On February 21st, 2025, Tristin Amezcua-Hogan, The Labor Beacon’s Editor-In-Chief, sat down with the new national Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin for a short, but wide-ranging, conversation about organized labor, working-people, Latino and AAPI voters, pizza in Lawrence, Kansas, and the future of the Democratic Party. The interview was conducted just outside of Bartolino’s Osteria, a unionized restaurant in St. Louis, Missouri. Missouri Democratic Party Chair Russ Carnahan also joined the conversation. Except where explicitly noted, Tristin’s words are in bold and Ken’s are in regular font.
Tristin Amezcua-Hogan: Hey Ken, thanks for sitting down with The Labor Beacon. In Kansas City, we are excited about the loud focus you’ve placed on putting working-people and union members at the forefront of the Democratic Party’s mission moving forward and are looking forward to this conversation. To get things started, we wanted to do some rapid fire, thumbs up or thumbs down questions.
Ken Martin: Sounds good to me.
Prevailing Wage?
Thumbs up!
The PRO Act?
Thumbs up!
So-called “right-to-work” laws?
Right-to-work is a thumbs down.
What about Pizza Shuttle in Lawrence?
Oh, wow. Thumbs up!
Do you still remember the phone number?
842-1212!
That’s right. It’s a great jingle.
Is it still five dollars a pizza? It was when I was in college.
It’s still cheap, but I don’t think it’s five dollars.
It was like five dollars for a nice sized pizza and I would always get the pepperoni jalapeno.
Are you a cream cheese guy?
If I was being decadent!
Okay, time for us to get serious.
You’ve been a card-carrying union member from a construction trades union for almost two decades now. Like me, though, your union card comes from doing staff work. Neither of us have ever picked up tools. I’m a member of the Laborers and you’re a Carpenter. But the work you did, the work was advancing prevailing wage ordinances across the state of Minnesota, making a real difference for working people. What did you learn from your time doing that work and what does that union card mean to you?
Well, first off, the union card means a lot to me because I come from a union family. You know, my, uh, grandfather was head of the letter carriers there. My brother is a union carpenter who does work with his tools. My sister is a union nurse and, you know, if it wasn’t for the unions I don’t believe that my family would have made it, right? My mom was 15 years old when she had me. She raised four kids by herself and, you know, it was the labor movement and the union that helped bring us from poverty into the middle class. And so, it is personal. It means a lot to me. It, also, means a lot to me because I know what unions represent, which is hardworking men and women who are building this country, right? And I mean literally building this country. I also want to acknowledge the aspirations of workers who aren’t in a union, but who want to be in a union and want to be protected.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing from some major legacy publications regarding a perceived rightward shift in union members, but the Center for American Progress and other outlets have reported that union members as a whole actually shifted toward Harris in 2024. But simultaneously, union members are making up a smaller and smaller portion of the American workforce. What is the Democratic Party’s plan to not only improve its vote share with organized labor, but to improve its vote share with the much larger contingent of non-union workers? How will the DNC center working-people under your term?
Yeah, I mean, let me start with the union voters first, which is, I believe you are correct. I mean, I don’t think there was a rightward shift there. In fact, we saw Vice President Harris do, overall, pretty well with union members themselves, right? And again, there’s probably a difference between the building trades and the public sector employee unions, but the reality is that overall Vice President Harris did much better with unions. And so, I think that’s important.
Next, is the fact that what has given a renaissance to the union movement right now is young people. Young people who are overwhelmingly in support of unions and joining unions at record levels. And so for us, the rebirth of the union movement requires us to really channel a lot of that energy amongst young people who want to be in a union in places that they can’t and make sure that they can.
In terms of the larger question about how we get back working-people, and I think this is important and also applies to union members, I think unions represent right now about 10% of the workforce nationwide and we were at, you know, 30 years ago at maybe 20% of the workforce. It has slid quite dramatically in a short period of time. So part of what we need to do, obviously to reverse that trend, is to make sure that we tackle these so-called right-to-work laws. We have to be fighting back against them. We need to win elections so that we can repeal them. That way we can allow those people who want to be able to organize and unionize to do just that.
To appeal to those voters, right now, as I’ve said, the perceptions of the two political parties have changed, right? Last spring, there was research that showed for the first time in American history, the majority of Americans believed that the Republican party best represents the interests of the working-class and the poor, with Democratic party representing the party of the wealthy and the elites. And sure enough, the only two groups we over performed with last year were wealthy households and college educated owners. That’s not who we are as a party, and so what this moment requires is for us to get back to our roots, right? And that means really focusing on an economic agenda, on a working-class agenda that gives people a sense of who we are, right? From blue-collar workers to other workers that we’re fighting for them and that we haven’t forgotten about their struggles, right? The largest percentage of workers and blue-collar workers are not in a union, and they’re falling even further behind! They’re feeling like they can’t get ahead. They are working two, three, jobs. They can barely afford their groceries. They can barely afford their rent. They can barely afford the things that keep them alive, much less anything on top of that, right? Like a vacation or the ability to send their kids to college or to, you know, just save for retirement. These are the things that are impacting working-class families on a daily basis. For us to get back to blue-collar voters and get them to vote for Democrats, we have to acknowledge the economic pain that they’re facing and focus on an agenda that gives them the sense that we are going to actually do something to improve their lives.
Well, staying on the topic of 2024, what do YOU think went wrong in 2024 and what is your work for the party going to do to address the Democratic Party’s previous shortcomings?
Well, it’s such a good question, a big question. I would say this: there’s a lot we’re still learning from this election and we have to spend some time in a post-election review to understand why we lost ground with almost every part of our coalition, right? As I mentioned, Latino voters, women voters, working-class households, young voters, uh, across the board, we lost ground with almost every part of our coalition and so for us to really understand that, uh, we have this take a little bit of time in a post election review to look at the how and why we lost ground with those communities.
I would say, generally, that one area we missed the boat in is how we communicate. Not necessarily the message itself, although that’s part of it, but it’s where we’re messaging, and, again, hindsight is always 2020, but in this case, the Republican party and Trump did a much better job of meeting voters where they’re at with information. You know they were on podcasts, streaming services, gaming services, online media and non-traditional information spaces that the Democratic Party really wasn’t competing in until way too late in the cycle. and so, for three years, the Republican party beat the hell out of Joe Biden and the Democrats and we weren’t anywhere to be found. Then we came in and tried to re-up our communications infrastructure in the last year and at that point in some ways, we were already too late. They had already defined us before we defined ourselves. We can’t allow that to happen again.We have to start the campaign now, we have to be messaging all the time to voters, and we have to be organizing all the time to voters. We can’t just show up in the final three months of an election and the first conversation we have face-to-face with the voter is asking them to vote for the candidate and the party, right?
So there’s a lot more to, you know, what happened this last election. I want to be careful about making sure that I draw the right lessons, not the wrong lessons from this election, but I will say that we have a lot of work to do. That said, this was a very close election.
114,000 votes in 3 battleground states and we would be having a different conversation right now. 7,200 votes in three battleground congressional districts and Hakeem Jeffries would be the speaker, so it’s important to note that, while it certainly felt like a gut punch, it was a very close election. This was not a mandate or a landslide for Donald Trump.
Here is a thing we’ve been talking about a lot: Missouri as a state is only like 5 or 6 percent Latino, you know, while Kansas is almost 14%.. in Kansas City in particular, about 1 in 10 voters is Latino. What do you think the Democratic party can do to connect with working-class Latino voters, particularly with Latino men?
Yeah, I mean, here’s what I would say is we know we lost significant ground with Latino men. It was a big swing, as you know, and we lost ground with the Latino community overall, including Latino women. But Latino men, we have a lot of work to do there. Again, I want to understand why we lost ground there. You know, the how and why really matters at this point. So before I can be too prescriptive with what we need to do moving forward, we have to understand why we lost ground and part of that is, uh, really digging in to everything from our ad spend, our organizing tactics, our outreach, and which groups were responsible for turning out the Latino community. We are looking at it holistically, what we did last year, and what we danced to really get at this question of how we win Latino men specifically back.
So I wish I had the answer for you now, but need to say that it is a real challenge and it’s also an opportunity, because I do think that with so many of these groups that have been a historic part of our coalition, their values are still aligned with us, but for whatever reason they’re not voting for our party’s candidates anymore. I’ll give you an example, since we’re in Missouri, and I use this everywhere I go. In Missouri, last year in November, they passed a minimum wage increase with paid family leave and abortion protections, all by wide margins, right? Yet, those same voters went down the ballot and a number of them, a majority of them, voted for Donald Trump and the Republicans, right? So people are supporting our policies that we support and champion, but they’re not translating it to our candidates and to our party. To me, that’s not a policy problem. There are people out there saying we need to come up with a new policy agenda or new policy prescriptions. No. Many of these issues we champion as Democrats are passing as initiative and referenda throughout this country by wide margins, right? So we have to do a better job of messaging that it’s a Democratic party that’s the ones that are championing these policies and connecting them back to our candidates, our party, and then, of course, our policies back to the voters. When we do that, I think we can again continue to make ground and get back those voters who’ve left us. There’s a lot more to it, right, we have to learn.
Ken Martin to Russ Carnahan, Chair of the Missouri Democratic Party: Russ, what do you think?
Russ Carnahan: Yeah, no, it’s not just that Democrats are champions of those issues. Republicans have fought them every step of the way. So, we’ve got to connect those dots and we have a big opportunity between now and the next midterm to go on offense, because the Republicans not only trying to undo the initiatives that the voters just passed, they are also trying to weaken the actual voter rights to vote on initial petitions themselves, which are very popular rights in Missouri to be able to vote on those issues, and they want to water those rights down to where it’s difficult, or impossible even, to do that again. And so I welcome that fight and that comparison that Democrats are gonna champion, you know, protecting those voter rights.
Ken Martin: You know, one last thing I would say on the Latino community that is not just a lesson of this last election, but one that I’ve seen for some time is that we cannot treat the Latino community as a monolith, right? There’s a big difference between Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans, right? There’s also a big difference between Mexican Americans that are third generation and those that are first generation. There’s a difference between Mexican Americans in Dallas and Mexican Americans at the border. Yet, our party and candidates for many years have sort of treated that community as a monolith. We have to be much more specific in recognizing how diverse that community is and then message appropriately within the community. Same with the AAPI community, right? So diverse and huge, and there’s over 70 different languages spoken in the AAPI community, yet we sort of treat it as one community. We have to be better than that.
Is that an endorsement of the DNC doing more language outreach moving forward?
Absolutely. And you know, think about this regarding the voter file: We previously did not break down the country of origin, where someone is from, right? What we break down is, well, that this person is Latino, this one is AAPI, right? We have to get more specific so we can actually reflect that in our organizing tactics and, also, our communications tactics. We need to be more culturally specific, so that we reach them in the ways that are intended. So for me, that is one lesson that we learned in this, and that we absolutely have to take away from many years of elections now, is that we cannot treat these vast diverse communities as one.
About Ken Martin:
Ken Martin is the new chair of the Democratic Party, a former labor organizer, and a card-carrying union member. He proudly identifies as a pro-labor progressive. He argues that the party needs to communicate its message more effectively and resonate with voters on a personal level.
He is a graduate of the University of Kansas and previously served as the Chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party. Ken made the DFL what it is today — an all-day, year-round party dedicated to organizing communities, empowering the grassroots, electing progressive candidates, and improving the lives of Minnesotans.
Given his success as the DFL Party Chairman, Ken was elected by his peers across the country to serve as the President of the Association of State Democratic Committees in 2017, where he worked with state and local party committees to build permanent, long-lasting political infrastructure so they can elect candidates from the school board to the Oval Office.
Before his election as Chairman, Ken spent two decades working with progressive candidates and causes. He played key leadership roles on various campaigns, including Dayton for Governor in 2010, Hatch for Governor in 2006, Kerry for President in 2004, Humphrey for Secretary of State in 2002, and Gore for President in 2000. Ken led the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment campaign in 2008, which dedicated funding to the arts, environment, conservation, and parks and trails in Minnesota. It is the largest conservation finance measure in the nation to ever become law.
Ken and his wife, Jennifer O’Rourke, live in Eagan, Minnesota with their two sons.
Tristin Amezcua-Hogan is the Editor of The Labor Beacon and a member of LIUNA Local 264. Tristin also serves as the Director of Communications for the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO and the Chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.
Tristin grew up as the son of a UA Local 669 member in Tecumseh, KS and the great-nephew of George C. Amis, longtime leader of the United Rubberworkers (now USW Local 307) in Kansas. Growing up in rural Kansas as the child of teen parents, Tristin quickly came to appreciate the life-changing benefit of a union job.
Tristin and his partner, Rebeca Amezcua-Hogan, are residents of the Westside, Kansas City, MO's historic Mexican neighborhood. They are proud members of Kansas City's New Reform Temple.
