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Ahead of Chair Vote, Progressives Say DNC 'Failing Disastrously' to Learn From Loss to Trump
"Voters—and all Americans—deserve better than two corporate-controlled parties," asserted the leader of Our Revolution.
Jan 30, 2025
The head of a leading U.S. progressive group on Thursday accused the Democratic National Committee—which will choose new leadership this weekend—of trying to silence rank-and-file activists and voters, showing that the Democratic Party's governing body is failing to connect with the working-class Americans who helped deliver the White House and Congress to Republicans.
"This moment demands a Democratic Party that provides more than just reactive opposition to an administration bent on rigging our economic and political systems in favor of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals on Earth," Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, an offshoot of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, said in a statement ahead of Thursday evening's final DNC candidate forum. "It demands leaders who put the party's grassroots base ahead of the donor class and articulate a real vision that rejects [Republican President] Donald Trump's corporate rule—starting with renouncing corporate money themselves."
"Unfortunately," Geevarghese lamented, "Democratic leadership is failing disastrously to meet this urgent mandate. Ahead of tonight's forum, the DNC is actively working to silence rank-and-file Democratic activists and base voters calling for a ban on dark money in primaries and the rejection of corporate funding. In a last-minute move, they shut the event off from the public and even deliberately shared the wrong address for where grassroots supporters are allowed to gather."
Trump has forged an unholy alliance between state and corporate power. With the help of Big Tech, Big Oil and other oligarchs, he is ushering in a new era of authoritarian capitalism in America. Where is the Democratic Party? Where is the leadership and where is the opposition required in this mom
— Our Revolution ( @our-revolution.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 10:15 AM
A post-election survey of 5,000 Our Revolution members found that only 14% of respondents were "very confident" that the Democratic Party and its leaders in Congress, state houses, and city halls will fight against the worst parts of Trump's agenda. Furthermore, 88% of survey respondents said they support efforts to transform the Democratic Party into a real opposition party and to get the party to reject corporate money and power, while the remaining 12% said they've already given up on the Democratic Party.
Forty-one percent of survey respondents said they want Our Revolution to primarily focus on fighting Trump and oligarchs, 32% said the group should concentrate on taking back the Democratic Party from the corporate class, and the remaining 27% think Our Rev should prioritize electing progressive candidates.
"Voters—and all Americans—deserve better than two corporate-controlled parties," asserted Geevarghese, whose group hosted a DNC candidate forum earlier this month. "The election of the next DNC chair will shape the opposition to Trump's second term, and we are already seeing glaring red flags from party leaders who are unwilling to part with the ways of the past that ushered in four more years of a would-be tyrant."
An
Our Revolution petition signed by more than 10,000 active grassroots Democratic volunteers, donors, and local and state party leaders is calling on the DNC to:
- Ban dark money in primaries and reject corporate money;
- Invest in state parties and uplift grassroots organizing;
- Make the DNC budget transparent and hold consultants accountable; and
- Commit to a progressive platform and small-donor democracy.
Longtime progressive strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, is
running for DNC chair on a platform of making Democrats the party of the working class.
"The question to my mind now is that if there is consensus around the working class confronting oligarchy, then what new ideas are we bringing to the table in how we utilize the power and authority of the DNC?" Shakir said in interview published Thursday by The Guardian. "My election would send the strongest message that we're doing something different."
As The Guardian's Joan Greve noted:
Shakir faces an uphill battle to capture the chair position. He only announced his candidacy earlier this month, while the front-runners in the race—Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party—have been campaigning for two months. Ahead of the leadership elections on Saturday, Martin claims to have already secured the support of at least 200 DNC members, which would put him within striking distance of a winning majority, although his opponents have questioned that whip count.
Undaunted, Shakir said he is the best candidate for refocusing the Democratic Party on serving its working-class base.
"Can we open the doors and let people in? Can we start from the premise that this is a people-powered organization?" he told Greve. "That we could be and should be in service to others beyond ourselves, that is the core of what I would believe as a kind of organizing philosophy of the Democratic party right now to rebuild the brand."
"The nation is calling upon the Democratic Party to say, 'Hey, we need you,'" he added. "I'm trying to fight the notions of insularity among groups of people who understandably are focused on reforming structures within the DNC. But we've got to think beyond the DNC.
Disclosure note: Brett Wilkins is the co-chair of San Francisco Berniecrats, an Our Revolution affiliate.
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'We Must Be Bolder': Faiz Shakir Enters Race for DNC Chair
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Jan 17, 2025
Longtime progressive strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, announced his late entry into the race for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this week, expressing frustration with what he described as the current crop of candidates' apparent "lack of vision and conviction for what to do to restore a deeply damaged Democratic brand."
"As I have listened to our candidates, I sense a constrained, status-quo style of thinking," Shakir wrote in a Medium post. "We cannot expect working-class audiences to see us any differently if we are not offering anything new or substantive to attract their support."
Shakir's decision to join the race comes two weeks before DNC's hundreds of members are set to vote on who will lead the organization in the wake of the disastrous 2024 elections, which saw Republicans win a trifecta at the federal level and Democrats continue to hemorrhage working-class support.
Shakir, the founder of More Perfect Union—a progressive media organization whose mission is to help build working-class power—said he's come away from recent DNC candidate forums and conversations with the view that "we wrongly perceive a powerlessness about the role of chair, confining it merely to being some kind of pass-through financial vehicle to distribute funds to various other entities."
"The grandest reforms I've heard so far revolve around procedural, internal changes to budgeting and consultant work, and we offer pablum around national war rooms and permanent campaigns that have no substance guiding them, deferring critical judgment about what to actually say and do to some other place and time or persons," Shakir wrote in his Medium post. "We must be bolder than that!"
"If we learned anything from our last four years, it should be that we must break some norms and get more compelling, interesting, and dynamic to win," he added. "We can't continue to defer critical political judgments to a donor class or some other outside actors. To be a multiracial working-class party, we must prove we are on their side in the fight against corporate greed."
Shakir, who previously served as a senior adviser to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, said he envisions a DNC that is "an organizing army" that backs workers in their fight against corporate abuses; "its own powerful media outlet" that features "working-class heroes taking on corporate greed" and airs "educational pieces about the aims and ambitions of the Silicon swamp surrounding [President-elect Donald] Trump; and a body that "actively involves the grassroots in surfacing interesting policy ideas and building civic organization around community service, faith, sports, culture, and entertainment."
"Most importantly," he wrote, "we have to strategically pick big fights with the elite and selfish oligarchs now entering government 'service' not just to decry their looting but to paint the picture of how we would wield power in a very different way."
Shakir joins a field in which two candidates—Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler and Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin—are widely seen as the frontrunners. But the race has so far lacked the kind of enthusiasm that Shakir argues is badly needed.
As Politicoreported Sunday, there has been "little daylight" between the DNC chair candidates and the contest has had "all the excitement of watching a euchre tournament, full of Midwestern niceness befitting its two frontrunners but short on big ideas or disagreements over how to salvage their fortunes."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Shakir said that it is "almost like we've moved on and not even deliberated or grasped what were the challenges."
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years," he warned, "if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Shakir's candidacy quickly received the backing of Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
"I am proud to endorse Faiz Shakir as chair of the Democratic National Committee," Nelson wrote in a social media post. "Faiz not only has the right working-class credibility, vision, and insight for this moment, but he also has the vast experience needed to operate and rebuild the DNC."
"The party is at a critical moment, and we need to embrace changing [the] status quo," Nelson added. "Faiz's vision and conviction is clear: use the authority and resources of the DNC to build power for working people—the promise of America. He is the leader the party needs at this moment."
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Ahead of DNC Elections, Forum Urges Democrats to Leave 'Corporate Party' Behind
"If we're gonna win, the only path is representing regular, everyday Americans who are about to get screwed by Trump and the oligarchs," said the head of Our Revolution.
Jan 14, 2025
Amid intense nationwide debates about what Democrats should learn from devastating electoral losses to Republicans last November, progressive groups on Monday night held a two-hour virtual forum for candidates seeking Democratic National Committee leadership roles.
"This forum is different than the official Democratic forums that are now underway," Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, said in his opening remarks. His group organized the event with Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), RootsAction, and the State Democratic Party Progressive Network.
These organizations "represent the progressive, working-class base, the Warren-Sanders wing, of the Democratic Party," said Geevarghese, referring to U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose 2016 presidential campaign led to the formation of Our Revolution.
Participants in Monday's forum are preparing to face off against a Republican-controlled Congress and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to be sworn in next week. Since the GOP's November victories, Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, has been a leading critic of, in his words, "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party."
Geevarghese similarly said Monday that "we don't believe, I don't believe, that the corporate hacks who got this party into trouble in the first place are gonna be the ones to save us," and "we need a Democratic Party that is on the side of America's working class."
"Give up on being the corporate party. Trump has got that locked up," he urged party leadership. "If we're gonna win, the only path is representing regular, everyday Americans who are about to get screwed by Trump and the oligarchs."
The DNC elections are scheduled for February 1, and The American Prospect last week published a previously secret list of "448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 'at-large' members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison."
Harrison, who has been hostile to arguments that Democrats lost last year because working-class voters felt abandoned by them, is not seeking another term. Seven candidates to replace him joined Monday's forum: Quintessa Hathaway, Ken Martin, Martin O'Malley, Jason Paul, James Skoufis, Ben Wikler, and Marianne Williamson. Robert Kennedy Houton and Nate Snyder did not participate in the livestreamed event, which had over 25,000 viewers and is available below.
Since last month, Our Revolution has been circulating a petition that calls on Democratic Party leaders to adopt four key reforms: ban dark money in primaries and reject corporate money; invest in state parties and grassroots organizing; make the budget transparent and hold consultants accountable; and adopt a progressive platform and small-donor democracy.
During the forum, chair candidates were asked what they planned to do to curb the influence of corporate interests and lobbyists in the party, particularly dark money political action committees (PACs).
"We need to make sure we call out the dark money in our politics, and it's corrosive," said Martin, who chairs Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and is endorsed by several key Democrats from his state. "These billionaire donors and these large corporations who are trying to essentially subvert the will of the people, they do it by buying people off."
Martin said the party must ensure "that we are only taking money from people and entities that share our values" and pledged that under his leadership, the DNC wouldn't take money from corporations that are union-busting or "preying on" the most vulnerable people in U.S. communities, and would focus on small-dollar donor programs.
Wikler, who chairs the Wisconsin Democratic Party, called for building "a party strong enough to be able to resist the people who are trying to ransack this nation top to bottom, to divide us across our identities, to divide us by cutting us apart, in order to rip off everybody, no matter what our skin color is, no matter who we love, no matter how we pray or whether we pray."
He suggested that Democrats can fight big money in politics "by choosing the fights that we fight and choosing those not based on who's making donations, but choosing those based on actually delivering change in the lives of working people, and stopping the far-right ultrawealthy from rigging this country to ensure that working people don't have a voice."
Wikler is backed by key leaders in his state plus Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). He and Martin are widely seen as front-runners in the chair race, though Wikler has faced some scrutiny for his relationship with billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who has poured millions into Wisconsin politics.
Chair candidates were also asked about whether to reform the process for at-large members, and the responses were mixed, with some supporting a change to the bylaws and others favoring the current approach but recognizing the importance of being thoughtful about appointments.
The forum also featured remarks from two potential vice chairs, Shasti Conrad and James Zogby, as well as Jane Kleeb, who is running to head the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC), currently led by Martin.
Zogby is the founder of the Arab American Institute, a strong advocate of progressive priorities including Palestinian rights, and a longtime DNC member. He explained Monday that although he initially considered stepping aside after the last cycle, "to this day, I'm the only Arab American in a leadership role in the party and I'm not giving it up."
Sharing some of his frustrating experiences at the DNC over the past three decades, Zogby said that "we need accountability and transparency," particularly with the budget. He railed against a "sick, corrupt system" in which consultants "never lose an election" because they make money either way and called for investments in state parties.
In a Monday opinion piece published by Common Dreams hours before the forum, PDA executive director Alan Minsky wrote that "rank-and-file Democrats want a progressive party. Unfortunately, the defining feature of American politics in the neoliberal era is that money matters more than people. The heretofore dominant wing of the Democratic Party, aka the party 'establishment,' is first and foremost a money-raising behemoth."
"This is why progressives must bring their A-game," he argued. "Many party loyalists embrace centrist policies out of a misguided notion of pragmatism. Our goal is not to chase these Democrats away, but to persuade them to support something more ambitious and inspiring. We have a very compelling case to make on all fronts. We can win them over."
Calls for major shifts within the party aren't just happening in and around events for potential Democratic leaders—who participated in the first DNC-sanctioned forum on Saturday and are set to join another one co-hosted by Politico in Michigan on Thursday.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group, and several allied organizations, launched an open letter calling on DNC leadership candidates to revive a ban on corporate donations to the committee and to prohibit super PAC spending in Democratic primaries.
Also on Tuesday, the PAC Justice Democrats—which helped elect leaders like Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.)—launched a 50-state effort to recruit "everyday, working-class people to run for Congress after a cycle of unprecedented spending from the billionaire class and right-wing super PACs in Democratic primaries."
"Until party leadership leads the way to take big money out of politics, ends the billionaire influence over our elections and policies, and puts the needs of working-class people back at the center of its agenda," said Justice Democrats, "voters will see its populist platitudes as lip service."
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