Self-help author Marianne Williamson didn’t exactly impress a lot of people as having the sharpest political mind during her brief foray into electoral politics. But here’s one thing she got a thousand percent right—though maybe not the way she intended.
In early 2025—and yes, you may be forgiven for having forgotten this—she ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee. Her candidacy went nowhere, and when she dropped out, she threw whatever weight she’d amassed behind Ken Martin over his chief rival, Ben Wikler. She told Politico at the time that Wikler’s establishment backing—he was endorsed for the job by Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi—was what made her turn to Martin. “This had come down to a race between two people,” she said, “and Ken to me is the one who does not represent billionaire funding that has become inherent to the functioning of the DNC.”
You can say that again, Marianne. Not only does Martin not represent billionaire funding; he represents no funding. As has been much reported lately, most dramatically in a brutal New York Times story that ran Sunday, the Democratic Party is broke. Not just broke. In debt. To the tune of $2 million. The Republican National Committee, by contrast, has $128.5 million cash on hand.
This should be a banner year for the Democrats, and the odds are still good that it will be. Donald Trump’s approval numbers are starting to compete with Kanye West’s and Meghan Markle’s, and it seems daily as if he’s doing his best to catch them. He says he doesn’t care about people’s financial struggles, he keeps fighting this ridiculous war whose rationale (Iran can’t have a nuke) exists only because of an idiotic decision he made in his first term, he slaps tariffs on everything from booze to hockey sticks, he bombs at the correspondents’ dinner like a washed-up Vegas comedian playing a bordello down the street from the Liberace Museum. Most of America is sick of him. They’re even sick of his wife, who, at 12 points underwater herself, is far and away the least popular First Lady in recent American history.
Since presidential approval is generally seen as the one number that most directly predicts and tracks the results of midterm elections, it’s still reasonable to assume that the Democrats will retake the House, and that, with Maine having settled down and with a handful of surprisingly close races in red states, they have a live shot at the Senate. But being $2 million in debt is not the way to win close races.
Martin became chairman of the DNC just 11 days after Trump returned to the White House. Here’s what he said at the time, per that Politico article I linked to above: “This is a new DNC. We’re taking the gloves off. I’ve always viewed my role as a chair of the Democratic Party to take the low road, so my candidates and elected officials can take the high road, meaning, I’m going to throw a punch.” And: “We have one team, one team, the Democratic Party. We have one fight, one fight. The fight’s not in here.”
To hear the Times tell it, most of the fighting Martin is doing is with his staff. And while I’m sure he’s probably tried to throw a lot of punches and the press just didn’t cover it, well … it’s his job to break through the noise. A party chair, when his party doesn’t control the White House, has two jobs. Raise money is far and away job one. But job two is, as Martin correctly said 17 months ago, to be a very public attack dog. Martin seems to have failed operatically at both.
It’s been surprising, at least to me. Before going national, he chaired the state party of Minnesota for 12 years. During that time, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party never lost a statewide race. When the party gained unified control of state government under Governor Tim Walz, they passed a boatload of solid liberal legislation that actually made a difference in people’s lives—12 weeks of paid family leave, a progressive child tax credit, free tuition for low- and middle-income families at public universities, free breakfast and lunch at public schools, and more. Martin didn’t have a direct hand in that, of course, but he led the way to electing the people who did. I interviewed him once during that time. I was pretty impressed.
But as DNC chair, he’s just been terrible. I’ve been hearing things long before this Times article, and none of them were good. Back in March of 2025, I wrote about how Democrats should create a shadow cabinet to confront and critique the president and generate national news. I was briefly enthused when, in early April, Martin said he would do just that. But it’s been 479 days and nothing has materialized. And the only time he actually made big national news was a train wreck—that long-delayed “autopsy” of 2024 that he released under public pressure while announcing that “it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” Both the report itself and the handling of it were embarrassingly amateurish.
I have to assume Democratic insiders are texting one another about how to get rid of the guy. They sure should be. I had a gander at the party bylaws, which say clearly and directly: “The National Chairperson shall be elected and may be removed by a majority vote of the Democratic National Committee.” The committee has around 450 members. Under normal circumstances, most of them are loyal to the chairman. But these circumstances are a long way from normal.
Martin defeated Wikler, the former Wisconsin party chair, with 246.5 votes out of 428 cast. Wikler did an amazing job as Wisconsin chair from 2019 to 2025. He built the party up not only in the large blue counties, but in the purple ones and even some red ones. He led the charge to elect a liberal justice to the state Supreme Court even as Elon Musk was spending a mind-bending $56 million—on a judicial race. And he just wrote a very good book, This Is the Plan, that’s all about how to out-organize MAGA. Every chapter of This Is the Plan oozes organizing smarts that meet this current grim, social-media saturated moment.
Democrats, it’s not too late! Correct your mistake. Fire Martin and hire Wikler (assuming he wants it). Clearly, it should have been Wikler in the first place. I remember being surprised that Schumer et al. backed him, because Wikler is both pretty progressive and an outside-the-box thinker. Not the kind of person establishment types usually back. But maybe they knew something about Martin that I didn’t.
The party is on the cusp of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Seems to me that’s when a party needs to act. I know—we’re talking about the Democrats. Sigh.
