Democrats choose a political operator from Minnesota as their next leader.

The committee raises tens of millions of dollars every year and can help set the tone of the party. It provides infrastructure and financial support for down-ballot candidates in off years before building an operation for a presidential nominee.

Mr. Martin captured the chairmanship on the strength of his yearslong relationships with party members, whose affection he won by promising to focus more on their concerns than past leaders have.

In his victory speech, Mr. Martin touched on a theme that Democrats hit throughout the weekend — that Mr. Trump was aligned with his billionaire supporters rather than with the American people.

“Are we on the side of the robber baron, the ultrawealthy billionaire, the oil and gas polluter, the union buster?” Mr. Martin asked. “Or are we on the side of the American working family, the small-business owner, the farmer, the immigrant and the students?”

He described the early days of the Trump administration as “what happens when amateur hour meets demolition derby.”

Mr. Martin defeated seven other candidates, including his top rival, Ben Wikler, the energetic chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Mr. Wikler’s base of support came from the party’s biggest donors and institutional players in Washington, including Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House speaker.

Mr. Martin won comfortably, with 246.5 votes to Mr. Wikler’s 134.5.

Late Friday, Mr. Wikler disclosed that his financial backers had included the billionaire Reid Hoffman and George Soros’s political action committee, both of which gave him $250,000.

Mr. Martin inherits a diminished party whose brand has suffered from its losses in 2024. A recent poll from Quinnipiac University showed that just 31 percent of voters viewed the Democratic Party favorably, a record low, while 43 percent saw the Republican Party favorably, more than ever before. And in the last four years, during President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term and the tenure of the previous D.N.C. chairman, Jaime Harrison, Democrats have lost control of the White House, the Senate and the House.

While Mr. Martin portrayed himself as a disrupter who would upend the D.N.C.’s longstanding relationships with Washington consultants, he was in fact the race’s party insider. He founded, and for years has led, the organization of Democratic state chairs, an alternate power center within the party. The group, which has often pushed for more money for state parties, emerged as an annoyance — or worse — to top D.N.C. officials in Washington who were more focused on winning national elections than on local politics.

Still, Mr. Martin’s connections prevailed.

“Ken knows that we need to reach out to Americans in every state and every county, no matter how red or how blue, and he will do exactly that as our new chair of the D.N.C.,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement. “I’m excited to work with him to strengthen our party and win elections.”

The vote came after a day of in-person jockeying at the same convention center in National Harbor, Md., that has traditionally hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Wikler and Mr. Martin both had sponsored hospitality suites, and hosted kickoff drinks and small bites for supporters.

Mr. Martin will take over a party apparatus with stable finances after its defeat to Mr. Trump last year but without an obvious national leader or a consistent message to voters. When Mr. Trump ascended to the White House eight years ago, angry Democrats marched in the streets by the millions, flooding campaigns and liberal causes with donations meant to push back against the administration.

That is not the case this time.

Still, throughout the campaign for party chair, Mr. Martin and Mr. Wikler both insisted that little was wrong with Democrats’ overall message: that they are the party of working people while Mr. Trump and Republicans align with billionaire moguls.

During a final candidate forum on Thursday in Washington, Mr. Wikler drew rousing applause for defending former Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance as a candidate. Mr. Martin also argued that Democrats did not need to change their message to voters.

“Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” he said. “We got the right message.”

Other candidates included former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, who entered Saturday in a distant third behind Mr. Martin and Mr. Wikler among D.N.C. members who had publicly declared their support. He received 44 votes.

Faiz Shakir, who was the campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, made a late entry into the race with an argument that the existing candidates were engaging in small-ball thinking. He won only two votes.

As is typical for D.N.C. elections, the race also attracted a few gadflies, including Marianne Williamson, the two-time presidential candidate. They were allowed to participate in the party’s online and in-person candidate forums and to deliver speeches to the national committee members who gathered on Saturday at a hotel in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital.

But by and large, they added little to the party’s discussion about how to proceed. Ms. Williamson ended up endorsing Mr. Martin in her nominating speech on Saturday.

Martin suggested, as he has before, that he would take a very pugilistic approach to his role as D.N.C. chair. He said his philosophy would be to “take the low road so my candidates can take the high road.”

The vote at the D.N.C.’s winter meeting capped a monthslong race that focused on party mechanics and messaging, rather than on sharp ideological or establishment-versus-activist fights that have characterized other party leadership contests.

Mr. Martin handily defeated his closest rival, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, with help from his deep relationships across the committee, especially his strong support among state party chairs.

Now, Mr. Martin must unite and lead a party that is locked out of power in Washington, scrambling to mount pushback to President Trump and confronting a challenging Senate map in 2026.

Here are five things to know about the new D.N.C. chairman:

He leans into his modest Midwestern roots.

Mr. Martin, 51, is the son of a single mother and the first child in his family, he has said, to earn a college degree, graduating from the University of Kansas.

He is a Minneapolis native and a married father of two sons who speaks with a Minnesota accent and sometimes reaches for hockey clichés to talk about expanding the Democratic map. (“Skate where the puck will be, not where the puck is.”)

Much like Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the unsuccessful 2024 vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Martin has emphasized the need to connect with the working-class voters who have increasingly drifted from his party, sometimes invoking Trump-supporting relatives like his brother, a union carpenter, to describe the splintering coalition.

“I don’t rub elbows with billionaires or Hollywood elites, I rub elbows with working people in union halls, on picket lines, at civil rights marches and at protests,” Mr. Martin said at a recent candidate forum. “I’m running for chair because that’s what the next D.N.C. will look like when I’m the next chairman. That’s who we’re fighting for.”

State chairs love him. Other prominent Democrats preferred his opponent.

Mr. Martin is a party insider who knows his way around the D.N.C.

He has led his state party since 2011 and is a vice chairman of the national party. He also leads the Association of State Democratic Committees, a body that lobbies for state parties within the national committee — and a power center that has irritated other D.N.C. officials, but one that his allies see as a sign of his strengths.

“He has built power within the D.N.C. by building relationships with state party chairs,” said Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat. “What that demonstrates is that he is going to trust people who are closest to the ground, closest to the voters, closest to the work.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Mr. Martin’s focus on state parties showed his interest in competing everywhere.

“What he will do nationally is focus on keeping our blue states strong, but also making sure our purple states — which, of course, didn’t happen last time — go blue and the red states go purple,” she said. “That’s part of what he’s been doing with talking about building up these state parties and making sure we’re hitting every area.”

But if Mr. Martin had strong support among the party chairs and vice chairs who are voting members of the D.N.C., it was Mr. Wikler, a powerhouse fund-raiser accustomed to competing in a far more competitive battleground state, who attracted splashier endorsements from elected officials across the party as well as from major donors like the billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Now, Mr. Martin — who did have notable endorsements, from figures including Mr. Walz and Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina — will need all the support he can get as he tries to help his party reset.

In Minnesota, he is seen as a turnaround artist.

Minnesota has not supported a Republican presidential nominee since Richard M. Nixon carried the state in 1972.

But Mr. Martin, who got his start in politics as an intern on Paul Wellstone’s 1990 Senate campaign — and became a disciple of the Democrat’s emphasis on grass-roots organizing — has navigated many competitive races up and down the ballot.

He encountered a beleaguered organization in debt when he assumed the chairmanship of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the state party is formally known, and is credited with turning its fortunes around.

“He gets a lot of credit, not only for that, but for keeping it going the long haul, even in elections where not as many seats are on the ballot,” Ms. Klobuchar said.

During his tenure, his party has not lost a statewide race, his team notes, though the elections last fall were challenging for Democrats in Minnesota and across the country.

He also has experience holding together a fractious coalition that spans the ideological spectrum, from deeply progressive activists in the Twin Cities to at least some moderate voters in rural parts of the state.

“It’s hard to knock what he’s done” from a tactical standpoint, said Amy Koch, the former Republican majority leader in the Minnesota State Senate. “He’s been able to keep a really divergent coalition of Democrats together.”

He will have his work cut out for him on the national stage, where Democrats are divided over what went wrong in 2024, how to fix their party — and how deep their problems run.

He’s more behind-the-scenes strategist than flashy party spokesman.

Mr. Martin is known more as a party tactician than a pithy television pundit — and that, he has suggested, is how it should be.

His party, he said at a candidate forum in Detroit, has a “very deep bench” of messengers, from governors and members of Congress to local officials.

“We have to tap into the rich, rich, rich diversity of elected officials we have throughout this country who are actually delivering on our party values right now,” he said. “The D.N.C. chair is just one spokesperson.”

During the D.N.C. race, Mr. Wikler was often regarded as the more engaging speaker. When he appeared on “The Daily Show” and began to speak passionately about what he saw as injustice, Jon Stewart, the host, couldn’t stop interrupting him.

“Oh, my God,” Mr. Stewart interjected at one point. “I’m getting excited.”

Still, Mr. Martin has plenty of experience speaking with the news media. And during the Detroit forum, he alluded to another role he might try to play as chairman: attack dog.

In Minnesota, he said, he saw his job as seeking to define the Republicans, an effort to free up Democratic candidates to “take the high road.”

“I will throw the punches so they don’t have to, and we will go on the offense against Donald Trump,” he said. “That’s the role that I will play as spokesperson.”

And, he promised, “I will also be the organizer in chief.”

His win was not about ideology.

Sometimes, races for state and national chair positions offer revealing insights about the ideological direction in which a party is heading, or serve as proxy fights in broader clashes between activists and the establishment.

Not so in this year’s race.

While Mr. Martin calls himself a “pro-labor progressive” and cites the populist Mr. Wellstone as an inspiration, he and Mr. Wikler both promised a “big tent” approach and drew endorsements from both left-leaning and more moderate officials.

And Mr. Martin has cast himself as a pragmatist focused above all on winning.

“I’m not here to win the argument,” he said recently on MSNBC. “I’m here to win elections.”

The purpose of a political party, he added, is “to build the infrastructure to not only win the upcoming election but to build long-term power.”

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Biden repeated a message from his farewell address that Democrats across the party have echoed over the last two weeks. “Today an oligarchy’s taking shape in America,” he said.

Nate Snyder, another candidate who had no demonstrable support, concluded his nomination speech by withdrawing from the race. He also endorsed Ken Martin.

Outside the ornate Georgetown hall where eight candidates lined up for their final forum before the party picks a new leader tomorrow, Washington was lurching from crisis to crisis. Hours earlier, President Trump had stepped into the White House briefing room to suggest without evidence that diversity programs were to blame for the deadly air crash that killed 67 people. Federal employees were receiving new emails encouraging them to leave their jobs.

What was happening onstage, though, was hardly a deep reckoning with what Democrats did wrong to lock themselves out of power. In a race that has been marked more by the similarity of the front-runners — Ben from Wisconsin and Ken from Minnesota — than any serious clash over vision or ideology, this felt more like a gentle pep rally than soul-searching at the crossroads.

The candidates were quick to point their fingers at outside forces, like the influence of billionaires as well as the effect that racism and misogyny had on the chances of electing the nation’s first Black female president. They talked about Republicans’ dominant messaging operation and Democrats’ bad branding.

But when it came to evaluating the party’s own role in its failures, or promising a detailed look at what went wrong? Not so much.

“We’ve got the right message,” said Ken Martin, the leader of Minnesota’s Democratic Party, who is widely seen as the race’s top contender. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

The swiftness with which Mr. Trump has imposed his will on the government, and the nation, has only added urgency to the discussions, which are playing out in closed-door gatherings on Capitol Hill, at retreats for donors and strategists and in the intramural campaign culminating in this weekend’s election of the next leader of the Democratic National Committee.

Many loud voices in the party are demanding a reckoning, and a reinvention. But others envision less an overhaul than a wait-and-see approach, hoping to harness what they expect will be a backlash of public opinion against Mr. Trump’s ambitious White House agenda to capture the House of Representatives in 2026.

The divide does not fall neatly along ideological lines. Some of the most moderate and progressive Democrats alike are aligned in seeking a sharp course correction to reverse the party’s erosion of support, especially among working-class voters.

“We need deep changes and hard conversations, not nibbling around the margins,” said Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat who represents a swing district north of New York City and who outperformed the top of the ticket by one of the wider margins in the nation. “At the core, the brand is weakened to the point that, without members running against it in tough districts, we can’t get to a majority, which is structurally untenable.”

Democrats who share this bleaker outlook see statistical signs of the party’s decline everywhere: Blue states are ceding population to red states. Voter registration figures are mostly headed in the wrong direction. More Americans are identifying with the G.O.P. than with Democrats. And Democrats lost ground last year among core constituencies including lower-income, Latino and younger voters as Mr. Trump swept every battleground state.

Yet, there are a number of glass-half-full Democrats, too.

That more upbeat group tends to focus on the narrowness of the G.O.P.’s current 218-to-215-seat advantage in the House, the extraordinary circumstances of the 2024 race — Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt and Democrats switched nominees over the summer — and the fact that political pendulum swings are as common as they are predictable.

Almost no one is suggesting Democrats should simply stay the course. But the differing diagnoses of the party’s affliction could lead to wildly different treatment plans — on policy, on personnel and on political priorities. One early focus has been on whether the party’s message or its difficulties in delivering that message is more to blame.

Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, who served as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2024 and is staying on to oversee the party’s efforts to take the majority in 2026, noted that House Democrats “actually gained ground in 2024.” She blamed an unusual Republican redrawing of congressional maps in a single state last year for her party’s continued minority status.

“Except for North Carolina doing a gerrymander, we’d be in the majority,” she said of a remapping that prompted three Democratic incumbents to abandon hopes of re-election.

Others pointed to the relatively slim 1.5-percentage-point margin of Mr. Trump’s popular vote victory, and to the fact that Democrats won Senate races in four states that Mr. Trump carried — an unusually high number to split their ticket in the current hyperpartisan era.

“We know what an electoral mandate looks like for a president and his party, and it is not losing a House seat and losing four of the five swing-state Senate contests,” said Neera Tanden, who served in the White House for the last three Democratic presidents, including as director of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s domestic policy council.

“There is work the party needs to do to be more compelling with working-class people — on economic and security issues,” Ms. Tanden continued. “But Trump’s popular-vote margin was less than half Biden’s four years ago.”

Of course, parties that enter periods of soul-searching are often blind to what exactly they are looking for: Republicans famously ordered a political autopsy after their 2012 loss and recommended a rebranding that was, more or less, the opposite of the strident, strict approach to immigration that Mr. Trump used to return the party to power in 2016.

For Democrats, the recommendations could vary widely, given the range of groups making them: Dozens of congressional progressives recently met on Capitol Hill to settle on a message to counter Mr. Trump. A Democratic super PAC and nonprofit, American Bridge, is holding a retreat for its donors next month. And Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, is organizing a gathering in February to discuss how to “empower moderate and mainstream views and voices.”

Such air-clearing conversations are not happening in every corner of the party.

Top officials on the Kamala Harris campaign and the leaders of the leading super PAC that supported her, Future Forward, have not sat down since the election for a formal discussion of what went wrong in their multibillion-dollar spending blitz. Campaign finance law prohibited such conversations during the election, and tensions rose between the two sides.

Future Forward’s leadership reached out to suggest a summit of sorts on lessons learned, but such a gathering was declined by the Harris side, according to three people briefed on the outreach, though they said there had been some informal communications across the divide.

Some Democrats see the party’s losses in 2024 as more situational than systemic. They blame Mr. Biden for ignoring polling that showed the public was gravely troubled by his age, and for withdrawing so late and in such a politically weakened state that Ms. Harris effectively inherited his unpopularity without enough time to carve out a separate identity for herself.

“There were people who were just very unhappy with the incumbent administration, and all they needed to know about Harris was she worked with Biden,” said Jared Bernstein, who was the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers for Mr. Biden.

Mr. Bernstein warned against “over-interpretation” of the 2024 result, which he said aligned with a worldwide backlash against parties in power over inflation.

“It was largely a global anti-incumbency — in our case very much fueled by immigration and inflation,” he said. “We might have been able to overcome that had we been able to launch a compelling defense of pronouns versus paychecks. But we weren’t.”

The final result was Mr. Trump’s first popular-vote win in three tries, and only the second for a Republican since 1988. (The last was George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.)

“Nobody can say that this was a landslide — hell, I was Walter Mondale’s policy director in 1984, and I got buried under one,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But Mr. Galston said that focusing on the closeness of the popular vote masked unnerving movements beneath the surface, like Gallup data showing that more Americans have identified or leaned Republican than Democratic for three straight years. That had not been the case in a single year since 1991, when the G.O.P. had won the last three presidential elections.

Back then, when Democrats were in the wilderness, Mr. Galston and Elaine Kamarck, a longtime Democratic National Committee member, wrote a paper together called “The Politics of Evasion” — a critique of those who made excuses for the party’s electoral shortcomings, rather than facing up to serious problems — that became a manifesto for the party’s post-Reagan revival.

In 2022, the two, who are both fellows at Brookings, published a revised warning, prescribing a course of “reality therapy” to Democrats, including over the party’s “cultural bubble,” which they said put many in the party out of touch with less-educated or lower-income Americans.

Mr. Galston said he and Ms. Kamarck were getting “the band back together for the last time” to draft a post-2024 update.

“It makes sense to break the glass and pull the fire alarm,” he said of the party’s predicament.

Some Democrats have aimed a spotlight at the long-term erosion of voter registration in key states, which seemed to come due in 2024. In Pennsylvania, the most recent figures show the Democratic edge in the state at roughly 189,000 voters — down sharply from 916,000 when Mr. Trump carried the state in 2016, and from over 325,000 as recently as last October.

But Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Biden and Harris campaigns, urged her party to focus exclusively on solutions.

“We don’t even need to debate how deep the hole is,” she said. “What Democrats need to do is act like we’re in a very deep hole — and if it turns up, upon climbing out, we weren’t in a deep hole, then that’s spoils to us.”

Jaime Harrison, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee, has decided not to seek re-election. The party’s 448 committee members, who include party officials and politicians from across the country, are voting on his replacement on Saturday.

The post has long been considered among the worst in American politics, with a need to satisfy a broad range of donors, elected officials and interest groups, and a tendency to be blamed if things go awry.

The race is crowded. Eight people have enough support — 40 signatures — from D.N.C. members to qualify for the ballot.

Here’s a look at the Democrats running to lead their party, including two candidates who have emerged as leading contenders for the role.

Who are the front-runners?

Ken Martin

Mr. Martin, one of several vice chairs of the D.N.C., is also the longtime leader of Minnesota’s Democratic Party. The state’s governor, Tim Walz, has endorsed Mr. Martin’s candidacy.

Mr. Martin has an extensive track record in behind-the-scenes party leadership. He has led the state party in Minnesota since 2011 and became a national vice chair in 2017. He is also president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, which lobbies the national committee on behalf of the state parties.

Mr. Martin has expressed interest in having Democrats contest every race on every ballot across the country, something no party currently does. He recently told The Times that the party’s next leader would have an opportunity to “reimagine the D.N.C.” while “trying to get at what happened in this last election.”

Ben Wikler

Mr. Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party since 2019, joined the race in early December. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, backed him in January, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House speaker, later followed.

“Ben Wikler has what Democrats need right now — proven results,” Mr. Schumer said in a post on social media.

Mr. Wikler is a popular figure among Democrats in Wisconsin, a political battleground. Some Democrats credit him for helping Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the state in 2020, and for helping Gov. Tony Evers secure re-election in 2022. He formerly was a senior adviser at MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group.

In an interview with The New York Times in December, he declined to say whether he thought President Biden should have sought re-election and which state he believed should go first in the 2028 presidential primary.

“My platform in this race is unite, fight, win,” Mr. Wikler said. “Uniting starts not with recriminations but with reckoning and with curiosity and data. And then you use all that to inform the way that you fight the next battle.”

Who else is running?

Martin O’Malley

Mr. O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland and a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, was the race’s first entrant.

He has a long record of public service, getting his start on the Baltimore City Council before becoming the city’s mayor in 1999. During his tenure as governor, an office he held from 2007 to 2015, he led the Democratic Governors Association.

In 2023, President Biden picked him to lead the Social Security Administration. Mr. O’Malley resigned from the post on Nov. 29.

In an interview with The New York Times, he said that he was a “turnaround manager,” and that the party should advance “economic arguments” to court voters.

“We face enormous challenges and a lot of soul-searching,” he said. “We need to focus on fixing the problem, and not the blame.”

Faiz Shakir

Mr. Shakir joined the race for chair in mid-January, just over two weeks before voting was set to begin. He said he thought other candidates were uninspiring, merely proposing procedural changes rather than a bold vision to reshape the party.

Mr. Shakir, who led Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said in an interview that if elected he would redefine the Democratic Party as the party of the working class. The Democratic brand was “tarnished,” he said, and needed help.

“We are rebuilding trust with people who don’t believe the Democratic Party has been there when it matters most to them,” he said.

Nate Snyder

Mr. Snyder, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under President Biden and President Barack Obama, entered the D.N.C. chair race in December. He is considered a long shot.

Many of Mr. Snyder’s positions, including his emphasis on a “people-powered movement,” are more progressive than other candidates’. He promises to rebuild the party’s support from working-class and rural voters and to increase transparency in party fund-raising, according to his website.

“Education, loan forgiveness, putting food on the table, fighting for the little guy — we’ve sort of lost our way on that,” Mr. Snyder told Reuters.

Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson, a self-help author who has staged two long-shot Democratic campaigns for president, joined the D.N.C. race in late December.

A onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey, Ms. Williamson, 72, said in an open letter to the committee membership that the Democratic Party needed to understand the “emotional” force of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s appeal and “create the energy to counter it.”

Quintessa Hathaway

Ms. Hathaway, a former congressional candidate, announced a campaign for the role in early January. Like some of the race’s other late entrants, she faces steep odds.

In 2022, Ms. Hathaway lost a bid to unseat Representative French Hill, a Republican, in the Arkansas district that includes Little Rock. Her D.N.C. campaign platform emphasizes civil-rights policies and Democratic organizing in the Southeast.

Jason Paul

Jason Paul, a lawyer and political strategist from Newton, Mass., began his bid for chair in December.

Mr. Paul has worked in local politics across New England, and in 2014, he lost a Democratic primary race for state representative in Connecticut.

According to his website, he supports a “subscription-based fund-raising model” for the party.

Who’s dropped out?

James Skoufis

Mr. Skoufis, a relatively unknown New York state senator who began a long-shot bid to be the party’s leader in late November, dropped out of the race in mid-January.

Mr. Skoufis, 37, has served in the New York State Legislature for 12 years, representing Orange County in the Hudson Valley. He initially saw his “outsider” status as an advantage in the D.N.C. race.

“We tried the D.C. Beltway thing, we tried the decades-long operative thing, we tried the sort of party machine thing over and over and over and over again,” Mr. Skoufis told The Times. “And here we are.”

But without established relationships with committee members, Mr. Skoufis struggled to secure votes for party chair. When he dropped out, he endorsed Mr. Martin.

Reid J. Epstein, Katie Glueck and Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.