The Democratic Party’s problems run even deeper than its operational headaches.

N obody knows the Democratic Party’s mood like its national committee chairman. It’s bleak, and there’s little cause for optimism. Ken Martin cannot give his co-partisans any reason for optimism, so he opted instead to emphasize the bleak.

“Democrats, make no mistake, a storm is coming,” Martin said at the outset of the Democratic National Committee’s Minnesota summit on Monday. “In fact, it’s already here.” What we have today is “fascism dressed in a red tie.”

“Rising inequality, attacks on democracy, voter suppression and a fascist regime that doesn’t play by the rules,” he continued. Today, the Republican Party is “led by the dictator in chief” who has cast American “values into the dustbin of history.” The Democrats, therefore, need to fight fire with fire. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” Martin declared. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight.”

The DNC chair isn’t the first Democrat to pose as the fighting fighter who fights. The consultant class can read the polling of anxious Democrats as well as anyone, although the Democratic lawmakers who are being asked by constituents to take a bullet for the cause shouldn’t need a public opinion survey to understand their voters’ restlessness. Those Democrats, too, are offering their voters thin gruel: gratuitous profanity, all-caps social-media posts, and anguished self-pity masquerading as sorrow for the state of the country.

At least Democratic lawmakers have some power to alter their circumstances on the margins. For the most part, Ken Martin doesn’t. He may be unwise to contribute to his party’s voters’ apprehension over conditions outside his or any other Democrat’s control. But it’s not hard to understand why he retreated into abstractions. The challenges facing the Democratic Party at the operational level are daunting enough.

Martin, a glorified fundraiser, is languishing in the fundraising department. Recent financial disclosures revealed that Democrats had just $14 million on hand at the end of July, a fraction of the GOP’s $84 million. This week, we learned that the DNC “struck a handshake deal” with Kamala Harris’s campaign that would cover all its outstanding expenses from the 2024 campaign, allowing the former vice president “to claim she did not end the race in debt.”

Democratic donors could be irritated to discover that their contributions were going to help the Harris campaign retire its debt. Fortunately, they were not informed (although the DNC-backed effort to sell copies of Harris’s book was a clue). “Big Democratic donors are unhappy with the direction of their own party,” the AP reported Sunday. And, as Politico noted earlier this month, “small-dollar donors who have long been a source of strength are not growing nearly enough to make up the gap.”

That’s just the start of Martin’s problems. The 2028 presidential race looms large on the horizon, and the Democratic primary calendar is still unsettled after Joe Biden tried and failed to push Iowa and New Hampshire further out in the electoral calendar. The furious backroom knife fighting over which states vote when has already begun. Martin recently expanded the number of seats on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, about “half or two-thirds” of whom “have never been to an RBC meeting,” one member told Politico. The clock is ticking. Whatever the outcome of this process, it will leave bad blood in its wake.

Then there is the activist class, which Martin and company attempted to mollify by bringing one of their own — youngish gun-control advocate David Hogg — into the fold. That didn’t go well. Hogg’s defenestration from the committee after his short, embarrassing stint in institutional life has provided insurgent progressives with something to prove. And protecting embattled incumbents is expensive. As one Democrat on the bubble, 78-year-old New York Representative Jerry Nadler, told Axios, primary challenges “take a lot of resources that should be used against Republicans.” That appeal has fallen on deaf ears. One unnamed House Democrat “predicted dozens more of their colleagues could end up facing primary challenges,” each sucking up their share of the party’s dwindling finances.

And that’s just the stuff over which Martin has a modicum of control. The Democratic Party’s problems run deeper than its operational headaches. In the 30 states that count voters by party affiliation, Democratic registration declined by 2.1 million since 2020 while the GOP gained 2.4 million new voters. Democratic stalwarts have tried to save face by claiming that these numbers don’t account for states that don’t register party affiliation — states like Texas — which might make up the difference. Democratic partisans should shudder when they hear their representatives pin their hopes on Texas to save them.

The party’s brand is still as damaged as it looked in November of last year, and the midterm election polling at this admittedly early hour does not suggest that a Democratic wave year is in the offing. “It’s more like a blue trickle,” said Emerson College polling director Matt Taglia. And amid all this, the 2030 census and the redistricting that will follow impends like a meteor heading toward Earth. In the next decade’s reapportionment, reliably red states are all but certain to take congressional seats from blue and purple states. The New York Times painted a portrait of what the “nightmare scenario” for Democrats might look like:

The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.

What can Ken Martin do but batten down the hatches? “There’s no doubt about it,” he told the Times. “We have to acknowledge that there’s some of these states that are red that are going to need more resources to essentially help us win down the road.” What “resources”? Indeed, that same Times dispatch devotes paragraph after paragraph to complaints from Democratic office-seekers who mourn the lack of DNC infrastructure on the ground in their states even as the party’s central committee pours cash into expensive TV spots (and the vendors who produce and place those ads).

Martin is defiant. “I’m not going to take a scarcity mind-set to this,” he insisted. The DNC chair would not be forced to choose between best practices in the effort to get more Democrats elected. “We can do both,” he insisted, “right?” Probably not, Mr. Chairman.

The DNC is confronting a vexing conundrum. Its donors are closing their wallets, and its activist class is bitter because the party has no power, but it has no power because the donors and activist class led it astray. Many of the problems Democrats are facing are not within Martin’s ability to control, but some are, and the long knives are not going to stay in their sheaths forever. It’s only a matter of time before they find their way to his back.

So, the next time you’re having a bad day, just remember that things could be worse. You could be the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.