(2025-01-10) Sifry Opening The Dncs Black Box

Micah Sifry: Opening the DNC’s Black Box. Three weeks from now (Feb01), the Democratic National Committee will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to elect a new party chair and other national officers. For Democrats reeling from the defeat of Kamala Harris, this will be their first opportunity to anoint a fresh face for the national party to replace Jaime Harrison, who is stepping down.

whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.

But who will make this decision? Officially, it’s a secret.

According to the DNC, there are 448 active members of the national committee

For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.

Michael Kapp... told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.

since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.

To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses

“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”

If you view the list sorted by title, the first group that jumps out, both alphabetically and by its sheer size, are the “at-large” members. The 73 listed here were all whisked into their current positions on the DNC roster by Jaime Harrison in 2021.

Some of the at-large members have been on the national committee for many terms. Those include stalwarts of the party establishment like Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Minyon Moore, and Maria Cardona, triple-hitters who have led national campaigns or party conventions

Brazile is a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm” Purple Strategies, which has worked for BP, United Airlines, NASCAR, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and PhRMA. Ickes is a partner at Tiber Creek Group, whose clients include the Greater New York Hospital Association. Moore and Cardona are both partners at the Dewey Square Group, whose clients have included Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Springfield, Sony Pictures, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and which has engaged in lobbying to undermine state labor protections.

The hacks definitely stand out among Harrison’s handpicked cohort. Those include top fundraisers Kristin Bertolina Faust and Alicia Rockmore of California, Carol Pensky of Florida, and Deborah Simon of Indiana, as well as David Huynh of New York, whose main claim to fame appears to be his work as a consultant to now-jailed cryptocurrency hustler Sam Bankman-Fried when he appeared to be the Next Big Funder of the Democrats in 2021-2022.

A lot of labor union leaders also made Harrison’s cut, including Marisol

When you add up the DNC’s at-large members and its officers, plus leaders of various affiliated groups...

that brings together about 122 voting members, a little more than one-quarter of the Gang of 448.

THE REMAINDER COME FROM THE 50 STATES, six territories, and Democrats Abroad, which is more apparent if you view the list sorted by state name. State party chairs and vice chairs are all automatically DNC members, which accounts for 113 votes. And another 213 (not 200, as the DNC says publicly) are elected or selected by their state party, with every state and territory getting at least two and those with larger Democratic populations getting proportionally more

A good part of this segment of the DNC’s voting membership is public, if you know where to look.

A decent number of these people are elected (like many chairs and vice chairs) by the state party executive committees; these are arguably the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about.

The biggest exceptions come in two varieties: small backwaters and big cesspools. For example, the Democratic Parties of tiny...

Seven big states—Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—collectively have 69 DNC voting members apportioned to them. But only 14 of them—in each case, the state’s chair and vice chair—are publicly known. What could these seven states remotely have in common with each other than being places where local party machine behaviors still permeate?

The missing 55 from these states were chosen, by some opaque process, by their state party’s leadership. Some may seem unobjectionable to anyone who thinks Democrats should be fighting for working people.

But some belong in the political dictionary next to the words “corporate Democrats” or “local party bosses.” Those include: John Graham... (long list)

SO FAR, EIGHT CONTENDERS FOR THE DNC CHAIR have demonstrated sufficient support to be included in a series of public candidate forums that the DNC has organized... Of these eight, most attention is focused on Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, whose time in the trenches of state party organizing and fundraising, and whose success improving Democratic fortunes in their respective states, has made them the strongest contenders for the job.

In 2017, the last time the DNC chairmanship was up for an open vote, the contest cleaved along clear ideological lines, with supporters of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid, many labor unions, and progressive organizations backing Minnesota then-Rep. Keith Ellison, while outgoing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and many state party chairs backed Labor Secretary Tom Perez. The latter won the vote, 235-200, on the second round, after several lesser contenders dropped out.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics, so being good at fundraising may be the most important qualification both men have for the job they are seeking. That skill may qualify them too well to maintain the DNC status quo.

But the status quo doesn’t change by itself. Knowing who has actual voting power over the DNC’s governance may give grassroots activists around the country who care about the party’s future some greater capacity to focus their efforts on the people who actually pull the levers. What they do with that potential is up to them.

Thoughts:

• I wish half the info in the article was copied in the spreadsheet.
• And having this now probably won't help at all by Feb01 election.
• Is there an opinionated (pro-transparency) profile of what the DNC does on a daily basis?
  • What are the operational things? What are some big successes and mistakes?
  • What are the other big event-levers?
• I hope this is actually helpful to someone. Who has a Theory of Change?