Members of the Democratic National Committee gathered in Washington over the weekend to elect a new chairman, Ken Martin, the little-known, 51-year-old leader of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a white guy with a nice haircut and an accent straight out of the latest season of Fargo. The chairman’s race was mostly a behind-the-scenes affair obsessed over by party activists and journalists, but ignored by the general public and the vast majority of exhausted Democratic voters. The election jockeying was peak inside-baseball, with each candidate rolling out endorsements from this D.N.C. member or that. Martin, a known commodity inside the D.N.C., won a dominant majority of the party’s nearly 450 members, easily dispatching his next-strongest opponent, Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler.
As a prize, the D.N.C. gig has lost luster over the years. In the era before social media, a party chair could model oneself a national leader by going on cable news or the Sunday shows and jousting with his or her Republican counterpart. With their party out of the White House, former chairs Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean routinely made news by going on Hardball and punching at George W. Bush. But as entertaining as they were back in the day, the reality today is that being a party chair—D.N.C. or R.N.C.—isn’t about driving a message or being the party’s puppet master. It’s about fundraising, building state party organizations, managing the logistics of a presidential primary, enduring tedious phone calls with donors, and mollifying needy activists and coalition groups. Martin, to his credit, says he’s planning to be an inside player, not an attention fiend or a message maven. “I’m not here to win the argument, I’m here to win elections,” he told MSNBC. Like Tom Perez, the D.N.C. chairman in Donald Trump’s first term, Martin will not become a household name, which seems just fine with him
What struck me about the D.N.C. election was that the committee members totally brushed off a slew of national Democratic politicians—Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear—who endorsed Wikler, a guy who’d gained a national profile by winning tight elections in battleground Wisconsin. D.N.C. members didn’t care. The D.N.C. is a clubby and insular outfit, sure, with lifer activists who run the show instead of the politicians we see on the news. But the rejection of Wikler and his big-name allies suggested that members weren’t interested in heavy-handed advice from the party brahmins who got absolutely smoked by the G.O.P. last year. Even crusty D.N.C. members were saying no thanks to the same old voices that lead the party, which, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, now has a favorable rating of just 31 percent, its lowest in almost 20 years.
So, if not Martin, who will actually usher the Democrats back into power? It’s obviously way too early to tell, but in times like these, a political party’s red-rimmed eyes often turn to the states, where ambitious governors like to brag about how their state is “a laboratory of invention” and how they just do things differently than their colleagues in Washington. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is one of them. After lying low, like many Democrats, during the first week of Trump 2.0, Pritzker launched an all-out media blitz attacking the president after he signed an executive order pausing federal spending and temporarily freezing Illinois’ Medicaid portal. With other governors mostly hanging back and carefully picking their battles, Pritzker has suddenly emerged as one of Trump’s loudest critics within the Democratic Party, and an all-but-certain presidential candidate in 2028.
I talked to Pritzker by phone over the weekend about how to respond to Trump’s culture wars, why Democrats lost in 2024, how the party should reckon with the popularity of Trump’s immigration crackdown, and more. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
“An Onslaught Against the Things that We Hold Most Dear”
Peter Hamby: For the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency, a lot of prominent Democrats have seemed to be lying low. Maybe they’re cowed, or timid, or maybe they’re just unsure how to shadowbox an incoming president who won an unambiguous victory. But after Trump’s executive order freezing federal spending, you came out swinging pretty hard. And you’ve ramped that up even more since Trump tied the plane crash over Reagan National to D.E.I. What’s motivating you here?
J.B. Pritzker: These people have no idea what average working Americans are going through. They’re sitting in some room with the culture warriors coming up with lines that they can throw out there that might incite people, but they have no idea. I mean, people really are suffering. They need higher wages, they need lower costs. These are things [Republicans] articulated during the campaign better than Democrats did. And now here we are, nearly two weeks into the Trump administration, and they’ve thrown everything out there to cause a lot of chaos, but nothing that actually benefits working people. They started with having the wealthiest people in America sitting in the front row as he’s taking the oath of office. And I think that tells you everything you need to know.
Remember: He hired a bunch of these Project 2025 types, who actually worked for Heritage Foundation. They don’t know how to run the government. They have ideas that they think will work. They have radical right-wing, crazy thoughts about how they should remake America. The reality is that those things—some of ’em are unconstitutional, many are illegal—but they don’t actually know how to effectuate things that help people. In the meantime, underlying a lot of it is the taking away of people’s civil rights, and that’s dangerous.
Give me a specific example of how they’re taking away civil rights.
Well, how about the fight to protect people’s individual rights, whether you’re LGBTQ or you’re Black or you’re Latino? I mean, birthright citizenship—how about that for an example? It’s a basic civil right, a constitutional right, and we know his order is unconstitutional. By the way, what Republicans say about it is, Well yeah, we know it’s unconstitutional, but it’s the right idea. Wait a minute!
With Democrats, it feels like there is a leadership vacuum that needs to be filled. You were one of the few Dem governors to come out and condemn the January 6th pardons and clemencies, pretty loudly. But otherwise, it feels like Democrats are being very cautious right now, and there’s room for someone out there to fill the leadership vacuum.
Let me begin by saying I was governor in the last two years of the last Trump administration, so I have lived through how to protect our state in the context of a president who wants to take people’s freedoms away and doesn’t give a damn about average everyday working Americans. And of course, at the beginning of Covid, we literally had to protect people’s lives from what they were doing in Washington. So I bring that to the fight.
I don’t know why anybody doesn’t understand that, in his first administration, Trump came in with all of his crazy ideas, but tried to hire people to run the government who were sort of in the Republican Party and had some experience running things. This time, everybody knew if he won, he was going to put in only the most loyal people, the biggest MAGA advocates, and they’re going to be in charge of everything. And guess what’s happening? Project 2025, which he said he disavowed, that’s exactly the playbook they’re following. It is going to be an onslaught against the things that we hold most dear. Fighting for working-class Americans and the most vulnerable. Did you not know that he was coming after Medicaid? Of course he was!
So look, I really believe that Americans are being lied to. They were lied to during his campaign about what he was all about here. Does corporate America need a tax cut from 24 percent to 15 percent? Doesn’t a working family need the tax cut? And all the things that he wants to cut—Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, programs that support police—all those things he wants to cut, why is he doing it? Because he wants to give a massive tax cut to Elon Musk and the wealthiest Americans.
The Message
All those things you just said to me—personal freedoms, healthcare, tax cuts for the middle class, that Republicans were against labor—Democrats made those arguments in the campaign, and it didn’t land. Why did Trump win the economic argument? Why did he win?
We Democrats need to be clear. Our policies are not off. Our message was off in the 2024 election.
How, though?
Well, probably because the president of the United States decided to run for reelection and then decided, after all the primaries were over, not to run for reelection. And in 108 days, we had to try to elect somebody that, frankly, people really didn’t know. That’s not a criticism, that’s just the fact of being a vice president. So, in a hundred days, you had to introduce her and convince people that she’s going to fight for them. And then overcome the Republican messaging that had been around for several years, that it was about inflation and immigration. It was a terrible environment—in 108 days, a near impossibility to overcome the Republican messaging.
Our message needs to be very clear. We are fighting for working-class Americans. We are fighting for the most vulnerable people. We think that Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security should be protected for your grandmother, and we think that your children should have the opportunity to go to a good Head Start program so that you can go to work. Those are simple ideas. How about raising wages? We’re for raising the minimum wage, they are not. That is a simple idea. We should have been saying that for 108 days straight.
I did that here in Illinois. My very first year in office, we raised the minimum wage from $8.25 to $15. We have the highest minimum wage in the Midwest. And I did that because people can’t afford to live on $8.25 or $7.25, the federal minimum wage. How on earth can anybody survive on that? And guess what? Corporate America can afford to pay people a wage that they can live on. Even $30,000 with $15 an hour isn’t quite enough, but it’s at least a hell of a lot better than it used to be.
Several of Trump’s executive orders on immigration have majority support in polling. Deporting undocumented people who’ve committed crimes is very popular, for one. Declaring an emergency at the border, whatever that means, is very popular. Democrats have lost the argument on immigration since the Obama years, when it was about comprehensive reform, when the party’s immigration rhetoric was about a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but also respecting the law and getting in line. Why was it so hard for Democrats to say out loud in the Biden years that there was a problem at the border? No mainstream Democrat wanted to say it!
Look, every time I stand up and talk about immigration, I start with: I do not want violent criminals who are undocumented in my state, nor do I think they should be in this country. Let’s take violent criminals who’ve been convicted, who are undocumented, and throw ’em out of the country. They don’t deserve to be here. That’s number one.
Number two, we need comprehensive immigration reform. Number three, someone who has been here for 5, 10, 20, 30 years—and I know people like this, who are undocumented—they’re law-abiding and they’re paying their taxes and they have families we should be protecting. Aren’t those the people we want in our country? They’re already here. How about if we give them a path to staying in the country legally, and citizenship?
Why can’t we as Democrats say all that? Comprehensive immigration reform. Border security. You know, [Arizona Senator] Ruben Gallego said it well. He said, If you don’t have a secure border, you don’t have a country. Let’s have a secure border. But let’s also have real immigration. We want people to come here and work.
One other thing I should say: 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies in this country were founded by immigrants or their children. 46 percent. The economy is dependent upon the entrepreneurship, the ingenuity, and the hard work of immigrants. We have that advantage in the world. We’re used to immigration. We believe in immigration. You can’t walk down the street anywhere and not run into people who look different than you, maybe have a slight accent or come from a different place. They can’t do immigration in Japan. And guess what’s happening? Birth rates are falling in all these wealthy countries. You need immigration to do well, and we should take advantage of our big advantage in the world.
Yet Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite. It will hurt our economy and it is hurting people across the country. Let’s throw the violent criminals who are undocumented out. Let’s keep the people who are law-abiding and working and paying taxes.
Breaking the Cycle
Part of your brand is talking about kitchen table issues, wages, helping working families—topics that are pretty much Democratic dogma. But again, Republicans won on the economy last year. And now that he’s back in the White House, Trump swallows every news cycle with culture-war topics and attacks and jokes and endless outrage bait. How in the world can Democrats offer a contrast message against Trump on middle-class issues in this attention economy?
How about simple, clear answers? We want to raise wages for middle-class, working-class Americans. That’s a very simple message. We want to lower costs. They want to lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Their actions prove that they don’t want to lower costs. Have you seen anything about lowering costs in these first few days, with hundreds of memos and executive orders? Nothing. Right? It’s all the culture wars they’re attacking on. Give me a break. D.E.I. is the cause of an aviation collision? This is a distraction. That’s what they’re all about.
Let’s raise the minimum wage. That’s a simple message. Let’s make sure people get healthcare. Everybody deserves healthcare. We should win on that issue. We should win on wages. Look, you don’t have to talk about everything that they’re doing. But you do have to talk about basic rights, civil rights, and you have to talk about how to make people’s lives easier at the kitchen table. Make it easier for them to pay their bills, put their kids through college, and save for retirement. I think those are simple things. You can pick a few of those if you think that’s too many topics, but that’s what we should be talking about. That’s what I’ve been executing on. Literally. I mean, we eliminated the grocery tax in our state. That’s simple. How about that as a way to lower people’s costs when they go to the grocery store? You haven’t heard any of that from Donald Trump.
Glenn Youngkin, a Republican governor in my home state, Virginia, did that too. Okay, last question before you go. Chicago sports hot seat. Is Caleb Williams a bust?
All right. I’m not going into that. Great to talk to you. Bye.