Four candidates have declared their intention to compete for chair of the Democratic National Committee, but as the race heats up, an aggressively polite, exceedingly Midwestern cold war has broken out between factions backing the two state party chairs in the race: Ben Wikler of Wisconsin and Ken Martin of Minnesota.
To a casual observer, Wikler may look like the frontrunner in this race. He has scooped up endorsements from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, MoveOn.org (where he worked before taking over WisDems), and the centrist Democratic organization Third Way, which extolled his virtues in a lengthy Political op-ed. The New York Times' Michelle Goldberg declared in a recent column, “If Anyone Can Save the Democrats, It's Ben Wikler.” And just last week, Wikler stopped by The Daily Showwhere his appearance was praised by Pod Save America host Jon Favreau. “I've rarely seen Jon Stewart so impressed with a political guest (though I can't say I'm surprised he's a Wikler fan — so many of us are),” Favreau posted on X.
But DNC chair is a position voted on by 448 party insiders, roughly one-quarter of whom are state chairs and vice chairs. Among that group, Wikler's peers, the qualities that have made him a darling of the media — his prodigious fundraising ability, relationships with donors and celebrities, and messaging ability — have engendered resentments that could torpedo his bid to head the national party.
In conversations with Rolling Stone, current or former state party chairs expressed frustration at the outsize attention and money Wikler has attracted relative to his record as chair, and they raised questions about whether, as chair of the national party, he would be able to stand up to the ultra-wealthy donors he has courted during his tenure helming the Wisconsin party. Wikler's relationship with billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman — who has previously sought to privatize state parties' prized voter files — was of particular concern to several people. Hoffman, records show, has personally donated a little less than $9 million to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since Wikler took over.
Wikler's chief rival is his neighbor Ken Martin, the longstanding chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Since he took over in 2011, the DFL has never lost a statewide race, Democrats have gained full control of the state government twice, and advanced a slate of progressive policy priorities.
Among the half dozen current and former state party chairs whom Rolling Stone spoke with for this story, everyone agreed it was critical for the next DNC chair to have experience as a state party chair, and each praised Wikler and Martin as smart and capable. But where Martin, who heads the association of state party chairs, was universally complimented for the efforts he made to help fellow chairs, Wikler's peers described him as less than generous when it came to sharing contacts and other resources. (A representative for Wikler pointed out that assisting other chairs is part of Martin's mandate in his role heading the Association of Democratic State Chairs, and insisted that Wikler makes efforts to share his contacts, but that it was ultimately up to the person in question if they will allow him to share their information with others.)
Simmering in the background of the fight between Wikler, Martin, and their proxies is the reality that the state parties have seen their power recede dramatically over the last 16 years, ever since Barack Obama created his own 50-state nonprofit apparatus, Organizing For America . Today, most parties' main source of funding is a meager salary from the DNC: between $12,000 to $15,000 to cover all of their operations every month. (That's up from $2,500 a month a matter of years ago.) For most chairs, the work is hard, it is thankless, and the pay isn't just bad, but nonexistent — a completely volunteer position.
Beyond the funding they receive from the national party, the parties have a single asset to their name: the voter file. Every candidate and campaign needs access to those files, which are maintained by the state parties. For years, Democratic donors including Hoffman have sought to privatize them. Doing so, chairs told Rolling Stone, would represent an extinction-level event for their already-beleaguered organizations.
In an interview, Wikler insisted that he would work to protect state parties' ownership of those files. “I believe unequivocally state parties should own the data, and that that's essential to their work, their ability to ensure that elected officials and Democratic candidates work with the state party in a coordinated campaign, and their voice within the broader democratic ecosystem,” Wikler told Rolling Stone. “I also know that, in the world as it is now, we need to raise a lot of funds to be able to defeat Republicans, and we need to do that in a way that doesn't compromise our values.”
He added: “There are a lot of significant donors and partners that start from a place of skepticism about whether state parties can make a meaningful difference, and Reid Hoffman, when I first started interacting with him at his team, he was pretty skeptical that the parties could be a vehicle to defeat [Donald] Trump and defeat Republicans. I've made the case, over years, that state parties are essential to this work and [that state parties] have powers that other bodies don't, and I've urged them to invest in other state parties.”
Rae Steward, managing partner of Reid Hoffman's investment fund, Investing in US, echoed that sentiment in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “When Investing in US entered the political space in 2017, we were generally skeptical of investing into state parties, and at first only gave modest support in a few instances. However, we found Ben Wikler very compelling as a leader and as we built a relationship with him, Ben repeatedly encouraged us to consider more robust support for state parties in addition to WisDems. Due to Ben's persistent recommendations and endorsements, we established relationships with other state party chairs, and ultimately expanded our investments to include Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Ohio.”
Wikler's national profile remains on the idea that the Wisconsin Democratic Party was “broken” (as Stewart put it during his recent visit to The Daily Show) before he took it over. But, chairs told Rolling Stone that narrative was flawed: They credited Wikler's predecessor, Martha Laning, with turning the state party around, and Wikler with sliding into the role once much of the hard work was done. “That's the thing that pisses off some chairs,” one says. “Martha Lanning was the chair that turned that state around and put Wisconsin on the map… For Ben to be propped up as like the 'comeback kid' who turned a red-state purple, that's not accurate.”
Laning took over the Wisconsin state party during the Scott Walker years, after the Democratic Party had lost three times — two elections for governor and one failed recall — to the then-rising Republican star. As chair, Laning launched a year-round, statewide organizing program that helped current Gov. Tony Evers finally defeated Walker, helped re-elect Sen. Tammy Baldwin by five points, and picked up two state Senate seats. (A representative for Wikler pushed back on the criticism that he doesn't credit his predecessor, Martha Laning's efforts, sharing a recording of remarks Wikler gave to a recent meeting of the Association of State Democratic Chairs where he mentioned her work.)
Wikler, who arrived in 2019, is praised for helping deliver the state for Joe Biden in 2020 but, his critics point out, he failed to deliver a toss-up Senate race for Democrats in 2022, Democrats lost a long-held congressional seat and Republicans gained, briefly, a supermajority in the Wisconsin legislature on his watch—all while he was working with magnitudes more money than Laning had. This year, Wisconsin Democrats raised a staggering $56.6 million dollars, but Kamala Harris and Tim Walz still lost the state by a little less than one percentage point, and Republicans maintained their legislative majorities.
Wikler's Wisconsin Democrats did manage to win a critical race for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court last year, which set an important series of events into motion: The newly-Democratic Supreme Court majority struck down legislative maps gerrymandered to favor the GOP, which in turn helped Democrats pick up 14 seats in the state Senate and Assembly this November. A member of Tammy Baldwin's campaign team who was present for both the senator's 2018 and 2024 cycles, meanwhile, tells Rolling Stone that the difference between the support they received from the party under the respective chairs was “like night and day,” adding that in early October, Senate Republicans' campaign arms and their candidate Eric Hovde “announced plans to drop over $25 million in the race . Our first phone call was to Ben, and he was literally with us every step of the way, hand in hand, shoulder and shoulder, to make sure that our campaign had the resources and support we needed. Ben was an integral partner.”
Still, a number of chairs accustomed to operating with far smaller budgets expressed disbelief that Wikler has not been more successful with such an eye-watering sum of money at its disposal. “Look, he's not been a savior for Wisconsin,” former Washington state party chair Tina Podlodowski says. “Wisconsin has a million fewer voters than my state, and Ben had almost 30 to 40 times the amount of money that I ever got in Washington state to do his work. I don't understand how we couldn't have flipped a state, and couldn't have understood those voters with that amount of money.”
Podlodowski added, “I brought Ben into my state in Washington and introduced him to a bunch of my high-end donors to try to help in Wisconsin when he first started. Did Ben ever do anything to help Washington state? No. Did Ben ever show up at these at their state party meetings for more than just a day and help other state parties? No. Was he ever fighting with us for different things from the DNC? No.”
For her part, Washington state's current chair, Shasti Conrad, tells Rolling Stone“When I was a new chair coming in I found Ben to be helpful… Ben has built an incredible program in Wisconsin, and certainly has raised a lot more money than most of us have. I think sometimes it is hard to feel like we are all working just as hard but don't always get the same attention, the same resources, the same support… In Washington, I've got a [fraction] of what Ben has… But we won everything. We did so well — but that story doesn't get told in the same way that Ben's story does.”
She added she would be pleased if either candidate won. “Ben's built a really incredible program in Wisconsin, and I'd be happy to see him as chair. I certainly am a huge fan of Ken Martin's as well. Ken's been an incredible leader of our association — I really think the world of Ken.”
Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina state party, however credited Wikler with helping unlock a stream of money that helped ensure that she would be able to take a salary as party chair. She was turning 26-years-old and about to be kicked off her parents' health insurance. “I was a young state party chair and somebody that nobody really had any business sticking their neck out for. And [Wikler’s backing] made the difference in opening up an ability for me to raise money that I needed to really show myself somebody that was worthy of being paid in that position,” Clayton told me. “I think Ben wants to be able to do that for everybody in this race — open up a flow of resources that we, as state parties, haven't necessarily seen. I think that we have been an undervalued branch of the DNC for a long time.”
