More than 400 members of Democratic National Committee are gathering on Saturday to choose the party’s next chairman, who will help guide Democrats as they aim to claw back power after their 2024 defeats.
The race has unfolded as Democrats debate how to oppose President Trump after his return to the White House. The candidates and D.N.C. members, however, have spent far more time wrangling over picayune internal considerations like consulting contracts, budgetary allocations and the influence of the party’s major donors.
The front-runners are two state party chairmen: Ken Martin, 51, of Minnesota and Ben Wikler, 43, of Wisconsin. The contest also includes two onetime presidential candidates, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland and the author Marianne Williamson, as well as one former presidential campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, who oversaw Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 bid.
Here are six things to watch as Democratic officials meet just outside Washington:
Will a secret election have plot twists?
The vote will be held among party insiders — the 448 members of the national committee.
By most accounts, Mr. Martin has accumulated the largest level of support. But the balloting will be held in private, so any promises made in advance could melt away once voting begins. (Candidates do have the right to see how each member voted, though those results may not become public until well after the vote.)
As of late Friday, Mr. Martin had claimed more than 200 public endorsements, Mr. Wikler had more than 80 and Mr. O’Malley had 31. Each candidate has boasted of private promises of support that are far higher, though those figures are impossible to confirm.
Will someone win on the first ballot?
If so, it will probably be Mr. Martin. If not, we could be in for a wild ride.
A candidate will need a majority of votes, or 225, to become the party chair. If no one reaches that threshold on the first ballot, voting will continue on successive ballots until someone is pushed over the top.
That has left Mr. Martin, Mr. Wikler and their allies scrambling to grab some of Mr. O’Malley’s supporters. Mr. O’Malley has had conversations with both Mr. Martin and Mr. Wikler, though he is not believed to have discussed throwing his support to either rival.
It would be a surprise if Mr. Wikler won on the first ballot. His path to victory depends on Mr. O’Malley drawing enough support to hold Mr. Martin below the winning threshold, and then racing to pull votes to his side on subsequent ballots.
The Wikler team believes Mr. Martin has built his advantage on the perceptions of momentum and inevitability. Mr. Wikler’s team thinks that if the Minnesotan fails to win on the first ballot, it can win over Mr. O’Malley’s supporters and perhaps peel off some of Mr. Martin’s backers as well.
In addition to the chair election, contests will be held for party posts including vice chair, treasurer and secretary.
Will there be introspection about the party’s predicament?
Some — but not a lot, it seems.
“Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” Mr. Martin said on Thursday at the final candidate forum. “We got the right message.”
Instead, the focus so far has been more on delivery — as in how to deliver that message to core Democratic voters, to keep them engaged, as well as to apolitical Americans who do not actively consume news.
Unlike the party’s last open race for chair, in 2017, after Mr. Trump’s first victory, this year’s contest has not focused on ideological divisions inside the Democratic tent. In 2017, Tom Perez, the former labor secretary, represented the party establishment while Keith Ellison, then a member of Congress and now the Minnesota attorney general, had campaigned as the left-wing champion.
Mr. Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s former campaign manager, entered this year’s race late to try to spur more fundamental discussions about the failings of the Democratic brand, especially among working-class voters. He does not appear to have found much traction in the race.
Notably, the departing chairman, Jaime Harrison, suggested in an exit interview with The Associated Press that the party should not have swapped former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for former Vice President Kamala Harris atop the ticket last year. The party lost control of the House, the Senate and the White House during Mr. Harrison’s tenure.
Can national leaders and unions lift Wikler?
Mr. Wikler has scored the backing of some of the largest labor unions, including UNITE HERE, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the Service Employees International Union.
He also has support from some big names, including Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House speaker. But Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi do not actually have a direct vote. Instead, it is Ms. Pelosi’s daughter Christine who sits on the D.N.C. and whose endorsement of Mr. Wikler merited her own news release from his campaign, a sign of the unusual places that influence and power sit in this closed process.
Mr. Martin founded and has served as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, a group inside the D.N.C. that has built a power base of state-level officials that he hopes will help him secure victory.
Mr. Martin and Mr. Wikler have both set up hospitality rooms at the D.N.C. meeting, with Mr. Martin’s plastered with “Yes We Ken!” signs and Mr. Wikler dishing out food, including crab and spinach dip.
Will the winner finally articulate a bold message for the party?
The winner will deliver a speech that may be his best opportunity to speak to a national audience. In the past, cable networks have carried the new party leader’s speech live. (This might not happen on Saturday, however, given a crush of Trump news and updates on the Washington plane crash.)
But after a campaign defined by small-ball procedural issues and the influence of donors and consulting firms, the winning candidate will have the chance to make a full-throated argument for why Democrats are better than Mr. Trump and Republicans.
How much difference that will make in the long run is to be determined. The fight against Mr. Trump is being waged in the halls of Congress and by the nation’s Democratic governors, who in recent days have begun organizing among themselves about what to say and how to act.
One of the new party chairman’s tasks will be to ensure that ambitious Democrats in Washington and around the country are doing more coordinating with one another than competing for attention in the anti-Trump world.
The next chairman will lead an operation that is on solid financial footing, at least: The D.N.C. reported on Friday evening that it had $22.1 million in cash on hand as of Dec. 31.
How will the next chair affect the 2028 calendar?
Mr. Martin has taken to describing the party chairmanship as the political equivalent of being a fire hydrant. That’s because, he says, “you get pissed on by everyone.”
But that is not to say the role is unimportant.
The party chairman will help set the rules of the 2028 presidential primary election, including determining which states vote first. Iowa held the kickoff caucuses for many years until Mr. Biden moved South Carolina, the state that delivered him the 2020 nomination, to the front of the line.
But there is no guarantee that South Carolina stays there. New Hampshire still has a law requiring it to go first, and all of the candidates for D.N.C. chair have deftly avoided making specific promises on the order of states.
The party chair will also determine the qualifications for debates, which deeply shape the political conversation. The D.N.C. contenders themselves sat through a series of candidate forums that included as many as eight hopefuls, some of whom have little chance of winning.