Echoes of 2016 shape race to run DNC
As Keith Ellison strives to lead, Democrats argue about this year’s primary
DETROIT— Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman who could become the first Muslim chairman of an American political party, spent last Thursday night behind a pulpit. Ellison’s brother Brian, a Baptist reverend, provided the Church of the New Covenant as a venue for a town hall spotlighting the lawmaker’s bid to run the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The sermon: How to move past the disastrous 2016 election and battle Donald Trump.
“If you had a beef on Twitter with somebody, make peace, because you were probably arguing with a Russian or a bot,” Ellison said. “We need new energy coming into this party, and we need people with institutional memory. We need people who are really psyched up, and we need people who know where the bodies are buried. Do we, in the era of Trump, have somebody to waste?”
He looked around the room, with around150 nervous Democrats spilling from the pews into the hallway. “Not nobody!” Ellison stated.
Just 437 people will elect the next chair of the DNC, which is trying to rebuild after Hillary Clinton’s devastating loss to Trump and President Barack Obama’s release of his grip on the party after eight years.
But in what could prove a problem for Ellison — who is running as the candidate of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” — four hundred and thirty-five of them were not in the room on Thursday night.
With eight weeks to go until the Feb. 23-26 DNC election, Ellison is taking an inside-outside approach with rallies and shows of public support meant to demonstrate that he could turn the DNC into a revolutionary organization.
The Minnesota Democrat remains the central figure in the contest — though not obviously the front-runner. Unlike the divisive ClintonSanders primary — when progressives battled the more centrist Clintons — they are not the same cleavages in the DNC battle.
None of Ellison’s four rivals have challenged the left-wing rewrite of the Democratic Party platform, which Ellison was part of. Ellison and Ray Buckley, the chairman of New Hampshire’s Democrats, have published the most about their ideas. They generally agree on ideas like upping funds for state parties, boosting turnout (Ellison’s goal is a boost of 3 to 7 per cent) and guarding against voter suppression.
Democrats instead are engaging in a gritted-teeth argument about the 2016 primary, the Clinton campaign and Obama’s legacy. Tom Perez, the outgoing Labor secretary who entered the DNC race last week, has institutional support just as Democratic activists have stopped trusting their institutions. Buckley has told audiences that his state ignored the Clinton campaign to do its own voter persuasion — and win.
When they drill down, all three candidates, as well as South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison and Idaho’s Sally Boynton Brown, came to the same conclusions about 2016: The national Democratic Party focused on swing states and let state parties wither behind the “blue wall” — which promptly cracked. Democratic voters in rural areas, rarely contacted by the Clinton campaign or by state parties, switched to Trump.
“We need to commit ourselves, once a week, to go to a new neighbourhood and talk to everybody,” Ellison said last week in Detroit.
“You don’t win elections with an out-of-state organizer,” Perez told the Huffington Post this week. “It’s a long-term investment.”
In 2004, the last year the DNC rebuilt after an election loss, there was a real argument about whether to focus on long-term state party building or on fundraising. That argument doesn’t exist after 2016 losses at every level of government.
In every swing state, and in former strongholds, Democrats have lost ground in local races since 2008. In 2018, they face a once-in-a-decade chance to elect governors who can stop the next round of gerrymandering, after a devastating 2011 map drawn by Republicans.
The subtext, lost on no DNC member, is that Republicans conquered key territory on Obama’s watch, hurting any Obama ally’s ability to lead a recovery. Several Democrats who support Ellison pointed to the long tenure of former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who presided over loss after loss with no real effort by the Obama political operation to intervene.
“The DNC has been worthless,” said retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in an interview with a Nevada radio station.
In an interview Thursday, Ellison complimented the Obama campaign for its “Fight the Smears” project, which he credited with bypassing the press to defeat nasty rumours. That was the extent of his praise.
Ellison, too, had been countering attacks on his personal life, from his youthful praise of Louis Farrakhan to money problems revealed in his 2006 House race. These were the sort of distractions that a forceful party could confront, he said — livestreams and social media could get strong Democrats past the “smears” in the press.
In his Huffington Post interview, asked if Obama “undermined” the DNC by creating an outside political effort in Organizing for America, Perez pivoted to talk about the economic crisis he inherited and argued that Obama “won two elections and was able to win a historic election in 2008.”
In a followup question from the Washington Post, Perez said through a spokesperson the president had a role to play in rebuilding the party.
“I welcome his support to build an organization that reflects the big tent of the party and his input on how to develop a message of inclusion and opportunity that is at the core of who we are as Democrats,” said Perez. “No one does that better than President Obama, and we will need his support.”
But to some Democrats, who are leaving the Obama years weaker than they entered them, defending the party’s outgoing management means it will never get past the lessons of 2016. Buckley said there are plenty of sore feelings in Michigan from the primaries, which some Sanders supporters viewed as rigged by a pro-Clinton DNC.
“I think that if you add up Jill Stein and Bernie write-in votes, you get to 10,000 in Michigan,” said Buckley. “If only 20 per cent of the protest voters were people who couldn’t get over the nominating process, then it mattered. And it’s not just the neutrality issue — it’s joint fundraising, caucuses, and superdelegates. There were a number of issues that were out there that caused great strife.
“I don’t think we ever properly addressed them.”
Ellison, who was urged to run by Sanders, has no problem winning the loyalty of those voters. But only a few of them hold the positions — DNC member or state party chairperson — that will select the next leader of the DNC.
On Thursday, Ellison framed himself as a unity candidate who could get Clinton and Sanders’ supporters past the primary — while adopting what had worked for Sanders. In a pamphlet distributed at his rallies, Ellison promised to change the DNC’s fundraising model so that “lowdollar contributions from everyday Americans account for 33 per cent of revenue.”
Ellison raised that standard in the Post interview, saying that a majority of DNC money should probably come from small donations, and the party needs to be ready to reject checks from “foreclosure kings” or other malevolent interests.
A lot of people said, “‘No one owns Bernie because he’s funded by the people. No one owns Trump because he funds his own campaign,’ ” Ellison said. “I’m telling you that the Democratic Party must be perceived as funded by the people.”
At his brother’s church, Ellison preached the same point: no matter who Democrats supported in the 2016 primary, no matter if a voter had bailed on the party to back Trump, Democrats need to turn away from the big money spigot. Without mentioning Clinton, he described the damage done when Democrats were perceived to be bending policy to curry donations from big banks and corporate interests.
“Once your grassroots is funding the party,” he said, “the lines of accountability run the right way.”