D.C. Memo: Ken Martin takes a victory lap

WASHINGTON – Democratic leaders are jubilant about the party’s sweep in Tuesday’s elections and Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin is among those celebrating.

“Democrats are back,” crowed Martin, the former Minnesota DFL Party chairman.

Since taking the reins of the national Democratic Party in February, Martin has suffered brutal criticism from party insiders who accused him of failing to unify the fractured and disillusioned party and prevent infighting.

Rahm Emanuel, who served as chief of staff for former President Barack Obama, said several months ago that Democrats had missed “the biggest political opportunity in a decade” because Trump provided a “target rich environment.”

“And the DNC has spent six months on a firing squad in the circle, and can’t even fire a shot out,” Emmanuel said.

Martin, however, said Democrats are unified, coalescing around a common theme of “affordability” that emerged from Democrats’ trio of wins in New York, New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday.

“We gave people something to be for, not just against,” Martin said.

In fact, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, perfected the art of running on the economy and “affordability.”

He promised fare-free buses, fully subsidized childcare, rent control and other new programs to help the poor and struggling blue collar workers. That theme resonated early for Mamdani, winning him the Democratic primary and propelling him from a little-known New York assemblyman to city hall.

Nonetheless, Martin said the new Democratic mantra and Democratic victories this week were a team effort.

“We didn’t stumble into this, we worked for it,” Martin said.

Besides winning the governorship in New Jersey, flipping the Virginia governor’s seat and winning two statewide races in Georgia, Democrats swept many down ballot races. They even swamped school board elections from Pennsylvania to Texas.

Still, Republicans shrugged off the results of Tuesday’s elections, which were seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump.

“There’s no surprises,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a Wednesday press conference. “What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming. And no one should read too much into last night’s election results.”

He also cast the Democratic Party – based on Mamdani’s big win – as the “Marxist Party.”

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance advised Republicans against taking the results too seriously, writing Wednesday on X that “I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states.”

“That’s bullshit, we won all over the country,” Martin said.

Martin was right. Democrats had big wins in Georgia and Virginia, former “red” states that are now “purplish,” and victories in the former “blue” state of Pennsylvania, which is now a key swing state, and the truly “red” states of Mississippi and South Carolina.

Yet demographics may be more important than geography when it comes to this week’s Democratic victories.

Democrats won back their support of Black and Latino voters, which had eroded and helped Trump win the presidency. Independent voters who favored Trump last year also reversed course.

“Independent voters are swinging our way heavily,” Martin said.

Meanwhile, overwhelming support for Proposition 50 in California — which allows rare mid-decade redistricting in the state to counter efforts by the GOP to redraw other political maps — was also seen as a repudiation of  Trump.

Shifting the blame for Tuesday’s election results, Trump threw congressional Republicans under the bus.

Citing unnamed pollsters, Trump posted on Truth Social late Tuesday that ‘’TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT.”

He continued that theme all week, telling Republican senators at a Wednesday breakfast that the GOP was “getting killed” by the impasse over funding the government. 

He pressed those senators to eliminate the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to pass contested legislation, including a short-term GOP funding bill that would reopen the government.

Judge orders USDA to provide full food stamp benefits

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to pay full food stamp benefits for the month of November on Friday, rejecting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to partially fund the food stamp program for 42 million Americans, including 440,000 Minnesotans.

“People have gone without for too long,” Judge Jack McConnell said during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island as he issued the order requiring the administration to tap funding sources it said were out of bounds earlier this week.

Low-income Americans who receive assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) did not have November benefits loaded on their EBT cards on the first of the month, which is customary, because the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it ran out of money.

McConnell, who heard a case challenging the USDA from a group of nonprofits and Rhode Island cities, and U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston, who heard a similar case from Minnesota and 24 other states, both ordered the USDA last week to release SNAP funds.

But the USDA said it only had money in a contingency fund to pay about half the benefits. That decision caused confusion in every state – and resulted in a lengthy delay of even partial SNAP payouts — because the USDA wanted every state to recalculate the benefits owed to each beneficiary and reduce benefits for households based on new income limits.

At Thursday’s hearing on the case, McConnell said the USDA “cannot now cry that it cannot get timely payments to beneficiaries for weeks or months because states are not prepared to make partial payments. USDA arbitrarily and capriciously created this problem.”

In a court filing, the USDA said it had only about $5.5 billion in an emergency SNAP fund and could not tap a $23 billion fund created by custom duties on imported food known as “Section 32” that is used for child nutrition programs.

McConnell ordered the administration to tap into those Section 32 funds, which President Donald Trump has eyed to compensate U.S. farmers for tariff-related losses, as well as the $5.5 billion contingency fund to pay for full November benefits.

It was not immediately clear how the administration will react. McConnell noted that Trump in a Truth Social post “stated his intent to defy the court order.”

In that post, Trump said SNAP payments “will be given only when the government opens.”

In other news:

▪️Tuesday’s elections resulted in several stories, including Brian Martucci’s piece on the reelection of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and the reelection of more progressive City Council members – and how that may continue an acrimonious relationship. 
▪️State government reporter Matthew Blake wrote about how new vacancies in the state Legislature won’t result in any change in the closely divided Minnesota House and Senate.
▪️Meanwhile, data reporter Shadi Bushra discovered turnout records were broken in the Minneapolis mayoral race.
▪️We also had a story about how the nation’s beer makers have joined the marijuana industry to target competitors who make THC-infused drinks, demanding federal regulations that could decimate a lucrative Minnesota industry. 
▪️Not surprisingly Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a tariff foe, could not keep herself from the oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court over President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and weighed in on the case, whose decision could spell disaster for the president’s key policy.

Please keep your comments, and any questions, coming. I’ll try my best to respond. 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the federal agency that administers the food stamp program. It’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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