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Who’s in Charge of the Democratic Party?

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Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!Fridays. The best of the week. EmailYou can read our here.Thank you for signing up for&nbsp;The Nation’s weekly newsletter.EmailYou can read our here.Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our .Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.Who is in charge of the Democratic Party? In particular, who is in charge of its strategy and spending? That’s actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer—and it shouldn’t be, at a time when the party and the country face critical challenges that will affect millions of lives for years to come. The next six weeks will see significant turnover in the staffing and leadership of the biggest organizations in the Democratic ecosystem, but many of those decisions will be made in metaphorical smoke-filled rooms, shielded from the kinds of transparency and accountability that are hallmarks of effective and successful organizations.What is commonly called “the Democratic Party” is actually a constellation of six entities that, collectively, spent more than $1.3 billion in the 2020 election cycle.Even in the most public process—as with the Democratic National Committee, where bylaws clearly explain the process for electing a chair—it remains unclear how to even put one’s name in the hat to be considered for the top job. Despite raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars from Democratic donors, the super PACs—House Majority PAC, Senate Majority PAC, and Priorities USA—operate with the least level of accountability, frequently making leadership changes without posting positions, searching for talent, articulating the key responsibilities of the position, or even revealing who is in fact doing the hiring.With respect to the campaign arms of the Senate and House Democrats, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), there is some measure of clarity regarding who becomes the chair of each entity. The Democratic senators select their leader, currently Chuck Schumer, and that leader typically picks the chair of the DSCC. On the House side, the members directly vote for the chair of the DCCC (before 2018, the leader of the House Dems choose the committee chair).While those lines of authority are clear, what happens next is not. The incoming chairs choose an executive director, who then hires the rest of the staff, who in turn run the day-to-day operations.Over the past decade, dating back to my work in 2008 helping to create a Diversity Talent Bank of 5,000 diverse candidates interested in working in the Obama-Biden administration, I have rarely, if ever, seen a job description circulated for the top staff position of these entities. At best, these poor practices undermine their ability to function at optimal levels. At worst, they result in the kind of that occurred last year, when Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus members loudly complained about the overwhelmingly monochromatic composition of the DCCC staff assembled by then–executive director Allison Jaslow.Absent clear criteria for what the job entails and with no process in place for a healthy range of promising contenders to offer their expertise, the pool of potential people to fill those positions is, almost by definition, limited to the friends and family of a small circle of insiders.The window for fixing these processes and pulling in the talent regularly walled off from participating in the biggest and richest organizations in the ecosystem is closing fast. Many of the key positions will be filled between now and mid-December, while attention is focused elsewhere.Now more than ever, Democrats need all hands on deck to analyze what happened in 2020 and chart a course forward. There are no more compelling examples than the results in Arizona and Georgia. The Biden campaign as the Midwestern triumvirate of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Yet, winning those Southwestern and Southern states was essential to securing a victory large enough to block Trump’s plans to steal the election through cries of fraud and appeals to the GOP-packed courts (with Trump revealing the game plan on election night, when he said he was going to take his allegations to the Supreme Court). Going forward, given the continuing demographic transformation of the country, smart Democratic leaders will build on those successes in the South and Southwest to solidify and expand progressive power.Victory in those states was not charted by the handful of consultants who dominate Democratic politics (in fact, in we did in August, we found that Senate Majority PAC had invested $0 of its first $80 million of expenditures in the Georgia Senate races, on which control of the Senate now turns). If the party wants to win, it should learn from those who actually won in what was formerly hostile territory, and bring their insights and understanding into the rooms where it happens. But quick, quiet, closed-door hiring practices inevitably lock out much of the available talent and knowledge.Although Trump has been defeated, the battle is far from finished, and the stakes going forward are enormous. Despite losing support from some college-educated white voters, Trump brought millions more people to the polls, causing Democrats to lose several House and Senate races they thought they would win. In light of this reality, the next Democratic leadership team must confront several critical questions:If the Democrats are going to get it right, they need to pull back the curtain on who is making the decisions, open up the process to the full diversity of the party’s talent, and clearly explain what qualities they are looking for in the leadership of the future. Specifically, they should take four immediate steps:Calamity has been averted with the defeat of Trump, but entrenched and ferocious opposition to progressive values in a rapidly diversifying nation is only going to increase. If the Democratic Party is going to win the battles to come, it needs to change its hiring practices so that it can find, elevate, and empower people who know how to win the kinds of fights that are on the horizon.

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!Fridays. The best of the week. EmailYou can read our here.Thank you for signing up for&nbsp;The Nation’s weekly newsletter.EmailYou can read our here.Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our .Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.Who is in charge of the Democratic Party? In particular, who is in charge of its strategy and spending? That’s actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer—and it shouldn’t be,...

Who’s in Charge of the Democratic Party?

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