The Democratic National Committee is the central hub for the sprawling array of state parties and other committees that make up the Democratic Party. In presidential years, the DNC is especially prominent, as it plans and runs the Democratic National Convention, and sets the rules for the presidential nominating process. It is in charge of the party’s bylaws, the process of selecting delegates to the convention, and the writing of the party platform. The committee is made up of members elected and appointed through a relatively complicated process spelled out in the party bylaws, but the day-to-day business of the DNC is handled by its permanent staff. This includes providing technical support for state and local parties (who lack the resources of the national committee), and also helps people cast ballots through IWillVote.com. Most importantly, it raises funds (it brought in $490 million in the 2020 cycle) and distributes it to state and local parties while spending on media itself.
The DNC has improved its leadership and finances since the dark days of 2016, which is why Blue Tent recommends giving to the committee. But we also believe that there are other organizations that are a better fit for most donors and view giving to the DNC as a low priority. (Explore our methodology.)
What are its core strategies?
Compared to other party committees, which focus on specific electoral arenas, the DNC’s brief is broad. Its goal is to help Democrats win elections however it can, with a particular emphasis on presidential races.
To do this, it fundraises huge sums of money and redirects it to state and local Democratic parties, while also running its own commercials in support of the presidential candidate. (In this era, the Democratic National Convention, which the DNC organizes, can be thought of as a giant commercial.)
These two strategies are widely used by other party committees and PACs, but the DNC also attempts to build up infrastructure that all the elements of the party can use, including maintaining voter files and warehousing data for campaigns. One recent innovation is the Democratic Data Exchange program, which allows state parties, campaigns and super PACs to share data. (On this, the Democrats lagged behind Republicans.)
How does it spend money?
Here’s a breakdown of how the DNC spends on these strategies:
The Democratic National Convention. This is a sizable expense, amounting to $18 million in both 2016 and 2020. These events are widely covered by the media and are important events in terms of intra-party dynamics—2004’s gathering made Barack Obama a star, and others have showcased conflicts between factions of Democrats. Conventions traditionally provide the presidential nominee with a polling bump, though since both parties hold them, this effect sort of evens out in most cases. But putting on a convention is an important and consequential task.
Transfers. The DNC regularly gives large sums to state parties, particularly those who need the money in swing states. In 2020, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, it gave $12 million to Florida Democrats and $11 million to Pennsylvania Democrats, reflecting the importance of those states, and gave in all $110 million to other organizations, nearly a quarter of its budget. That actually reflects a turn away from transfers: In 2016, the DNC gave away $139 million to state and local parties, 44% of its budget.
Media. In midterm years, the DNC spends very little on media buys, but ramps up in a big way during presidential races. In 2020, the DNC invested more than it had previously in media buys, with 22% of its budget going to media compared to 11% in 2016. This included $50 million to the major Democrat-aligned firm GMMB, which mostly did TV ads for the DNC. An additional $39 million went to Bully Pulpit Interactive for a mix of digital and TV ads, while $26 million was spent on direct mail firm RWT Production. (The DNC did not spend significantly more on direct mail compared to 2016, but ramped up in other categories.)
What are the strengths and weaknesses of those strategies?
The DNC has so much money that it can invest in a wide variety of strategies every cycle, from digital and TV ads to transfers. While it engages in a flurry of activity every presidential election cycle, by design, it isn’t focused on any single project or tactic.
The advantage to this is that the DNC can survey the political landscape and decide how best to support Democrats, whether that’s through advertising or backing particular state parties. But the downside, for donors at least, is that money given to the DNC may end up funding a wide variety of organizations and activities. When you give to Joe Biden’s campaign, you are supporting his presidential candidacy; when you give to the DCCC, you are supporting efforts to win congressional races; but when you give to the DNC, the goal is more diffuse and your money might be routed to a state party that will use it to start a phone bank for a gubernatorial candidate, or for a round of digital advertising on behalf of a presidential campaign. A donation to the DNC is essentially a vote of confidence that it knows better than you what to do with that money. And there’s reason to be suspicious of that proposition.
What is its track record of achieving its goals?
The DNC took a major hit to its reputation in 2016 when Russian-affiliated hackers stole and then leaked DNC emails, revealing some of the party’s dirty laundry. This included a controversial fundraising agreement that benefited Hillary Clinton’s campaign that helped fuel claims from Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters that the primary was “rigged” against him. Donna Brazile, a longtime strategist who served as vice chair of the DNC, was revealed in those hacked emails to have leaked a debate question to Hillary Clinton; she took over as interim chair after Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned due to the controversies contained in the emails.
Brazile did not handle a difficult situation well. At one point in the 2016 campaign, Politico reported, the interim chair pumped money into get-out-the-vote efforts in Chicago and New Orleans—places where votes essentially didn’t matter—because she worried Clinton would lose the popular vote while winning the electoral college, which would look bad. For years after that, the DNC was nearly broke and had to take out numerous loans to continue operations. Brazile later claimed in a book that the Clinton campaign had a secret fundraising agreement with the DNC during the primary, and trashed Wasserman-Schultz, underlining how dysfunctional the DNC had become.
There was still so much rancor surrounding the DNC in the aftermath of the 2016 disaster that at the conclusion of an unusually contentious election for a new chair, establishment candidate Tom Perez was greeted with heckling from lefties after he won.
But Perez’s leadership seemed to have stabilized the party as a whole, and of course, winning elections in 2018 and 2020 made everyone happier. Still, the DNC has continued to make decisions that look questionable in hindsight. For instance, it spent heavily to support the state party in Florida in 2020, but Biden lost badly, and it is now clear Democrats didn’t have a good message for Latino voters. Partly, these problems are a result of trusting polls that have lately been unreliable, but it’s part of the DNC’s job to figure out what’s happening with the polls.
Of course, it’s probably unreasonable to expect the DNC to be clairvoyant, especially at a time when polling is so unreliable—very few people saw the 2020 Florida losses among Latinos coming, for example. But if the DNC doesn’t have a special ability to see into the future, why wouldn’t a donor instead spread out donations to state parties and candidates directly?
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
Like most major political committees, the DNC turns over its leadership every few years. The new chair as of 2021 is Jamie Harrison, best known for his unsuccessful 2020 run for Senate in South Carolina. Harrison, a Black man who formerly chaired the South Carolina Democratic Party, has pledged to build up party infrastructure and assist state parties in red parts of the country, a revival of the Howard Dean-era “50-state strategy.”
It’s too early to say whether Harrison’s tenure will be a success, but everyone Blue Tent has spoken with supports him, and there are hopes for his efforts to build the party in places where it has no short-term prospects for success, but which could have a long-term payoff.
What metrics and milestones does it use to measure its success?
Like other party committees, the DNC is tight-lipped about how it judges success internally, and did not respond to requests to comment for this brief.
How transparent is it about its spending, results, and learning from its mistakes?
Occasionally, the DNC will admit that something is wrong, usually after the problem has been widely acknowledged by others or the DNC has already fixed it. An example of this is the DNC’s transparency about the disaster that was its previous data management system after it adopted its new “Data Warehouse” in 2019. But like most party committees, it isn’t very transparent.
Is it committed to racial and gender equity both internally and in its strategies?
One thing that sets the DNC apart from other committees is that its bylaws mandate gender equity at all levels. The leadership team includes Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Texas Rep. Filemon Vela, a group that represents a wide swathe of demographic and geographic diversity. Its initial hiring decisions under Harrison were clearly made with diversity in mind. One notable hire is Roger Lau, the new deputy executive director, who, when he managed Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 bid, became one of the first Asian Americans to run a presidential campaign. Time will tell whether these hiring decisions will result in Democrats winning more Asian, Hispanic and Black votes in the coming cycles.
Does it collaborate well and is it respected by its peers?
The DNC’s most unique function is its sharing of data and tools to campaigns and state parties that aren’t able by themselves to access that level of resources. It has done a spotty job of doing that in the past (see this WIRED article about how bad the party’s data infrastructure used to be), but it has been on the upswing. And while the leadership failures of 2016 were extremely public and humiliating, Perez seems to have calmed the waters, and Harrison, though he hasn’t overseen a major election cycle, is largely seen as a good choice.
Does it have clear and realistic plans for the future?
In previous election cycles, the DNC (along with the rest of the big Democratic committees) has lagged behind its Republican counterpart, but that trend has been broken in 2021, which is good news for the committee’s financial health. With a solid financial footing, the DNC should be able to continue developing tools Democratic campaigns can use. Now, if only the DNC could figure out why the polls are so persistently wrong.
Conclusion
Giving to the DNC is attractive to major donors for several reasons. One is that there are FEC-mandated limits on gifts to candidates, and mega-donors will quickly run into those limits. The DNC offers them an easy way to give lots of money. For instance, Biden’s campaign entered into an arrangement with the DNC to create the Biden Victory Fund, allowing big donors to give up to $620,600, which would then be split between the presidential campaign, the DNC and 26 state parties. Major donors who help fund the Democratic National Convention have traditionally received lots of perks. The DNC has said it is cracking down on this, but donations can buy access, and given the party’s ties to Hollywood, big donors can find themselves hanging out with movie stars after dropping a chunk of change on the DNC.
The vast majority of donors, however, won’t be donating such large quantities. For the small or medium donor, donating to the DNC makes less sense. Sending money directly to the campaigns that the DNC is working to support is a better option (campaigns get cheaper TV ad rates, for one thing), and donors interested in building power in one particular state or political arena have no shortage of other groups they can give to. Finally, although it’s important to make sure the DNC is well-funded (we’ve seen what a cash-strapped DNC looks like), at the moment, it has plenty of money. So while Blue Tent recommends giving to the DNC because of the work that it does to support the party as a whole, it should be a low priority. (Explore our methodology.)