,” Perez said. “But it was an important job.”
Perez’s successor was Jaime Harrison, the former Party chairman of South Carolina. Harrison held the role during the Biden Administration—and he was, just as McAuliffe warned, an extension of the White House. He has channelled his feelings about his time as chair into an upcoming memoir. The title, he told me, is, “A Chair with No Table.”
As a D.N.C. member himself, Martin was often a thorn in the side of the chair, agitating on behalf of state Parties for more resources. Now he is on the receiving end of such complaints, living in Washington, away from his wife and family in Minnesota, and spending much of his time on the road for work. It has been an adjustment. Martin isn’t well connected among major donors, or among leadership on Capitol Hill. Both Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, supported Ben Wikler, Martin’s opponent in the race for the chair. And many of the staffers working around him inside D.N.C. headquarters were inherited, rather than chosen by him.
Nevertheless, Martin’s fifty-seven-state-and-territory strategy has led to recruitment, staff hires, and organizing programs across the country. According to one D.N.C. official, investments in Democratic state and territory Parties, which total a million dollars a month, have helped North Carolina and Texas assemble a full slate of Democratic candidates for the first time in recent history. In Mississippi, the money has funded the hiring of new data and communications staffers. Tennessee has a new finance director. North Dakota hired part-time organizers and a part-time data director. Missouri opened a headquarters in Jefferson City. Arizona launched a Democratic voter-registration initiative. Colorado started a rural organizing program.
This weekend, Martin will convene the members of the D.N.C. in Austin, Texas, for their annual summer meeting. There has been talk of whether someone will make a move to force him out of the role. This doesn’t seem likely, as there has thus far been no discernible movement by D.N.C. members to call for his removal. To do so would require multiple procedural steps under Robert’s Rules of Order before an actual vote is taken. Minyon Moore, a leader inside the D.N.C. who has worked alongside multiple chairs, has been encouraging Martin to stick to his plans. “You have to put on your own armor, because you will not survive this if you allow every story to change the type of work that you’re doing,” she said. It remains to be seen whether Martin’s strategies will pay off. Observers worry about his fund-raising strategy, the botched autopsy rollout, the mood in the office. Can Martin restore trust in his abilities as a leader? He seems to believe that he can. Winning elections in the midterms, several former chairs told me, would certainly help. And, if anything can be learned from the modern history of the D.N.C., it is that these complaints will likely recede, and new complaints, about this or something else, will soon emerge.
When I spoke with McAuliffe, the Democrat who perhaps liked the job the best of any recent Democratic Party chair, he told me that he, too, was headed to Austin this weekend. He had just received an invitation to deliver a speech to the D.N.C. membership—a pep talk of sorts. He agreed, rescheduling a golfing trip to Ireland with his sons to be able to attend.
“I know why I’m there—to do the big rah-rah,” he told me.
What did he plan to tell his party? “Democrats! Quit your whining!” he said. “Stop your lemon-sucking. Get in the game.” ♦