DNC Chair Ken Martin's Broken Promises Haunt his Tenure and the Party

Martin ran for chair on a platform that emphasized his commitment to transparency and to getting big money out of Democratic Party politics. Now, though, Martin is dealing with controversy over his lack of transparency on the autopsy report, and a DNC resolutions committee that has watered-down resolutions to ban dark money.

By Sam Rosenthal

Last week, the Democratic National Committee met in New Orleans for its semiannual meeting. Despite attempts by the event’s organizers to project a united front, it was evident that many of the disagreements that have plagued the party during the Trump era are far from settled.

While party leaders publicly expressed their absolute confidence in DNC Chair Ken Martin, it was a different story behind the scenes. In one private conversation after another, DNC members expressed their misgivings about Martin’s leadership and the DNC’s general direction.

First, there are financial concerns; the DNC’s Republican counterpart, the RNC, has opened up a huge fundraising gulf and Democrats in competitive races may find themselves at a major financial disadvantage. There were deeper, more existential worries, too. The fissures that emerged during Kamala Harris’s ill-fated 2024 campaign remain largely unresolved. They include disagreement about the Democratic Party’s orientation to Israel, whether Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, and also the role of dark money, including GOP money, in Democratic primaries.

These divisions exploded into public view last week in New Orleans, where a series of ambitious, progressive resolutions were, one by one, watered down or tabled by the DNC majority. These included a resolution explicitly naming the Gaza war a “genocide” and calling for a permanent ceasefire there, along with a resolution calling for an immediate end to the war in Iran. Both were referred to a task force — one that, incidentally, Martin had created at the DNC meeting last August in lieu of holding a vote on a similar resolution that condemned the Gaza genocide. This task force has not issued a report and has scarcely met since its inception nearly eight months ago; there was controversy at the recent DNC meeting about how frequently, or whether, this group has met.

DNC members who introduced resolutions condemning corporate money in Democratic primaries saw their resolutions defanged and stripped down to the most anodyne language. The original resolutions named AIPAC, cryptocurrency, and AI lobbies as the chief perpetrators of big dark money expenditures in Democratic primaries. This is well substantiated — AIPAC, for example and its affiliates have already spent well over $14 million in the 2026 primary cycle. That degree of specificity was too much for the DNC though, who sought to take out any language naming the most active lobbies in this year’s Democratic primaries, under the dubious premise that calling out specific groups undermined opposition to all dark money groups.

And then there was the question of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy. The report, compiled by the DNC in the aftermath of Harris’s blowout loss to Donald Trump in 2024, has yet to be released to the public. The vast majority of DNC members have not seen the report either, despite some requesting it directly from Martin. On Friday, three people were kicked out of a full DNC session for demanding that Martin release the autopsy, a moment of shocking discord at an otherwise placid event.

For Ken Martin, there is no easy resolution to these divisions. Martin ran for chair on a platform that emphasized his commitment to transparency and to getting big money out of Democratic Party politics. Now, though, Martin is dealing with controversy over his lack of transparency on the autopsy report, and a DNC resolutions committee that has watered-down resolutions to ban dark money. These about-faces on his campaign promises, plus his inability to elevate the DNC’s fundraising prowess, could spell disaster for his tenure as chair.

There’s no sign that detractors will let up any time soon. RootsAction, which was part of the demonstration activity at last week’s DNC meeting, has launched a petition demanding the release of the DNC’s autopsy report. Videos of protestors inside and outside the hotel where the event was held have circulated widely on social media. And, with the Democratic Party increasingly out of step with its base — nearly 80% of whom now hold an unfavorable view of Israel — tensions within the party may prove too great for Martin’s business-as-usual approach to suffice.

Sam Rosenthal is the political director at RootsAction. He formerly served as the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Electoral Commission.