This is a pretty big disappointment imo, and shows that the party didn’t really listen to its voters or learn from the election in any meaningful way. He was the least interesting and compelling candidate. I wish they had gone for someone with an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years—like Faiz Shakir. This role is very important, and it would have been a great way to show us that Dems actually care about us, and not just the money. But nope, they’ve taken yet another opportunity to give power to a bland vanilla fundraiser who almost nobody has heard of.
The race hinged more on the candidates’ organizing and fundraising resumes than on their postures regarding the ideological soul of the party, as it did in 2017, after President Donald Trump’s previous election win.
lol, Shakir? “Martin won a majority vote among DNC members on the first ballot, 246.5 to 134.5 for Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Martin O’Malley received 44 votes, Faiz Shakir received two and Jason Paul received one” you’re so out of touch, i don’t even know what to say.
Sounds about right, for someone who has an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years. Presumably, like Bernie, “no one wants to work with him.”
i love Faiz but it’s really as simple as “he cannot speak or animate a room to save his life and he’s clearly better working on infrastructure side of things than leading a political party”. there’s a reason he was Bernie’s senior advisor and not a public face of the campaign (and before that an aide to Nancy Pelosi).
Martin had been the frontrunner from the beginning of the race, leveraging his relationships with the more than 400 voting members of the DNC that he forged over more than a decade of work inside the institutional Democratic Party.
real cool that 400 Democrats, all part of the existing party establishment, are the only people who get to vote in this.
from May 2024: The Struggle for Democracy in the Democratic Party
Even in the age of social media, the Democratic Party remains a stubbornly closed-off enterprise. At the top, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a private corporation, as opposed to a membership organization like a labor union, and its leaders have impunity over how they set and enforce party rules. For decades, DNC insiders have gone to war to prevent basic transparency and grassroots reform efforts from gaining steam.
from a recent Jacobin article:
“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
and from his twitter account in October 2023, quote-tweeting Twin Cities DSA “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine”:
“From the river to the sea” is a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel.
looks like we’re in for 4 more years of the same feckless bullshit from Democrats.
i mean no offense but if we’re worried about the “Democratic establishment” it should probably give people pause that the vast majority of Democratic establishment leadership supported Ben Wikler, while the majority of Ken Martin’s support was from the “grassroots” state party infrastructure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Democratic_National_Committee_chairmanship_election#Endorsements
Dick Durbin, Senate Minority Whip (2005–2007, 2015–2021, 2025–present) from Illinois (1997–present)[66]
Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader (2017–2021, 2025–present) from New York (1999–present)[69]
Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader (2023–present) from NY-08 (2013–present)[70]
Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2007–2011, 2019–2023) from CA-11 (1987–present)[72]
(also, there is literally no ideological difference between most of these people. do you think Ben Wikler for example is pro-DSA? lol)
(oh, and that doesn’t even touch on Reid Hoffman and George Soros backing Wikler with a fucking PAC for an insider-baseball race like this)
