DNC Chair Candidate Martin O’Malley Wants To Be More Than Just A Bureaucrat

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Martin O’Malley has not held elected office in nearly a decade.

But to see him greeting Democratic governors, consultants and lobbyists with an easy smile at the Democratic Governors Association’s annual meeting this past weekend, you would think he had never left.

That comfort with gladhanding might make O’Malley, a former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor now wrapping up his stint as commissioner of the Social Security Administration, seem like an unconventional choice to chair the Democratic National Committee.

It’s a body made up more of bureaucrats than political stars. Most of the job’s work is distinctly behind-the-scenes: fundraising, managing relationships with state parties and helping set up the presidential nominating process.

And it’s not like a glittering public persona helps you get the job, either. Winning requires wooing over 448 voting DNC members — a clique of state party leaders and other insiders with different considerations than the mass electorate O’Malley courted to win gubernatorial races in 2006 and 2010.

Undeterred, O’Malley is pitching himself as a hybrid pick who has the administrative experience needed to run a big organization but can also help drive Democrats’ messaging in the media. It’s an implicit contrast with the two leading contenders for the job, both of whom are comparatively low-profile state party chairs.

“I can go every day on television and bring back to the American people why Donald Trump and the things he’s breaking and dismantling are bad for their family’s future, and bad for the economics of their household, and bad for greater opportunities for their kids,” O’Malley said. “But I am also the best operational turnaround leader in this party willing to do this job right now, and I’m going to do it.”

“This is not a peacetime DNC chair,” he added. “This is kind of a wartime footing. The foundations of this Republic have already been rocked, and they’re going to be rocked even more in the next two years.”

The DNC will meet to elect its new chair at its annual winter meeting on Feb. 1, before which contenders will have the chance to participate in four official candidate forums. Of the four DNC chair candidates, O’Malley was the first to announce his bid in mid-November, but he is far from the frontrunner.

Ken Martin, chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and chair of the Association of State Democratic Committees, has probably earned that title, having secured 100 endorsements from the roster of voting DNC members.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, who helped engineer a liberal state Supreme Court takeover that resulted in the undoing of Republican gerrymandering, has broad national support that could yet fuel a groundswell inside the DNC. He is backed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the centrist group Third Way. An interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Monday night devolved into a love-fest.

Both Martin and Wikler have nodded to the Democratic Party’s recent difficulties reaching working-class voters.

But the two Midwestern state party chairs are running as talented managers rather than iconoclastic changemakers. Their pitch to DNC members is that they have the experience needed to incrementally improve party operations without inflaming intraparty divisions. Neither candidate has sought to diagnose policy or strategic errors that the party has made under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, nor have they suggested they could dominate the talk show circuit.

They have instead ceded the “major changes” lane in the race to O’Malley and New York state Sen. James Skoufis, an unknown on the national stage who touts his victory in a Hudson Valley seat where Harris lost by a significant margin.

Skoufis is running as even more of a gadfly than O’Malley, promising to let all of the DNC’s current contracts with vendors expire. He has also challenged his rivals to stake out positions on whether Biden should have withdrawn from the presidential race earlier and what the 2028 presidential nominating schedule should be. (Skoufis believes Biden should have dropped out sooner, and wants to keep South Carolina in the top spot.)

Speaking to HuffPost, O’Malley would not answer either question and said the primary schedule was up to the DNC membership as a whole.

He has been more willing to be critical of how Harris conducted her campaign than Martin or Wikler, however, calling it a mistake to concentrate, in the final weeks, on the dangers Donald Trump poses to democracy, rather than keep the focus on her economic agenda.

“I guess the media consultant somewhere in an office in Washington, or Manhattan or someplace decided to shift the tracks to more of a double-negative approach, of scaring people worse about Trump than he was trying to scare people about us,” O’Malley said. “A lot of people tell me that on the ground, a lot of their neighbors thought defending democracy meant voting for the status quo at the high price of things and the high cost of living.”

“When we stopped talking about the economy, we lost credibility as the party of working people,” he continued.

O’Malley wants the DNC to conduct an after-action report about the 2024 election, calling it the only logical response to the kind of drubbing Democrats endured this year. Without naming names, he is also critical of recent DNC chairs for allowing Democratic voter registration to decline in key states even as Democrats “increased the volume of our shouting and our objections to [Trump’s] presidency.”

“I know that there are some who would want to say, ‘Oh, well, but it was only one point here and two points there.’ No, we lost for a second time to a convicted felon who sicced a violent mob to chase our leaders and kill police to disrupt the election,” he said. “It’s a big loss, and we need to learn why it is that so many families at their own kitchen tables lost sight of the fact that our party is the one that’s on their side, and instead chose to believe this pathological liar that he’s actually on theirs.”

O’Malley sees Arizona Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego as an example of a Democrat who put an appropriate emphasis on lowering prices, and delivered an immigration message that balanced compassion with concern for border security. Gallego won Arizona despite Harris losing the state, outperforming her by about eight points.

That well-trodden analysis is likely to find a receptive audience among the many Democratic decision-makers eager to learn from successes as well as failures.

What’s less obvious is whether the DNC’s voting membership is in the mood for O’Malley’s brand of tough medicine — or envisions him as the best person to prescribe it.

Before Biden tapped him to take over the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley’s last foray into politics was a 2016 presidential run. He quickly became an afterthought amid the ideological showdown between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But O’Malley, who was only confirmed to his current post in Dec. 2023, touts his work streamlining the SSA’s customer service. He has won praise from disability rights advocates for reducing wait times and other positive changes.

O’Malley also argues that his experience winning reelection by almost 15 percentage points during the Republican wave year of 2010 gives him a unique perspective on Democrats’ present moment. In his first term, O’Malley froze public college tuition cuts — following major increases by his predecessor— but also raised income taxes on higher earners to even out the burden of fiscal austerity. The latter step proved controversial among Maryland’s sizable contingent of upper-middle class families.

Acting against what he said was the advice of his advisers, O’Malley ran on economics and empathy. He’d bring a literal kitchen table to campaign stops to demonstrate he was thinking constantly about how to help people meet their basic needs.

“I’d say, ‘You know what this is? This is the most important place in Maryland. This is every family’s kitchen table,’” he said. “And what I learned through those eight years as we accomplished a lot of really progressive things — including repealing the death penalty, marriage equality, comprehensive gun safety legislation — is that our ability as a party to do those things depends, always, every day, on the trust that people have in our party to be working to improve economic conditions for themselves and for their families.”