Let’s talk about Ken Martin and the Democratic National Committee.

Even before he released the meandering, error-ridden and wildly incomplete autopsy of the 2024 election defeat, Martin, the party chairman from Minnesota, was not exactly Mr. Popular in the broader Democratic ecosystem.

The D.N.C. began the year $100 million behind its Republican counterpart. The Democratic Party’s cash on hand, minus debt, is negative $3 million. Democrats who worry about funding infrastructure for the 2028 presidential election had long begun to fret that the party was falling behind.

So, in recent weeks, I’d been asking top Democrats if they had confidence in Martin as the chairman.

“I don’t want to go there,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, told me last month.

Just this Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California — a likely candidate for the 2028 nomination — performed verbal calisthenics rather than deliver a straight answer on Martin.

“The Democratic Party, we’re many parts and it’s a bottom-up party, and it is reflected in different realities, different conditions, in different states,” Newsom said. “And so, from that perspective, I don’t have any call-out in any negative sense about his leadership.”