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.”
I think the American public is slightly confused as to what it means to be part of "the elites," as intellectuals and scientists are conflated with money bags and zillionaires in the same category.
But, in general, the best way to fight right wing populism is left wing populism. It's scary for the Democrats, though, as they don't have really good role models for what it means to be left wing populist, and how to make that work in a statewide or nationwide election.
AOC has probably blazed the trail, Mamdani is following it: promise concrete improvements in people's lives, and tie them to higher taxation of the wealthy. Never allow the link to be forgotten: the higher taxes on the wealthy are only there to pay for necessary services for everyone. The estate tax pays for free childcare; the wealth tax for universal healthcare, and so on. Make the connection clear and tangible, so that when a right-wing populist wants to sever it, people understand what they are losing.
Mamdani does that, and if he succeeds (both in the election and implementing his agenda), then the DNC has an idea of where the party needs to go, and that it can go there.
I mean didn't we? I mean FDR was basically that IMO. In fact I gotta admit he had some of the flaws of left wing populism... hence the internment camps etc... But on the whole his new deal politics drove the country so far, and doing them was so successful they had to invent term limits.
I would agree, FDR was a left-wing populist and his policies were massively successful. So much so that we think of the time after their enactment as the golden period of American society, and the successive dismantling of them as the beginning of the current crisis.
The problem is that in current times, we found out that a considerable number of people's vote can be swayed by advertising and marketing, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that parties and candidate should be able to sway away, which means access to funding is essential.
That is, until the people realize who's doing the swaying, how, and why. Once in a while the candidate with less funding wins, but I could see that the DNC needs proof of it working on a massive scale.
Not defending the DNC, by the way. Or the current Democratic leadership.
Yeah, but was he friendly to the corporate donors? That's all the current leadership in the party cares about. You need their funding to lose elections in staggering ways
And they try to justify that as if they can't win elections without that blood money as if it's a necessary evil, but when they win they won't enact change because that might cost them their blood money needed to win the next election, so it's just an endless cycle of inaction, false hope, and virtue signaling with these people.