Ken Martin is frequently identified these days as one of the front-runners in the crowded contest for chair of the Democratic National Committee. But the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party chair doesn’t go in for the sort of political braggadocio that is favored by the current occupant of the White House. Instead, Martin recalls, “Paul Wellstone always said, ‘Even if they tell you you’re ahead, run like you’re 20 points behind.’”

Wellstone, the progressive senator from Minnesota who died in a 2002 plane crash, just days after casting a courageous vote opposing President George W. Bush’s rush to war in Iraq, mounted the sort of economic populist campaigns that top Democrats now all seem to agree they need to run. He practiced year-round organizing; built multiracial, multiethnic coalitions; explicitly rejected corporate influence and focused on appealing to working-class people; always campaigned in rural areas; toppled a Republican incumbent by running a grassroots campaign out of the back of a beat-up bus; and mounted reelection bids that emphasized his progressive values rather than the talking points favored by major donors and party consultants.

Wellstone inspired a generation of young progressives, including a teenager who volunteered for his breakthrough Senate bid in 1990. That teenager was Ken Martin. Martin embarked on a lifelong career in political organizing that culminated in his 2011 selection to chair the Minnesota DFL. He stayed close to Wellstone until his death—interning in the late senator’s office, working on his campaigns, and relying on Wellstone for mentorship.

On Saturday, Martin will find out if the lessons he learned from Wellstone, and his own track record as a winning state party chair, will be enough to win him election as chair of a Democratic Party that is struggling to renew itself after losing the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2024.

It won’t be a cakewalk. Martin, who has gained significant support from committee members because of his record in Minnesota and as the current president of the Association of Democratic State Committees, faces serious competition from Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler. The Wisconsinite is a rising star in the party whose energetic campaign has in recent days won the endorsements of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and seven Democratic governors—including potential 2028 presidential contenders Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Andy Beshear of Kentucky—as well as a number of major unions. Former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential contender Martin O’Malley is also in the running, as is Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the executive director of the More Perfect Union media project.

All the candidates are hitting similar themes—talking about how they hope to steer the party back toward its working-class roots and toward a more energetic approach to politics that seeks not just to win elections but to maintain a year-round mobilization of base voters, and those who might become base voters.

Martin argues that this is the sort of politics he and his team have been practicing for years in Minnesota, where, under Martin’s leadership, the DFL has a 25–0 winning streak in statewide races. The state chair credits Wellstone for handing DFL activists like himself a playbook for beating Republicans in a historically competitive state.

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“We win the Wellstone way in Minnesota,” explains Martin. “People forget who Paul Wellstone really was. They remember him as a US senator. But they forget his time before that—when he was organizing during the farm crisis. He was out there standing with farmers in the early 1980s. Paul, at the heart of it, believed that the role of the Democratic Party was to be a champion ‘for the little feller, not the Rockefellers,’ as he used to say. He was really fighting for the working class. He understood the connections between working-class people. I’ve been talking a lot about this as it relates to this moment in time, when [Democrats nationally are] trying to get back to our roots of fighting for the working class. Paul understood that what connected a corn farmer in southern Minnesota, an iron miner on the Iron Range, and a new refugee in the Twin Cities was economics—kitchen-table issues. All of these groups, as disparate as they were, shared something in common: a belief in the American dream, that they could achieve it. If they worked hard and played by the rules, they could build a better life for their families. Yet so many of them were struggling. They were feeling forgotten and left behind, and they didn’t feel like they had a champion. That’s why people loved Paul Wellstone. They didn’t agree with him all the time, of course. But they loved him because they knew he was going to stand up and fight for them.”

What’s missing now in too much of our politics, says Martin, is that sort of “authentic, empathetic leadership that understood struggle and understood that everyone, regardless of whether they live in a rural community, or an urban community, or anywhere in between, needs to have some hope that their lives would be better.”

Martin, who is also a former union organizer, is not alone in this view. The notion that a values-based politics that unites urban and rural voters might be the answer for Democrats is suddenly in vogue with senators, governors, and all of Martin’s fellow candidates for DNC chair.

Martin argues that this approach has been hard-wired into the DFL for years. And, he suggests, it explains the party’s success—as a state that has voted Democratic in every presidential race since 1976 and that elects Democrats like Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith to statewide posts.

In fact, Minnesota Democrats have done so well building a bold blue politics, in a region where neighboring states are either red or purple, that backers of other chair contenders suggest Martin and his fellow partisans have had it easy. But he says that’s never been the case.

“I do bristle at the notion that Minnesota is easy to win,” explains the state chair, noting that the state, where Donald Trump has frequently campaigned, has a history of being competitive at the presidential and state levels. In 2024, Kamala Harris and Walz won 51–47 in Minnesota—the eighth-closest result in the country. In 2016, Minnesota had the closest margin of any state won by Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“Sure, we have been 25–0 on statewide races. But it’s not because it’s a blue state. It’s because we have built infrastructure and have had great candidates running on our side,” argues Martin, who notes that DFL candidates lost gubernatorial races from 1986 until the election of Mark Dayton in 2010 by less than 10,000 votes. Since then, they’ve been winning. “But,” says Martin, “it’s still a purple state. It’s very tough to win, and it requires a lot of effort. I don’t get the type of attention that some of the battleground state [chairs] get, because people just assume we’re going to win here. But I have to go out and work my ass off to make sure we win.”

He’s right that there are still plenty of close races in Minnesota; for instance, Ellison won his second term in 2022—after leading the successful prosecution of the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd Jr. in 2000—by less than 1 percent of the vote. (Ellison’s an enthusiastic Martin backer in the chair race, saying, “When the upper Midwest was nearly swept, Minnesota prevailed for Harris under Ken’s leadership. For over a decade, all Minnesota statewide officials are DFLers. Ken wins elections.”) Martin says Minnesota Democrats have secured those close victories by maintaining a year-round mobilization that keeps talking with voters between elections. If he’s elected as DNC chair, the Minnesotan says he wants to steer resources to state parties so that they can do the same. He says he’ll make sure that the money goes to all 50 states, and that projects are developed to dramatically improve the party’s outreach to voters in urban, suburban, and rural areas that have been neglected in the past.

“I am not willing to write off any red part of this country—whether it’s a red state or a red county. Once you do that, then it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says the Minnesota chair. “There’s no such thing as a perpetual red state or a perpetual blue state. We’ve seen our own indifference, our disinvestment in very blue states, result in a loss of vote share in some of those states. I believe you have to organize everywhere. You have to fight for voters everywhere. You have to let voters, wherever they live, know that we’re fighting for them.”

The bottom line for Democrats, says Martin, is that “if we continue to slide with big parts of our coalition, we’re going to be in a perpetual minority.”

As DNC chair, Martin recognizes that a core part of his job would be to raise the money to fund permanent campaigns in 50 states and to take on a Republican Party that, under Trump, is seizing every opportunity to gain financial and structural advantages. But, like Wellstone, he is wary of a politics that is so focused on fundraising that it loses sight of basic values.

“You can’t win without resources in this political environment. So you have to raise money, but you can do it in a way that empowers the grassroots: Raise money from small donors, don’t take any money from corporations and others that don’t represent your values,” explains Martin, who has gotten generally high marks for his fundraising prowess in Minnesota. “I’m not going to take money from oil companies or from tobacco companies or union-busting companies. I think we need to get dark money out of politics, we need to end Citizens United, and, if I had my druthers, we’d have a complete campaign finance reform overhaul, so we’d limit how much money is spent in politics.”

He says he’s “really interested in exploring” strategies for getting dark money out of Democratic primaries, although, like other chair candidates, he struggles with questions of how exactly to accomplish the goal.

Ultimately, argues Martin, the most important focus for the party must be on how it speaks to working-class people of all backgrounds and all regions “in a very present way that lets people know we’re not just using them for their votes but that we’re here in true partnership and, most importantly, we give a damn about their lives and we’re going to fight for them.”

“That,” says Martin, “is the Wellstone way.”