Is D.N.C. Chair the Worst Job in Washington?

Even by D.N.C. standards, it has been a difficult summer. By the time I reached out last week to Donna Brazile, a longtime Party leader who twice served as interim D.N.C. chair, she told me that she was tired of talking about it. “I genuinely need a break,” she said. “I’m heading to the gym for physical therapy and don’t feel like discussing the D.N.C. today.” In more good timing, she was scheduled to give an inspirational speech to the D.N.C.’s summer interns the following day.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who became chair after his 2srcsrc4 Presidential campaign, told me that part of the job is learning how to tune out the complaints, something Martin has apparently not yet mastered. “I think he’s got a thin skin,” Dean said. “But he’s on the right track.”

People are quick to compare Martin’s tenure with that of Tom Perez, the only other chair to serve while Trump has been President. When Perez took over, the Party was in a dismal state. Hillary Clinton had lost the election. Progressive voters felt that the D.N.C. had tipped the scales in Clinton’s favor during a bitter primary against Bernie Sanders. The D.N.C. had just been humiliated by a hack of its e-mail system. The staff had been reduced to fewer than a hundred people. Morale at D.N.C. headquarters was nonexistent. “You can’t overestimate how bad it was,” Sam Cornale, Perez’s chief of staff at the time, told me. Perez, a former Labor Secretary, took over promising a “turnaround job.” When they arrived at Party headquarters, they couldn’t even find a key to the chair’s office. At one point, as they searched the building, Cornale recalled, they opened a drawer and found a multimillion-dollar unpaid invoice from a polling firm.

Perez had run for chair in a crowded field of candidates, which included Pete Buttigieg, a little-known mayor from South Bend, Indiana, at the time. His main opponent in the race was Keith Ellison, then a Minnesota congressman beloved by Sanders voters. The race between Perez and Ellison was treated as an extension of the Clinton-Sanders primary. After Perez won the race, he named Ellison as his deputy and embarked on a “unity tour” with Sanders. Inevitably, at almost every stop on the tour, Perez would be booed. “It will never go down as one of my favorite jobs—period, hard stop,” Perez said. “But it was an important job.”

Perez’s successor was Jaime Harrison, the former Party chairman of South Carolina. Harrison held the role during the Biden Administration—and he was, just as McAuliffe warned, an extension of the White House. He has channelled his feelings about his time as chair into an upcoming memoir. The title, he told me, is, “A Chair with No Table.”

As a D.N.C. member himself, Martin was often a thorn in the side of the chair, agitating on behalf of state Parties for more resources. Now he is on the receiving end of such complaints, living in Washington, away from his wife and family in Minnesota, and spending much of his time on the road for work. It has been an adjustment. Martin isn’t well connected among major donors, or among leadership on Capitol Hill. Both Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, supported Ben Wikler, Martin’s opponent in the race for the chair. And many of the staffers working around him inside D.N.C. headquarters were inherited, rather than chosen by him.

Nevertheless, Martin’s fifty-seven-state-and-territory strategy has led to recruitment, staff hires, and organizing programs across the country. According to one D.N.C. official, investments in Democratic state and territory Parties, which total a million dollars a month, have helped North Carolina and Texas assemble a full slate of Democratic candidates for the first time in recent history. In Mississippi, the money has funded the hiring of new data and communications staffers. Tennessee has a new finance director. North Dakota hired part-time organizers and a part-time data director. Missouri opened a headquarters in Jefferson City. Arizona launched a Democratic voter-registration initiative. Colorado started a rural organizing program.

This weekend, Martin will convene the members of the D.N.C. in Austin, Texas, for their annual summer meeting. There has been talk of whether someone will make a move to force him out of the role. This doesn’t seem likely, as there has thus far been no discernible movement by D.N.C. members to call for his removal. To do so would require multiple procedural steps under Robert’s Rules of Order before an actual vote is taken. Minyon Moore, a leader inside the D.N.C. who has worked alongside multiple chairs, has been encouraging Martin to stick to his plans. “You have to put on your own armor, because you will not survive this if you allow every story to change the type of work that you’re doing,” she said. It remains to be seen whether Martin’s strategies will pay off. Observers worry about his fund-raising strategy, the botched autopsy rollout, the mood in the office. Can Martin restore trust in his abilities as a leader? He seems to believe that he can. Winning elections in the midterms, several former chairs told me, would certainly help. And, if anything can be learned from the modern history of the D.N.C., it is that these complaints will likely recede, and new complaints, about this or something else, will soon emerge.