the Democratic National Committee will begin a multi-round election to choose its new chair. Former President Joe Biden’s appointee, Jamie Harrison, is on his way out, and an array of party insiders and outsiders are competing to replace him.
The DNC’s 448 voting members include hundreds of Democrats elected and selected through state parties, along with smaller numbers of appointees, elected officials, and representatives from party groups like the Young Democrats of America. They will cast ballots for a new chair at a time when the Democratic Party itself is adrift, with no clear leader and no strategy for fighting the Trump agenda or regaining power. As one DNC member told me, “The DNC is not really talking about what went wrong and what we did wrong.”
In writing this piece, I reached out to 427 of the DNC’s 448 voting members and interviewed 19 of them. Those who spoke with me came from ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse backgrounds. They included Democrats from rural and urban communities, grassroots party members, elected officials, and party insiders and critics alike. Most agreed to speak on the condition their names wouldn’t be used.
What emerged from these conversations is a picture of a DNC that is built to be an undemocratic, top-down institution, unable to truly leverage the wisdom and guidance of the DNC members who hail from local and state networks across the country. This is especially true when those local and state members disagree with the DNC’s posture or strategic choices
Members said their meetings don’t feel like a place for participation or governance. They described these gatherings as a combination of party presentations and social time, as opposed to real debates or discussions. During Covid, for instance, one member said that meetings were held via web conference, with the chat function turned off. And while the potential for real decision-making can occur at the DNC committee level, “committees are completely rigged, with the chair appointing whoever they want,” one DNC member told me.
In some ways, the race for DNC chair has itself become a microcosm of this tension between money, transparency, and winning elections. Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party Chair Ken Martin and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler are considered the front-runners based on their declared, though likely inflated, DNC vote counts. But neither has disclosed how much money they have raised for their campaigns, who their donors are, or how much they have spent.
Every election is an opportunity to use your tiny amount of voting influence to try to make the world a better more survivable place. Protests and direct action are the most important thing you can do, but please don’t let apathy allow candidates to power who hinder our ability to speak freely and perform direct action. Until we have ranked choice voting everywhere, the democrats give us the version of fascism with the most survivors to build a newer, better, fairer society.
To be clear. They still SUCK. They’re still fuckin’ fascists. But that’s the electoral system we have, and our fellow Americans are THOROUGHLY propagandized against real and workable solutions to all this. If you refuse to vote strategically, you will be refusing to leverage one of the tools in your arsenal for making the world better. I ask you to go around in physical meatspace and talk to the marginalized people around you because this attitude is one I only really encounter in online spaces. All the marginalized people I talk to out in the real world are organizing resistance through the ethics of care but they ALSO vote democrat because that gives us the best chance at a regime that will even allow us to march in the streets and object to their shit.
And flipping the perspective, this is a thing Republicans succeeded at.
I know Trump voters, mostly older folks or small business owners/runners, who did not like Trump… but hesitantly voted for him anyway in at least one election. They were simply too driven by perceived personal interest (or just being old in the case of old folks) to bicker about that.
There’s basically no “we hate Trump, protest vote!” within the party, especially now, even though many don’t like him.
No…no more…fuck that. I went with the party for Harris as a last gasp attempt to keep the great experiment alive. It failed. From here on out, if you still support the Ds, you are part of the problem.
It’s time for a new opposition party. It’s time to stop voting soft Rs to prevent hard Rs.
Great! . . . Which one is it?
Whoever the satanic temple runs. I really don’t care, but it’s clear the Ds are not a viable alternative. They’ve had 40 years since Regan to fix his shit, and they haven’t.