No more concessions.
That was the message that new Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin stressed during a recent interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast. Martin, who was elected chairman of the party in February, said the DNC, which has spent the last few months reassessing its strengths and weaknesses in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, has landed on an overall strategy.
Fight everywhere. Including supposed red states and “unwinnable” southern states.
“I just spent the last eight years as the head of our state party association where I wrote the 57-state strategy – 50 states and of course the seven territories – and it’s an acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as a perpetual red state or perpetual blue state,” Martin said. “If we want to move a red state to a purple state to a blue state, we have to invest time energy and money in those places. I’m a big believer that when you organize everywhere you can win anywhere.”
Simply saying you’re going to fight everywhere, though, is rather meaningless, Martin said, unless there’s a viable strategy behind it. And to that end, the new DNC is prepared to make massive shifts in how it conducts organizing, where it spends money, the media strategy it employs and the messaging it sends out.
Martin said that a party that just spent $2 billion on a losing presidential campaign can certainly spare some capital to tackle down-ballot races in every state, focusing on local offices and cutting off the spread of hateful, harmful rhetoric at the roots.
“We can’t be a party that’s just focused on federal races we if if we want to build both for the short term and the long term,” he said. “We have to be competing up and down the ballot – contested races at all levels, from state races to legislative races all the way down to local races. They all matter right now, and our own indifference, as an example, to local races has allowed the conservative movement in this country to take over so many of our school boards where they’re now banning books, whitewashing history, attacking our children.
“That’s partly on the republicans but it’s certainly also on us, because we’ve not contested those races and we’re not organizing around local races. So, for me, I take a very holistic view on how we build power. We have to compete everywhere across this country. We have to compete in every zip code and be organizing in every zip code, and we have to do it up and down the ballot, competing in every race.”
Martin also stressed that the Democrats’ old media strategy, which relied too heavily on legacy media, local broadcast advertising and a passive reliance on news outlets to perform adequate fact checking, was a thing of the past. Moving forward, the Democrats will take a few pages from the successful Republican playbook, as far as new media, and implement a more user-friendly campaign strategy.
“This is one of the areas where we got our butts kicked over the last several years to be honest with you,” Martin said. “If you think about this, about probably a decade or longer now, maybe fifteen years or so ago, corporate America in the entertainment industry understood that ninety percent of Americans had a smartphone, and as a result they were going to start getting their information in entertainment from digital spaces. So they started to move all their content into those spaces, and of course politics and elections and campaigns always lag behind where corporate America is.
“The Republicans actually made this switch probably about five years ago, right after the 2020 election. They started an incessant drumbeat of beating the hell out of Joe Biden and the democratic party in all of these digital spaces. They paid them to spread their misinformation and disinformation for three years before we were ever even revving up our communications infrastructure. They had already defined us before we defined ourselves, and that’s one of the critical lessons that we’ve learned already from this last election cycle. We have to have meet where voter meet voters where they’re at.”
Martin also spoke of a new organizing strategy and no longer conceding the religious vote to Republicans. The interview in its entirety, will be available later this week on the Alabama Politics This Week website, or subscribe to the podcast on all major platforms.
