900 people crowded into Eau Claire's Pablo Center March 18 for a town hall with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

About 900 alarmed and angry Wisconsin voters, searching for an answer to their political helplessness, crowded into the Pablo Center in Eau Claire Tuesday evening to attend a town hall with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz hosted by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

At the event, voters said they were scared of how cuts made by the administration of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will affect their health care, children’s education and the future of the country. 

Taking place on the same day early voting started in Wisconsin’s spring election, which will decide the ideological swing of the state Supreme Court, Democratic officials repeatedly said that the April 1 election gives Wisconsinites a chance that few Americans will have this year — to reject the aggressive cuts to government programs and agencies that Trump and Musk have already made and promised to deepen. 

Musk has now spent more than $13 million supporting the campaign of Waukesha County Judge and former Republican attorney general Brad Schimel. Democrats and the campaign of Dane County Judge Susan Crawford have repeatedly pointed out the ties between Schimel and Musk. 

Schimel has said he doesn’t have control of how people spend outside money on his campaign, but in several campaign appearances, he has directly tied himself to Trump. He told a group of canvassers associated with the right-wing Turning Point USA that he’d be a “support network” for Trump, and said to supporters in Jefferson County that Trump was “screwed over” by the state Supreme Court when it decides against overturning the results of  the 2020 election. In a radio appearance this week Schimel alleged that elections in Milwaukee are frequently rigged for liberal candidates. 

“In the rest of the country, people are protesting, which is great, but essentially, they don’t have a way to fight back at the ballot box in this moment,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told the Eau Claire crowd. “In Wisconsin, uniquely in this country, we’re the only state with a statewide election, all the way until November of this year, we’re the only state where we can go to the polls, recruit everyone we know to go to the polls and send a message to the GOP [against] this extremism, this assault by Republicans on our democracy.” 

Exactly 223 days after he was in Eau Claire for his second campaign appearance as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Walz pushed attendees to support Crawford in the election, criticized Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden for not holding town halls in the district and said he was searching for how Democrats can re-assert themselves as a party that makes government work for people. 

“We’re here for a very specific reason, we know what’s at stake,” Walz, who has made similar appearances across the country in recent weeks, said. “I’m not going to whistle past the graveyard here and tell you things are fine. I’m also having the most unsatisfactory I-told-you-so tour in the history of the world … You came here because, you know the fight’s still on, and you know that you love your country, and you wanted to be here in front of your member of Congress, because the First Amendment to the Constitution gives you that right and responsibility to address your congressman.”

During his remarks, Walz called Musk a “dipshit” and an “unelected South African nepo baby” before comparing the state’s April 1 election to cleaning the house, saying “America’s first chunk of cleaning is Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.” 

In a statement, the Schimel campaign said Crawford is being “propped up” by leftists. 

“Tim Walz, the leftist Governor of Minnesota and failed Democratic Vice Presidential candidate is now propping up dangerous Susan Crawford in an attempt to dismantle our state the same way he ruined Minnesota,” the campaign said. 

Prior to the event, a group of four men wearing Make America Great Again hats and other pro-Trump apparel tried to get into the auditorium before being asked to leave by staff. Republicans said the denied entry showed Democrats’ “hypocrisy.” 

Joe Oslund, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said the men were asked to leave because they were clearly looking for trouble. 

“Four individuals who arrived with the clear intention of inciting a confrontation were asked to leave the event,” Oslund said. “We welcomed more than 900 people in Eau Claire last night, and I’m certain that we had folks in the audience who didn’t agree with us on everything. We’re always happy to engage folks with different points of view, but when you show up to cause a scene, we’re going to save ourselves the trouble.”

While the April 1 election will be the first test across the country of the voting public’s mood after the first months of the second Trump administration, people in attendance said they were desperate for something more to do. 

During the event’s question and answer period, one man compared the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, saying this is “our World War II to save the world from Trump” before inviting people to a weekly protest outside the federal building in Eau Claire. 

Menomonie resident Shari Johnson said that after the November election she and a group of politically minded friends started having dinners to discuss ways to counter Trump. She told the Wisconsin Examiner that she’s found her answer, saying that on Saturday she’s going to start marching through her town wearing a six-foot tall inflatable chicken costume while carrying signs that promote justice and fairness in the political system. 

Helen Durden said she skipped work to attend the event because “I feel terrified, angry and lost. What do I do to fix this? Besides a vote, there’s got to be something else. There’s got to be something more. And I’m looking for answers from our leaders to help me figure out, where do I step in to make that change?”

Joe Wendtland, a teacher who lives in Chippewa Falls, said he attended because he’s trying to find ways to be part of the solution. One part of that, he said, is voting in a spring election he usually would have sat out. 

“Quite honestly, in the past, I wouldn’t have bothered with the coming up election. Just, I wouldn’t have shown up unless it was a presidential election year,” he said. “But what I’m seeing is the Republican Party and current administration is just chipping away at all the little options that are out there. And this is me saying, ‘You know what, I’ve got a responsibility to protect what we have.’ And this is one of the few ways that I can really make a difference, is to vote in this election. So I’m gonna be there April 1.”

During a question and answer session , attendees fretted about losing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, how cuts to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will affect kids and the dismantling of government agencies like the Department of Education. 

Walz said that he believes the Democratic Party should respond to Trump by loudly acting as an opposition party, declaring forcefully that public service is noble and working to strengthen labor rights. 

“Look, I understand what I have. I have a platform and a megaphone, and my goal of doing this now also is I was hearing that primal scream of God dang it, do something,” he said. 

“They’re destroying our country, taking our freedoms,” he added, noting that Republicans are complaining about being called fascists. “Quit exhibiting fascist tendencies and we won’t say that.”

Minnesota DFL Chair Ken Martin speaks during a 2024 party bus tour. (Courtesy photo)

On a summer day in 2021, the Minnesota Senate minority leader was lying in a ditch next to an upside down Jeep Cherokee and trying to reach Ken Martin.

“Is Ken your husband?” a state trooper asked then-Sen. Melisa López Franzen as paramedics strapped her onto a backboard to carry her to an ambulance.

“Ken Martin is the party chair,” Franzen replied.

The trooper, taking Franzen’s phone, offered to call him. Dash camera footage first published by Alpha News shows Martin pulling up to the scene in a branded Democratic-Farmer-Labor van about a minute later.

Franzen had been riding with State Auditor Julie Blaha back from the annual agriculture convention Farmfest when they collided with a semi-truck. A trooper found an open can of White Claw hard seltzer in the car, but Blaha was only issued a citation for failing to yield. (Blaha blew a zero on a breathalyzer and Franzen said it was her empty can.)

For Republicans, the incident confirmed their worst suspicions about Martin’s seeming omniscience and omnipotence.

It inspired a short-lived parody Twitter account for the MN DFL Rapid Response Van. (In an interview, Martin called the insinuation that he was any kind of fixer Republican “horsesh**.”)

The MN DFL Rapid Response Van account wasn’t meant to be flattering, but it nevertheless highlighted a fact that both Republicans and Democrats agree on: Ken Martin is the man you want to call when you’re tires-up in the ditch.

As it happens, Democrats find themselves in the ditch, and on Saturday the Democratic National Committee met and chose Martin over more than half a dozen others to lead the party after an embarrassing defeat in November.

Martin won Saturday’s vote handily, with 246.5 votes. Wisconsin Democratic Chair Ben Wikler finished second, with 134.5 votes, in a contest that also included former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

Martin is selling his single-minded obsession with winning as Democrats try to resurrect a moribund party that seems to have no clear message, or even identity.

Asked in the days before Saturday’s vote why he should lead the DNC, Martin said just look at his record. Since he took over the Minnesota DFL in 2011, the party hasn’t lost a single statewide race. He’s 25-0.

“My record is unrivaled and unmatched in terms of winning elections and building power around the issues we care about,” Martin said.

The question is whether Martin will succeed at scaling up Minnesota Democrats’ success and making it national.

From Wellstone to WIN

Martin’s mom was just 15 years old when she had him and was raising four kids on her own by the time she was 20. Martin has said he remembers “the sense of shame that comes with a life of poverty.”

He got involved in politics early. As a high schooler he volunteered for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone before becoming the first in his family to go to college — University of Kansas — where he studied political science before returning to Minnesota to work for the DFL.

While he boasts a 15-year winning streak, Martin’s early career was full of disappointment and the lessons that failure imparts. He worked on the losing Gore and Kerry campaigns — though both won Minnesota — and the gubernatorial campaign of Mike Hatch, who was on the path to victory until Hatch’s running mate biffed a question about ethanol and then Hatch called a male reporter a “Republican whore” for asking about it.

After that, Martin went to work for the carpenters union — officially, the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters — for about a year. It’s that experience that he uses to tout being a union-card carrying member. It’s a highly valuable symbol of blue-collar cred — though Martin is rarely without a blue blazer — for a party agonizing over its loss of working-class voters.

At one forum Martin even called himself a “union carpenter,” in contrast to his opponent, Wisconsin party chair Wikler.

“My grandfather was not an ambassador, he was a letter carrier. My mom was not a college professor. She was a house cleaner,” he said at a candidate forum co-hosed by the Michigan AFL-CIO. “I am a union carpenter, out of the building trades. At the end of the day, I know what it means to get up and bust your ass to go to work and build something in this country.”

Martin never swung a hammer as a carpenter, although his brother, who he says voted for Trump three times, is a union carpenter.

What Martin did at the union was build a statewide database of all the local prevailing wage ordinances and expanded the number of cities with them, according to Kyle Makarios, a former director of government relations for the union.

Makarios is an enthusiastic supporter of Martin for chair, saying he’s able to unite Democrats despite fractures over issues like mining and the war in Gaza.

“While we certainly have our disagreements within the Democratic Party, Ken has built a culture and a structure within the party where that stuff just doesn’t tear us apart,” Makarios said.

In 2008, Martin ran a statewide campaign to raise the sales tax, with the money going toward environmental and cultural projects, and the measure won more votes than Barack Obama.

He then helped set up WIN Minnesota, an outside group with the aim of raising huge sums and spending it to help Democrats, primarily by pummeling their Republican opponents.

With WIN’s help, Democrat Mark Dayton won a close race to become the first DFL governor in 20 years despite an otherwise disastrous election cycle. Martin ran Dayton’s recount operation — he won by less than 10,000 votes — and Dayton hand-picked him to be party chair.

The party was broke and broken. It was $725,000 in debt, had lost control of the Legislature for the first time in 40 years, and the historically blue 8th Congressional District covering the northern Arrowhead had flipped red. Donors had lost faith in the party, factions were fighting and Democrats feared the worst: That Minnesota would go the way of Wisconsin.

“The party was in shambles,” said Corey Day, a former executive director of the DFL who worked closely with Martin. “[Martin] looked under the hood and figured out what was wrong and figured out the best way to fix it.”

In addition to winning every statewide race under Martin, state Democrats have also enjoyed two legislative cycles with the trifecta, allowing them to pass a sweeping progressive agenda including free universal school lunch, paid family leave, legal cannabis and higher taxes on the highest earners.

Martin’s supporters tout his ability to keep the party together, but he’s frequently tangled with DFL factions that he thinks are a threat to the party or its message and candidates. He publicly challenged the party’s left wing over issues like defunding the police and Hamas’ attack on Israel. 

He once told an anonymous poster with a smoking raccoon picture to “Get a life loser.” To a Hello Kitty holding an AK-47 he wrote: “You’re a grown man FFS, start acting like one.”

In 2023, the then-chair of the Minneapolis DFL Briana Rose Lee tweeted “19 years ago today Ronald Reagan did his one good deed for the world” on the anniversary of his death, which became a mini online scandal in Minnesota as Republicans pounced on it to highlight Democrats’ alleged depravity.

Martin issued a statement distancing the state party from Lee, writing that “mocking the passing of an American president is beyond the pale.”

That prompted then-Minneapolis DFL Vice Chair Mike Norton to call Martin a “snake motherf*****” in an X thread laying out broader problems in the party like suspected fraudulent delegates.

Norton resigned a few months later, criticizing the DFL endorsement process as “highly problematic and exclusionary.”

Day, the former DFL executive director, said Martin’s willingness to fight is an asset, not a liability, and isn’t reserved just for the left.

“If that means going toe-to-toe with the moderate wing of the party or going toe-to-toe with the far left wing of the party, I think Ken has shown that he’s gonna do what it takes to make sure that Democrats are elected up and down the ticket.”

Built to win

Martin, 51, says he has a winning strategy to help the party rebuild from a devastating election that handed Republicans control of Congress and put a twice-impeached convicted felon back in the White House.

Even before Saturday’s vote, he appeared to be a front-runner, claiming to have lined up the votes of nearly half of the 448 DNC members, although his stiffest competition, Wikler, won major endorsements from top Democrats including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer as well as the major public-sector unions.

The ditch national Democrats find themselves in today isn’t so different than what the Minnesota DFL was confronting in 2010: a bruising electoral defeat, disgruntled donors, defecting supporters. And finger pointing among the various factions as they contend with a second Trump presidency.

When Martin took over the DFL, he developed a blueprint called “Built to Win. Built to Last.” It became Martin’s mantra for the party, and now his campaign slogan for DNC chair.

He brought fundraising in-house. He funded a year round research department and organizing department. He created a “coordinated table” of key stakeholders including political campaigns, progressive groups, labor unions, donors and others to make sure Democrats were rowing together.

Jeff Blodgett, a veteran Democratic operative who ran campaigns for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, said Martin has the special skills required for party building: Research, coalition-building, cohesive messaging, candidate and volunteer training — and the fundraising that makes it possible.

“That’s what he’s done here to great effect,” Blodgett said.

He’s brought in more than $200 million to the Minnesota DFL. It’s a necessary skill for a DNC chair, although a closeness to deep-pocketed donors — including Rockefeller heiress Alida Messinger and wealthy publisher Vance Opperman — presents its own problems as Democrats aim to stop looking like the party of elites.

Among his campaign promises: Help state parties become more like Minnesota’s by giving them more resources. He’s already made the development of state-level talent a priority, having founded and become the president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs. As it happens, those state party chairs have become a key source of Martin’s DNC chair momentum — evidence of his foresight, and maybe even cunning.

Martin’s other major campaign plank is to invest more in the Sun Belt. He’s rattled off a list of the fastest growing states again and again in his campaign for chair: Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Florida.

There’s a Minnesota analog: Martin has shifted the DFL’s focus to the south, once infamously — and prophetically — telling the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2016 that Democrats no longer need the Iron Range to win statewide.

He cites a study from the Brennan Center showing nearly 4 in 10 House members could come from Southern states after the next census in 2030. That means Democrats need to start shifting their focus to the ruby red South and “skate to where the puck will be,” a quote by pro hockey player Wayne Gretzky that Martin uses.

“There are people who are going to say you shouldn’t be putting money into a state like Tennessee because it’s very red. Are you kidding me? If we don’t do that, we’re going to miss the moment,” Martin said.

Although his reputation is as a skilled back room operator, Martin seems eager to brawl with Republicans on the big stage.

“I will take the low road, so [elected Democrats] can take the high road. I will throw the punches, so they don’t have to,” Martin said during a Politico candidate forum.

After Martin announced his bid for DNC chair, Norton, the former Minneapolis DFL vice chair who sparred with Martin, lined up behind him.

“Ken Martin and I have had our differences, but if Democrats want to win more elections we need someone that’s willing to backstab and throw people under the bus running this party,” Norton wrote on X.

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

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