DNC Chair Candidates On 2024 Election, What They’d Do Differently Moving Forward

A Feb. 1 election will determine who will lead the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The current chair, Jaime Harrison, decided not to run for reelection, so it’s a wide-open playing field.

In an interview series, Marc sat down with three of the candidates to discuss their priorities and why they’re running, along with asking them the question on everyone’s minds: what went wrong for Democrats in 2024?

In November, former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential race, losing all of the crucial swing states, and Republicans regained control of the Senate.

The three DNC chair candidates all said they’re waiting for voter files to come back to do a more in-depth, data-driven analysis, but what they know now is that Democrats didn’t communicate effectively enough to reach the lower-income and less politically educated voters whose biggest issue was the economy — specifically inflation.

While they agreed on that point, each candidate emphasized certain findings and presented different ways they would mitigate this issue if they led the nation’s Democratic Party:

Ken Martin

Martin has served as a vice chair of the DNC since 2017 and the chair of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (the state’s branch of the Democratic Party) since 2011.

“Research…came out last spring that should have been a red flag for everyone in our party, which showed that for the first time in modern American history, the perceptions of the two political parties [have] actually switched,” Martin said. 

Martin further explained that most Americans currently believe the Republican Party best represents lower-income individuals and that Democrats are the party of the wealthy and elite, noting that “the only two demographic groups that we overperformed with this election cycle were wealthy households and college-educated voters,” which is “a damning indictment on our party.”

He said the DNC focuses too much on one election cycle without a “longer-term arc” in mind and has started to “ignore local elections.”

The solution: “Getting the DNC out of D.C., recommitting to building from the grassroots” and a strategy targeting all 57 states and territories.

He also said it’s important to look at where Democrats could’ve done better in many previous elections and what demographic groups they lost support from, not just in 2024, because “this has been going on for some time.”

Martin O’Malley 

O’Malley served as the governor of Maryland 2007-2015 and as the social security administrator in President Joe Biden’s administration 2023-2024.

“Everyone seems to agree that the ads we ran on defending democracy, even the ads on that important issue of choice, did not persuade as many people as what I thought [Harris’] best ad [did],” O’Malley said.

He said Harris’ best political ad was one where she expressed she feels people’s pain — recognizing that prices are too high — and that she would work hard to lower prescription drug costs and strengthen social security.

However, he argued that communications like this, focusing on the economic argument, were not prevalent enough.

The solution: Place a larger emphasis on the issues that impact people’s lives every day in political ads and outreach as well as updating the party’s marketing and communication tactics to reach people most effectively in the ever-changing political landscape. 

For example, O’Malley said he supports door-knocking efforts, but that they may not be the best way to communicate with voters anymore because “the other guys had already been inside those doors over social media channels where more and more people get their information.” 

He also said these efforts shouldn’t just be reserved for an election cycle, arguing it’s crucial that “we can deliver a message and be more effective at staying connected [with voters] year-round rather than just in the last three weeks of an election.”

Ben Wikler

Wikler has served as the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2019.

For the most part, Harris won voters “who say they pay attention to political news all the time,” and she lost those “who say they never pay attention to political news,” Wikler said.

He argued that people who didn’t follow political news closely based their decision on who to vote for on how they felt day-to-day — many people thinking about how “prices went up,” and “life seemed unaffordable,” — and weren’t voting on Harris’ specific policies. 

These voters just wanted their economic circumstances to change, and the easiest way for them to make that happen was to vote for change — putting a different party in power, Wikler said.

He explained that Democratic candidates should go on podcasts and YouTube interviews and engage in large group chats to reach people outside of the traditional political sphere, instead of just going on news networks. He said Democrats need to make it clear that they will actually fight for working people, while the GOP will prioritize the wealthiest individuals above all else.

The solution for future elections: “Communicating in places where people who don’t watch the news get their understanding of the world.”

“We’re against the folks who are trying to rig this entire country for the benefit of a tiny group of far-right billionaires at the top,” Wikler said. “If we can lay those battle lines out in a way that people feel in their gut, I think we have a chance to win back a ton of votes from working people across the country and win elections in these next four years.”