Whoever wins the race to take the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) this Saturday is poised to inherit one of the most challenging and potentially thankless jobs in Washington as Democrats scramble to chart a path forward in President Trump’s second term.
Any one of the three candidates viewed as a major contender — state party chairs Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, in addition to former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley — faces the tall task of uniting different factions of the party, guiding Democrats on how to oppose Trump and winning back key voting blocs they lost in November.
That job is particularly difficult now with Democrats out of power and mired in a leadership void.
“The next DNC chair, I think, is going to have to make people believe in our party again,” said North Carolina state party chair Anderson Clayton, who has endorsed Wikler in the race.
“You need someone that’s gonna to be able to come in and effectively get donors to buy back into our party,” she said. “You need someone that’s going to be able to give a vision of how every state in this country factors into the way in which that we push back against extreme Republican agenda.”
The race for DNC chair is reaching its conclusion this week as the committee holds its last official forum Thursday. DNC committee members will then cast their vote for the chair and other DNC officer positions this weekend at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland.
While eight candidates are running for DNC chair — Faiz Shakir, a former campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), made a last-minute entry into the race — Martin, Wikler and O’Malley have racked up the most prominent endorsements in the race.
The winner will take the reins of a party at one of its lowest points since Trump’s first win in 2016. The party’s 2024 nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, lost all seven battleground states to Trump, along with the popular vote. With former President Biden and Harris largely out of the spotlight, there have been few figures who have been able to serve as the party’s guiding north stars.
One of the biggest challenges ahead for the next chair will be unifying the party postelection, which — even in the best of times for Democrats — can still be a tall task given the party’s broad coalition, giving it a reputation as one of the hardest jobs in politics.
“It’s just hard as hell to please everybody, because you have a very diverse party, people from all walks of life, people from different points of view,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who ran for DNC chair in 2017 and backs Martin.
“I think Democrats are all ready to be really united and fired up and highly energized,” Ellison said, “but the party leadership is going to be real key.”
There’s also the question of how Democrats will oppose Trump. Martin told The Hill last year he saw the DNC’s role during a second Trump administration as resisting “the really extremes and excesses of the Trump administration,” while also explaining what Democrats are for.
O’Malley, asked how to address Trump during a forum the DNC and Politico hosted, said “we need to hold him accountable” for promises he made that he would make things better for people.
Wikler said during that forum that “we don’t wring our hands about violations of the Hatch Act or this or that norm that he’s eroding. We look at what matters to people in their lives, and then we draw the line and we say, ‘Absolutely not.’”
Some members of the party believe Democrats have to take a more nuanced view of how to take on Trump this time.
“There’s a big difference between being the political opposition party and just pure resistance,” former Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) said. “We’ve got to do what’s best for the American people, and that doesn’t always just being resist, resist, resist. We’ve got to be strategic in this.”
Taking the helm of the DNC, particularly during a tumultuous period, is a job Steve Grossman knows well. Grossman took the reins of the organization in 1997 when the party was millions of dollars in debt and reeling from a scandal, which found foreign sources illegally donating money to the committee. That incident led members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community to feel stigmatized because of the way the DNC handled the situation.
Despite the turmoil, Grossman was able to change the party’s fortunes in a few years before stepping down in 1998.
“You can call it a thankless job. I loved it,” said Grossman, who’s endorsing O’Malley.
“250,000 miles in two years. And when the dust settled in 1998 with Monica Lewinsky scandal going on as I — as we were campaigning, no less, we had won seats in Congress.”
While the Democrats may be finding themselves in a sort of wilderness nationally, Jones sees reason for the party to feel optimistic, even after it lost the bully pulpit.
“People are now waking up to what a lot of people have been saying for a long time, that sustaining is a long-term prospect, and you cannot just gallop between elections and just go from one election cycle to the next. Those are short-term wins,” he said.
“But for long-term sustainability, you’ve got to look long-term, and this is giving Democrats that opportunity to look long-term,” he continued, “not just for ’26 and ’28, but way beyond.”
