The Democratic Party is a sprawling mess whose formal institutional power is spread across a handful of national organizations like the DSCC, DCCC and the Democratic Governors Association, as well as state and territorial Democratic parties, and below them, county and local parties, all of them legally separate entities. President Joe Biden is the head of the Democrats but beneath him, the org chart spiders out confusingly.
The people who actually run the party in the sense of hiring key staff or establishing funding priorities can be awfully opaque, and that opacity starts at the Democratic National Committee, a party organ that is controversial and whose functions can be unclear even to people who follow politics relatively closely. So let’s demystify the DNC.
Who belongs to the Democratic National Committee
This is pretty simple, on paper: The DNC is made up of the chairs and vice chairs of all the state Democratic parties and then a bunch of other people who are selected by individual state parties, a process that varies state by state. (For instance, the California Democratic Party’s executive board, who are themselves elected, elect 20 DNC members and another 13 are appointed.) Being a DNC member comes with very little power—they are superdelegates in presidential primaries, but reforms prior to the 2020 election reduced the autonomy of superdelegates—and they are unpaid. Most of them are relatively anonymous, and they don’t get insider information about what’s going on with the party.
David Atkins is one of those anonymous delegates. He was elected to be a DNC member from California. He hoped to both combat misinformation about what the DNC does and also try to make it more transparent and less top-down. In the last strange pandemic year, he said, DNC member duties amounted to “passively sitting in on Zoom meetings” where the chat function wasn’t even enabled. Members are also asked to raise money for the party and to amplify the message of party leaders. Earlier this month at the DNC winter meeting, members formally elected a slate of officer candidates headed by new chair Jaime Harrison, but there wasn’t an “election” in the sense that candidates ran against each other; in practice, Biden simply appointed people to these positions and the members approved those appointments, not that they had much choice.
The people who actually make decisions at the DNC are Harrison, new Executive Director Sam Cornale, and whoever gets hired as full-time staff. (Atkins said that in practice, even officers who aren’t the chair have very little input.) In years when the Democrats don’t control the White House, DNC members can exert some power during contested elections—truly competitive chair races are relatively rare, but we saw one in 2017, when Tom Perez defeated Keith Ellison, which was seen as a defeat for the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. But when the president is a Democrat, they can put whoever they want in charge of the DNC.
What the DNC actually does
In a Twitter thread last month, Atkins described the DNC as a “money firehose run by shoestring staff, run entirely (by) a handful of consultants and appointed fundraising honchos.” Basically, it makes decisions about where resources are allocated. Howard Dean, one of the most famous DNC chairs in history, ran a “50-state strategy” that tried to build up state party infrastructure even in places where Democrats weren’t immediately competitive in elections. The DNC also plays a role in presidential contests by organizing primary debates and the Democratic National Convention.
The DNC can be weak or strong depending on how it’s managed. Barack Obama failed to build it up and left it in terrible shape. Hillary Clinton has said that by the time she took control of the DNC (as presidential nominees do after primaries) it was “on the verge of insolvency.” She also singled out its data operation, which was notoriously bug-ridden and prone to crashes; the party was using the same data-storage system it had used since 2011, and it wasn’t equipped to handle the volume of voter information that campaigns needed. Even in 2018, Democrats didn’t have a central repository of information on voters, knowledge that was splintered between many groups, state parties, and campaigns. In this, the party was lagging behind the GOP, which has had such a system since 2016.
The good news is that a plan to consolidate all that data, which Perez had been pushing, came together during the 2020 campaign, belatedly giving the party a tool it absolutely needed. That’s the other thing that a strong, functional DNC can do: coordinate among the different organizations that make up the Democratic Party and try to make them more efficient.
Why people hate the DNC
Criticism against the DNC has many flavors. After the 2016 primaries, a number of lefties accused the DNC of rigging the contests against Sen. Bernie Sanders, complaints that were largely meritless. Often, complaints against the DNC from progressives about how the organization favors centrists confuse the DNC with the Democratic Party as a whole, or conflate the DNC with the DCCC and the DSCC, which are generally more powerful.
Another critique of the organization is that it hasn’t been as strong as its right-wing counterpart, the Republican National Committee, which in recent years has been better funded and more organized. Under Perez, the DNC has been trying to change course by improving its data infrastructure, putting more money into state parties, and conducting a training program for young organizers.
The most widespread complaint against the DNC may be that it has been running on what Perez called the “accordion model” during its recent winter meeting—the organization would expand every four years to help run presidential campaigns, then contract into weakness again. Perez has been trying to counteract that tendency, a project that Harrison vowed to continue.
In his speech at the winter meeting, Harrison promised not to “ignore the red” or “focus only on a few purple areas.” As a former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a recent Senate candidate in that state, it seems likely that he will know the needs of Democratic parties in red states and not ignore them. He also wants to reach out to rural voters and maintain a “constant presence” in communities in order to be a “community organization” that addresses the needs of voters even in years when the party isn’t calling upon them to vote.
That focus on organizing and cycle-long operations is what many people, including Atkins, have been calling for. Stacey Abrams’s organization in Georgia did this sort of outreach in Georgia for years and the Democrats have control of the Senate as a result; Abrams is frequently cited as a model for the party going forward.
“So far, everything (Harrison says) sounds great,” said Atkins. But it remains to be seen whether the DNC will make publicly announced moves that support the kind of operations that Harrison seems to want. The DNC could become more powerful and more transparent, a direction many of its critics have wanted it to go for years. But it is largely what the president and its higher-ups want it to be.
