The race for Democratic National Committee chair has an emerging front-runner in Ken Martin, the head of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party who has secured almost half of the needed endorsements to win the contest, Politico reported.
The DNC chair election, which will be held on Feb. 1, 2025, is widely seen as a battle over the future of the party, which saw parts of its coalition vote for President-elect Donald Trump.
Two more Democrats on Sunday announced their candidacy: Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since 2019, and Robert Houton, a former U.S. Senate candidate from Maryland, ABC News reported.
They join a growing field that includes New York state Sen. James Skoufis and Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor who has served as commissioner of the Social Security Administration since December 2023.
Current DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is not running for a second term.
Martin's apparent early advantage may ultimately be put to the test by other, bigger-name potential candidates who have not yet entered the contest, such as U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel or Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, according to Politico.
Martin and his backers are selling him as a neutral leader who would avoid messy intraparty disagreements that some are in no mood to have right now following Trump's victory and Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress.
"The key for a successful party chair is to get all of those various ideological wings of your party to work together," said Martin, who is also president of the Association of State Democratic Parties. "For me, it doesn't really matter where I stand on any of that, because my job is to make sure that we are winning elections."
Some outside Democrats say members need to have a serious intraparty debate.
"Maybe the best thing is for the Democratic Party chair to be essentially a technician addressing the operations of the party," said David Axelrod, the former top Barack Obama adviser. "But someone has to ask the question: How did we lose 90% of the counties in this country, and is that a workable model moving forward?"
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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