Don't Dismiss the Need for a Newly Transformed DNC:
A Lot Will Depend on the New Direction the Democratic National Committee Takes, Regardless of Leadership.
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Very few people today will have much praise for the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) work in recent times. On the one hand, it is very easy for a progressive to villainize the DNC as an institution that favors the elite and tilts the scale. After all, 8 years ago, WikiLeaks and superdelegates proved that the 2016 contest was tilted heavily towards one unpopular establishment-favored candidate (Hillary Clinton), and against an anti-establishment insurgent (Bernie Sanders).
But progressives should value the importance of a DNC that is run right, even beyond policy. Let’s take some steps back.
At the time, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign had seemed a godsend in inspiring the Democratic base around a message of change. Yet it also had some less appealing and long-lasting ramifications up to this day. As people began to realize especially post-2016, the Obama campaign apparatus’s successes in 2008 led to a disastrous strategic mistake. That is, it led the Obama campaign’s work to largely supersede and even replace that of the DNC itself.
As we clearly see now, that had some terrible consequences for the DNC. After the 2010 shellacking, and then the 2014 drubbings, the DNC cut back its ground game outside of the battleground states. If you remember, Obama’s 2012 campaign was a campaign more centered around the swing states of that cycle than anything else (remember? Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, etc.). Furthermore, the prioritization of the Obama Only machine siphoned off financial resources from the DNC, which by 2016 faced a plague of financial problems.
(And that is not to discount the abysmal conduct that defined the leadership of then-DNC Chairwoman and practical Clinton surrogate/fixer Debbie Wasserman-Schultz).
2016 and 2024 are emblematic of the costs in letting the DNC run dry. Neglecting the basics, rejecting the ambitions and potential of such an institution, and taking it for granted outside of satisfying the whims of the establishment elite and the donor and consultant classes.
The finance issue is one part of it. A total of $2 billion spent between the Harris campaign itself and affiliated Super PACs. $1 million paid to Oprah Winfrey’s company. $500,000 given to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit before he interviewed the Vice President on MSNBC. Celebrities traveling across the country as surrogates (I don’t know for sure what the expenses were on that, but evidence suggests that other celebrities’ companies got paid too). Fundraising emails going up weeks after the election season ended. Most expenditures going to TV advertising and media buys. Concerns about how certain vendors were being taken for granted in outreach to Black & Latino voters. Rural campaign arms running their operations on essentially a shoestring, with little to almost no support financially. I have personally seen and heard about this underfunding and lack of support way too frequently over the years.
There’s obviously more that could be pointed to as a potential flaw or shortcoming one way or another. But let’s consider what the result of it was. The result was states like New Hampshire, Virginia, New Jersey, New Mexico, Minnesota, and Maine being decided by margins of 4%-6%. The result was Trump winning Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa by double digits, rivaling victories in those states by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 80s. The result was a historic performance by Trump in New York. The result was one of the worst Democratic performances ever in states like Missouri, Indiana, and Montana. The result was a Republican presidential candidate getting more than 40% of support in Rhode Island (the first time since 1988).
And if you look closer, you can see that in many cases, Trump outperformed his own 2016 numbers in blue-collar Midwestern and rural congressional districts, crossed record breaking support in urban areas, made big inroads with young voters, especially males, won over some Arab and Muslim Americans, and punched through the base of Hispanic & Latino support (and African Americans to a much, much lesser extent).
The next DNC Chairman will have a key role in rebuilding the party. Who it is will matter a lot too (like in my personal opinion, the one and only Ben Wikler, who has a depth of experience working on campaigns for Tammy Baldwin, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, and Sherrod Brown, volunteering with several progressive grassroots organizations, and running the Wisconsin Democratic Party over the past 6 years to tremendous effect). The leader will matter, as the primary messenger for the party, as the chief fundraiser, and for being the party motivator while out of power in the Beltway.
However, that will not be the only significant piece in what needs to be a major retooling of the DNC. It will take systemic reforms to the DNC’s method of operation.
First off, we deserve a full AND ACCURATE 2024 autopsy so we can learn our past mistakes for the future.
Wikler’s political mentor and close friend, former DNC Chair Howard Dean, knows this very well as the original pioneer of the 50-State Strategy. Kerry supporters remember the pain of 2004, and a lot of them will likely remember the days and months afterwards. Dean saw the potential in being everywhere and showing up where the voters are. All state parties were adequately funded and supported, not broke. And it worked.
The results of that success are clear in the stories and the numbers. As Tim Walz described it in December of 2006, it was the infrastructure the DNC set up in early 2005 that in no small part paved the way for his own success in rural Southern Minnesota, as former Congresswoman Nancy Boyda would say for her own Kansas upset back then. In 2006, House Democrats did not lose a single incumbent, and gained around 50 seats between 2006 and 2008. Senate Democrats gained 15 seats between 2006 and 2008, with not a single incumbent unseated during that time. Democrats gained a number of governorships, and picked up a significant advantage in the state legislatures, erasing what was a slight GOP edge in 2004.
It is only with the 50-State Strategy that it can be easily explained how Wyoming almost elected a Democrat to Congress over a GOP incumbent after 70% of voters supported the Bush-Cheney ticket two years prior, how Democrats won statewide offices even in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and South Carolina, how Democrats competed closely in Idaho, and how Obama in 2008 flipped Indiana blue for the first time since 1964, after Bush gave Kerry a 20% drubbing four years earlier.
People like Tim Walz, Nancy Boyda, David Loebsack, Carol Shea-Porter, Joe Courtney, Gabby Giffords, Steve Bullock, Janet Cowell, Jeff Merkley, Jeanne Shaheen, Martin Heinrich, Chris Murphy, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey Jr., Joe Donnelly, and even Claire McCaskill are all products and testaments to that strategy’s remarkable success.
And contrary to the current playbook, it took grassroots organizing and energy on the ground to win, and not simply throwing money against the Joni Ernsts, the Steve Daines, the Marco Rubio’s, the John Cornyn’s, the Thom Tillis’s, or Susan Collins’s of the world. This kind of “throw spaghetti at the wall” strategy backfired most prominently when Sen. McConnell routed his Democratic opponent in 2020.
Likewise, the Democratic Party has no choice, but to rebuild in Rural America. And yes, that includes having the party be more like Rural America in representing them and advocating on their behalf on their issues. But it also includes the basics, like just being there on the ground. After the 2010 midterms, the DSCC and DCCC campaign arms disbanded its rural policy and messaging desks, basically shutting down its rural outreach program completely. The decline of rural support since is startling, and also self-explanatory from this. Much like talk radio in the 1990s, breakthroughs through rural news outlets have largely been forfeited by Democrats to Republicans. Having a DNC Rural Council and restoring the Rural Desks in the DSCC and DCCC can go a very long way to rebuilding a national majority again through these areas. The party was getting 45%-48% of the rural vote in the 2006-2008 down ballot elections after backsliding in 2000 and 2004. It can happen again.
To that end, the party also has to listen to its rural voices, whether it is Western Nebraska’s Scott Kleeb, who competed hard in 2006 for a conservative district Bush won with around 75% of the vote (Kleeb garnered 45% support), or Matt Barron, the most prominent party rural strategist in the country left who assisted elected officials like Iowa’s Tom Harkin, Massachusetts’s John Olver, Rhode Island’s Jack Reed, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Wisconsin’s Steve Kagen, and New Jersey’s Frank Pallone. Barron was also (sadly) the man who forecasted the Democrats’s continued collapse in rural areas this year. Worth saying Matt is someone I highly recommend to lead rural engagement for the coming years at the DNC. Our understanding of the rural collapse is absolutely essential in rebuilding the party identity in the Industrial Midwest, and continuing the march since 2008 in the American South. Solely depending on the cities will not cut it anymore.
Democrats also have to appreciate the value of the state legislatures as laboratories of democracy, and as the frontlines of redistricting cycles and litigation every 10 years. Republicans had such a focus in 2010, winning the majorities that would allow them to cement partisan and racial gerrymanders in a number of states, some lasting to today. Republicans even to this minute hold 57 state legislative chambers across the country today to the Democrats’s 39 (not counting coalition or split bodies). As bad as it was in 2004, the “low point,” Democrats then had 47 chambers under their control. This is also what it means to rebuild from the bottom up.
Another issue is having regular, year-round party presence in the base communities that matter so much (including rural black and Hispanic communities). For years, since 2020 at least, South Texas leaders complained about the last-minute posturing at the end of each election cycle. The same can be said elsewhere from 2016, and now, in Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. In 2024, we saw Hispanic and Black voters moving to Republicans in historic numbers, and turnout drop-offs in those same communities. Asian Americans shifted significantly towards Trump, as did Native Americans in northeastern Arizona and western Nevada, and Pacific Islanders in Hawaii. Turnout really matters.
Makes it worth including the voices of people in that community who rang the alarm bells well before this moment (especially Chuck Rocha and Atima Omara).
It is also worth listening to my friend Mr. Rocha for other reasons, using his own experience to emphasize the need for more permanent organizing positions, collaborating with smaller, more black and Latino-owned consulting firms, empowering up-and-coming young voices, and eliminating education requirements that leave out high school graduates from the process.
There is a new understanding needed of social media, as Dean and Obama were able to accomplish with the blogosphere and Twitter in the mid-2000s. Whether it is with the online podcast manosphere, or the Spanish language disinformation bubbles that have enveloped entire communities, including South Florida.
And finally, as DNC member Larry Cohen has stated, if they want to really walk the walk, the Democratic National Committee should ban dark money interests from engaging in future primary contests (as some are already pledging to do again in 2026).
Improving the party brand this way can do a lot, even for the best candidates and recruits out there in an environment where elections have become so parliamentary that party affiliation could really make or break a campaign. And that will take more than just a great leader. It requires a needed change from business as usual that has so alienated the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing of the party since 2016.
It also may be the most important step, and one of the last opportunities left, to rebuild the working class image the party inherited from Roosevelt, to Truman, to Kennedy, and to Johnson.