Democrats are sabotaging the midterms —and this man is to blame

President Donald Trumpand his Republican Party are in an increasingly weak position as they approach the 2026 midterm elections — and yet Democrats are sabotaging themselves due to the reported incompetence of the Democratic National Committee chairman.

“At the center is Ken Martin, the 53-year-old party chairman, who has found himself increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts, according to interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, including current and former D.N.C. officials and members,” reported The New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein on Sunday. “Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s troubled state of affairs.”

Goldmacher and Epstein added, “Mr. Martin’s fraying nerves are showing. In a pique of frustration in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.’s human resources department.”

The Times added that the alleged phone-throwing episode had tangible fallout, with D.N.C. human resources officials meeting with Martin about the incident. Yet that was far from Martin’s only problem during his brief tenure in charge of the organization. He has been slammed for delaying the release of an autopsy on the 2024 presidential election, and then releasing an incomplete and annotated version. He has made very few media appearances. Staffers are widely reported as being demoralized, and the organization is full of leaks. Martin reportedly is in constant fear of being fired.

Perhaps worst of all, though, the D.N.C. is struggling to raise money.

“None of the party’s problems are more acute than money,” the Times reported. “For more than a decade, the D.N.C. has transferred millions of dollars every election to sister committees responsible for winning the House and Senate. But the national party is now so short on cash — even after taking out a $15 million loan last year — that officials have privately conveyed to congressional leadership that there will be no such transfers in 2026.”

By contrast, Republicans — even though they are struggling in polls — are far exceeding Democrats in fundraising.

“New financial reports released this week revealed the depth of the D.N.C.’s financial hole,” the Times reported. “The party is $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee has $128.5 million in cash on hand. The party that holds the White House almost always raises more money into its party coffers, but this year’s chasm is extraordinarily large.”

Speaking to AlterNet in June, various sources also expressed alarm at Martin’s leadership of the Democratic Party. One anonymous source, a longtime member of the DNC Women’s Caucus, told AlterNet that Martin has done nothing to protect mail-in voting from Trump’s reported attempts to quash it. He has also refused to move away from electronic voting and toward paper receipts, which would be harder for Trump and other Republicans to tamper with.

Despite this shortcoming, the party’s “autopsy” in May acknowledged that "any assessment of the state of technology in the Democratic party would be incomplete without an acknowledgement that comprehensive data warehouses like Phoenix represent an irresistible target for hackers and other bad actors seeking to undermine the integrity of the modern political process."