For two months as he campaigned for Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin worked methodically through a call sheet of the committee’s 448 members, sometimes on the phone for as long as an hour, even two hours, at a time, often until 10 p.m.

It was the kind of exhaustive, behind-the-scenes operative work Martin knew best from his time leading Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the Association of State Democratic Parties, where he built a reputation as a mild-mannered tactician with a Midwestern work ethic.

But it was another side of Martin — what one DNC member, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called his ability to be a “knife-fighter” — that Democrats and their new chair himself on Saturday appeared to embrace.

“Minnesota nice has two sides: Minnesota nice is a pleasant, earnest ability to engage with people publicly, and it is also a private ruthlessness and a coldness that only comes when you’ve lived in 10-degree-below weather half your life,” said John Bisognano, who worked with Martin at the ASDC and now serves as the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Ken will cut you if he has to, but that ruthlessness is what we need to achieve electoral success.”

Martin looked to cement that image in his first remarks to the press as chair on Saturday, after defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, who had the backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“I’ve always viewed my role as a chair of the Democratic Party to take the low road, so my candidates and elected officials can take the high road, meaning, I’m going to throw a punch,” Martin said.

He suggested, implicitly, that he would be a departure from the party’s previous chair, Jaime Harrison, telling reporters, “This is a new DNC” and that “we’re taking the gloves off.”

That kind of combativeness may be necessary for Martin, as he stares down a void in leadership and direction for his party. Democrats enter 2025 deflated, locked out of power in Washington after losing ground nearly everywhere in November. But the party’s setbacks may also elevate Martin’s role within it. As Democrats look to reassert themselves in Donald Trump’s second term — and without a Democrat in the White House to shape the party’s message — Martin will play a significant role in setting the terms of the 2028 presidential primary, from its debate qualifications to its nominating calendar.

He also committed to publicly releasing a post-mortem on the 2024 election, something the DNC did not do after its loss in 2016.

But Martin doesn’t come out of the DNC chair race unscathed.

“Yes, he’s a knife-fighter, but the problem is, a lot of people in this room feel like that knife is in their backs,” said a second DNC member who didn’t support Martin. “He won the job, but he didn’t necessarily win everyone’s trust.”

Wikler, who super-charged the Wisconsin Democratic Party, was described by some DNC members as a reformer who could turn the DNC into a more powerful and well-funded institution. A former podcast host himself, Wikler was also seen by some as a more forceful messenger. Martin, said a third DNC member who also backed Wikler and granted anonymity to speak candidly, brings “institutional knowledge,” but is “part of the same group of people who have always been here, who don’t want to leave the room, and who haven’t yet made it better.”

“We are so bound up by people whose only quest for relevance is the DNC title,” the member added.

Even Martin’s supporters acknowledge that he’s been working toward becoming DNC chair “for years,” as Ray Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic Party chair, put it — from his appearances at obscure party meetings and tasteless fundraising dinners to his campaigning across 40 states during the last election cycle.

“He knows the machine. He literally understands all of the levers, all the ways the resources move, all the relationships with people who make it move,” said Ron Harris, a DNC member from Minnesota.

And, Harris noted, “He knows where the bodies are buried.”

Given that deep knowledge, Martin has, at times, been a pain for top leadership and staffers at the DNC, who squared off with Martin in 2018 during several intraparty squabbles over control of voter data — a valuable asset that’s primarily held by state parties. At the time, then-Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez accused Martin, by name, of undermining the DNC by not keeping other state party chairs “in the loop” of the negotiations.

In those negotiations, Martin “threw up every block imaginable to keep the party from basic modernizing in order to keep their lists, even though Republicans were already way ahead of us at the time,” said an operative who was involved in the discussions at the time and given anonymity to discuss private conversations. “I would hope that he brings that same loyalty to his new constituency, a broader constituency, that he now has as chair.”

Buckley, a former ASDC president, saw it differently. “There are establishment folks in the party that are still not over the fact that Ken pushed back,” Buckley said. “They’re not used to getting pushed back.”

“He’s turned the ASDC into a force that now has a much bigger seat at the table when we sit down to advocate for our states in front of the DNC,” said Mike Schmuhl, chair of the Indiana Democratic Party. “This is his life’s work, and he’s been working on this for years.”

Some of Martin’s intensity, his backers said, comes from his own childhood — the son of a single mom who had him at 15 years old.

“We were in and out of shelters. We knew what poverty felt like. We saw what she sacrificed to make sure we could have a warm dinner most nights,” Martin said in his speech to DNC members on Saturday. “Because my mom gave a damn about me and because my community gave a damn about my family, it meant we had a chance.”

Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, another Martin ally, said Martin “really had to learn how to rely on himself through struggle, and I think that that does come through in his personality of leadership.”

Martin came up in politics as a Minnesota political staffer in 1998, when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura and his Reform Party won the governorship and Democrats notched less than a third of the statewide vote. By the time he became the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 2011, Democrats had only just started to reassert themselves electorally. But the party itself was in shambles — and in debt. Martin plotted a 10-year rebuilding plan that put the DFL back at the center of the Democratic ecosystem.

“He ran the DFL with an iron fist, was very impressive,” said a Democratic strategist, also granted anonymity to discuss Martin candidly. “He’s like Stalin, and I say that as a compliment.”

Now, Martin faces another party at a deficit. But some Democrats are not convinced he’ll be able to pull off the same rebrand. Of particular concern, they said, was a frustrated donor class, many of whom preferred Wikler.

“The delegates wanted Ken, and that must be completely respected. It wasn’t a close race,” said one Democratic donor adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “However, the donors wanted Ben, and they will make the delegates and the new chair painfully aware of that fact over the course of the next four years.”

Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.