Ken Martin, the longtime leader of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party who called for President Donald Trump to be put on trial for treason, was elected as chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday.
Martin received 246.5 votes at the party’s meeting this weekend in Maryland, with Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler trailing behind in second place with 134.5 votes.
In June 2020, Martin accused Trump of ignoring intelligence that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to attack Americans — an unsubstantiated claim the White House said in 2021 was based off little evidence, and a claim that was not verified by the CIA.
Trump “should be immediately impeached and then put on trial for treason. His actions led to the deaths of American soldiers. He is a traitor to our nation and all those who have served,” Martin said at the time.
Martin joined the rest of the DNC candidates over the weekend in saying that “racism and misogyny” played a part in Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump. Although minority voters made dramatic shifts to the right in the last presidential election, Martin said that the Democratic Party has “got the right message.”
“What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,” Martin, who was a vice chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, said.
Martin’s vision for a “new DNC” includes releasing a post-mortem on Democrats’ 2024 failures, to study “some lessons that we glean on that so we can operationalize it, not just here in DC, but through all of the 57 state parties. We’ve got to look backwards and look forward at the same time.”
Although Wikler received endorsements from many Democratic leaders, Martin was endorsed by Minnesota governor and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
During his tenure, Martin will focus on combatting “the really extremes and excesses of the Trump administration” and laying out a policy agenda for Democrats, he told The Hill last year.
“You have to give people a sense of who you are and who the party is, who we’re fighting for, and why and that means, you know, if we’re focused the whole time on just resisting Trump, we’re not giving people a sense of who we are and why they should support us,” he said.
Martin will also copy the successes of Trump’s campaign and bring Democratic messaging to new platforms, including popular podcasts, to remedy what he calls the party’s branding problem.
“One thing that is deeply alarming to me, and you’ve probably seen this research, is that for the first time in modern history, the majority of Americans believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor,” he told the New York Times in November. “And that the Democratic Party represents the interests of the wealthy and the elite.”
“That would suggest we have a huge branding problem, because that is not who our party is,” he added. “And we’ve got to do a better job of making sure people know that wherever they live, wherever they are from, no matter who they are, we’re fighting for them and we’re their champion in this country.”