DNC to elect new chair as party grapples with how to rebuild after 2024 losses

Members of the Democratic National Committee will elect their next chairperson on Saturday, as the party grapples with how to rebuild itself after devastating losses in the November elections and reckons with the tumultuous return of Donald Trump to the White House.

The winner of the DNC chair race will help shape the message and priorities of the Democratic party, giving them a crucial role in the party’s efforts to win back the House of Representatives in 2026. The race has attracted a large field of candidates, but two state party chairs – Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin – have emerged as the frontrunners.

Until its final days, the chair race had appeared rather sleepy, an accurate reflection of a party exhausted after a grueling and ultimately disastrous presidential election. But the chair candidates have grown punchier as the race draws to a close, and the late entry of Faiz Shakir, who ran Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, has injected new energy into the race.

All of the candidates seem to agree that the Democratic party needs to move in a new direction after their 2024 losses, expanding its outreach to the working-class Americans who have lurched to the right in recent years and finding more effective means of communicating their values to voters. But the candidates have squabbled over the best strategies and prioritization of those goals, in a display that Shakir said showed a “lack of ambition and a sense of powerlessness about what the DNC could potentially do”.

Faiz Shakir. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“The question to my mind now is that if there is consensus around the working class confronting oligarchy, then what new ideas are we bringing to the table in how we utilize the power and authority of the DNC?” Shakir told the Guardian. “My election would send the strongest message that we’re doing something different.”

Even with Shakir’s late entry, Martin appears to have the advantage heading into the elections on Saturday, when the 450 voting members of the DNC will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to choose their next chairperson and fill several other key leadership positions. Martin claimed last week that he had already secured the support of at least 200 members, putting him within striking distance of the majority needed to win, but Wikler and other candidates have questioned that whip count.

A spokesperson for Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who appears to be running third in the chair race, told ABC News last week that “not a single soul running for any DNC office” believes Martin’s whip count. Wikler said on Tuesday that he had the support of at least 183 members, putting him not far behind Martin, and he insisted he had the momentum heading into Saturday’s vote. After already securing the support of Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, Wikler also received a last-minute boost from Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, who endorsed him on Wednesday.

Still, Martin has racked up a string of endorsements from party leaders like Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and former vice-presidential nominee, and his long-running ties with the DNC may push him over the finish line.

“In Minnesota, Ken has built a national model for how to elect Democrats in a competitive state,” Walz said in his endorsement. “I have seen Ken’s leadership in action, and it’s exactly what we need from our next DNC chair.”

Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democrats. Photograph: Brian Cahn/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

In another sign of Martin’s strength, one of his opponents – James Skoufis, a New York state senator who had launched a long-shot bid for the chair post – endorsed him after dropping out of the race earlier this month.

“The years ahead will be tough. We will be on the outside,” Skoufis said in a statement. “The Democratic party must be laser-focused on demonstrating our commitment to working men and women and fighting like hell to win races up and down the ballot. I am here for that fight and look forward to that fight, in all 50 states and all of America’s 3,244 counties, alongside Ken.”

But Wikler’s allies described the race as a jump ball, as many DNC members remain undecided. While Martin’s supporters frame his extensive experience with the DNC as an asset, his opponents have painted the Minnesota chair’s potential victory as the perpetuation of a failed status quo that cost Democrats dearly in November.

“This DNC chair race is important for sending a signal to voters that Democrats have learned a lesson and will do things differently going forward,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which has endorsed Wikler. “If it sends a signal that we stand for the status quo and want to do everything the same, that will be a turnoff both to the Democratic base and to swing voters who want to see that Democrats are doing something different.”

Wikler’s advocates point to his leadership in Wisconsin – where down-ballot Democrats outperformed Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump by 0.9 points in the battleground state – as evidence of his prowess in campaign strategy.

“A lot of people have professional respect for Ken. I don’t know him. I’m sure he’s fine, but we don’t need ‘fine’ in this moment,” Green said. “We need to do things differently.”

And despite Wikler’s progressive bona fides as a former senior adviser to the group MoveOn, he has managed to assemble an ideologically diverse coalition of supporters as he seeks the chair position. The same day that the PCCC announced its endorsement of Wikler, the center-left group Third Way threw its backing behind him as well.

Kate deGruyter, senior director of communications Third Way, praised Wikler as a battle-tested leader who had developed a winning formula for carrying Democrats to victory in swing districts.

“If you look at a nationwide map, what you will see is that Democrats have largely become a party of the coasts and that we have really hemorrhaged support in the middle of the country,” DeGruyter said. “We really like the idea of having a chair who comes from one of these states that Democrats absolutely need to win and where we really need to work on reconnecting with voters.”

No matter who wins the chair race, the victor will undeniably face significant hurdles in implementing a meaningful agenda. In recent years, the DNC has served as a largely administrative body focused on fundraising, spreading party messaging and setting rules for presidential primaries.

“When Democrats have a Democratic president in charge, it is often the case that [the DNC] is working at the behest of the president of the United States,” Shakir said. “But now when we don’t have the presidency, you take that structure and you say, ‘What is the most important thing that we have to do?’”

The DNC chair will certainly not be the sole arbiter of where Democrats go from here, DeGruyter ackowledged, but the winner of the race will become an influential voice in the discussion over how Democrats can and, in her view, must change.

“It would be a dangerous mistake to assume that we don’t need to really wrestle with some fundamental changes to the way that we approach building a winning coalition,” DeGruyter said. “And so I think it’s really a moment to reflect on how we win the battle of reasonableness with voters.”