News

In a Monday interview just minutes away from Spanberger’s Norfolk, Virginia, campaign headquarters, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin assured me that his party did indeed have room for both Spanberger, the centrist former CIA agent, and Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Muslim Democratic Socialist—and that their ideological disagreements are actually good and healthy.

“No one should confuse unity and unanimity within the party. We are a big tent party. We’ve got many different ways of being a Democrat,” Martin said when I asked him about a lack of party congruency on more left-leaning, economic populist policies like universal health care and childcare. “We’ve got conservative Democrats, we’ve got centrists, we’ve got progressives like me, and we’ve got leftists in this party.”

“All are welcome. We share the same goals, which is making people’s lives more affordable and actually giving people an opportunity to get ahead. What that looks like is different in different parts of the country.... There’s different issues that are facing New Yorkers than there are in Richmond, Virginia.... And how our politicians decide to tackle those issues is different all over the country, right?” Martin continued. “But there is a throughline right now between, let’s say, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill and Zohran Mamdani. Despite the fact that all three come from very unique and different areas and also represent different wings of the party, they all are focused on the same thing, which is how to lower costs and make people’s lives more affordable so they actually can get ahead.”

A self-described “Wellstone progressive,” Martin left his longtime position as chair of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party in 2025 to chair a party on life support. From the jump, he stressed the need for a party-wide return to its working class roots, writing in February in his first party memo as chair that “the canary in the coal mine” of Vice President Kamala Harris and the party’s November catastrophe was that “for the first time in modern history, Americans now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and Democrats as the party of the elites.”

Seven months later and Martin was still hammering the importance of labor—and harder than I’d heard Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill do in some time.

“We need the Democratic Party to fix this corrupt and rigged system that is only benefiting those at the top. The rich, the powerful, the wealthy and well connected. It’s bullshit,” Martin said while we sat in a Norfolk Starbucks, his easygoing Minnesota accent growing stern. “It’s got to change. No one is benefiting from this administration except those at the top right, and that’s how they like it.”

“My job is to build power and actually win so we can get shit done for people,” the chairman said. “There are values that connect all of us. And in a coalition, you work them out. You have the same goals. We have the same goals. How we get there, there’s lots of different ideas and opinions. And within a coalition party, you work those differences and opinions out, you compromise, and you find the policy that works for everyone, and then you go and get it done right.”