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THE LEFT’S DIMINISHED DNC PRESENCE  
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Tom Gallagher
February 8, 2025
Stansbury Forum
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_ At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the
Sanders mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to
make it our business to find one. _

Ken Martin, newly elected Democratic National Committee chair, (Rod
Lamkey, Jr./AP).

 

Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step
backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair
had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat
back the Party establishment at the DNC.” Now Our Revolution being a
direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders
presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention
delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means
are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent
takes?

For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to
lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic
Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no
contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected
president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow
defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama Administration
Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota
Representative Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235–200.

Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the
second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s
presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored
serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the
ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the
election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just
occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Representative Barney
Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’s run — who had once
declared “the most effective thing liberals and progressives can do
to advance our public policy goals … is to help Clinton win our
nomination early in the year” — now thought there was “a
great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in
there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But
Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so and Clinton’s
past Obama Cabinet colleague, Perez took up the torch in a race that
produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen
in this contest.

Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather
than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the
underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time
around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any
political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support
for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up
Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi,
Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire
class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening
the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this
seems a rather thin flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an
anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that
he doesn’t want the party to take money from “those bad
billionaires” only from “good billionaires;”and one of the two
billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign
was George Soros — probably the DNC’s model “good
billionaire.” Besides, Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t
thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported
Ellison eight years ago.

Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race — 2020 Sanders
campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a
non-profit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to
“building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats
needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their
criticism of Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a
serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum
that “We’ve got the right message … What we need to do is
connect it back with the voters,” — seemingly a tough position
to maintain following an election in which NBC’s ten state exit
polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes
under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from
over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a
DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee
members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken
for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.

Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of
the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin
touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in
Minnesota in the fourteen years that he has chaired the party and
anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign
work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be
criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be
the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was
nevertheless of some importance.

At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence
of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we”
legitimately contended for power in the last contested election.
Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of
the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee
who had not gone before the voters in a single primary — for the
first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who
believe that the structure and history of the American political
system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic
Party — uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As
the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and
absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that
motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big
questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere
always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet another third
party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but
ultimately receives only a small share of vote, but a large share of
the blame for the election of a Republican president.

At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the
Sanders mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to
make it our business to find one.

_Tom Gallagher [[link removed]] is the
author of The Primary Route: How the 99% Takes On the Military
Industrial Complex._

* DNC
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* Democratic Party
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* Minnesota Democratic Party
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* Our Revolution
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* Bernie Sanders
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