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DNC chair candidates pitch their plans to win back the working class [1]
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Date: 2025-01-08
The race to become the new chair of the DNC is the ultimate insiders’ game. As with the presidential primary, the candidates vie to collect the support of delegates representing every state and different constituencies with influence within the Democratic Party. But unlike the race for the presidential nomination, the public does not get to vote or have any other sway over the outcome, because even the chair of the DNC does not exist to serve the public.
Much of the contest plays out behind closed doors, an undemocratic process that has historically been shaped by party bigwigs and donors. Choosing a leader this way is particularly troubling while Democrats grapple with the broad perception that what was once the party of working people is now a clubhouse for out-of-touch coastal elites.
While candidates jockey privately for individual endorsements from top Democratic officials and donors, they’re also pursuing the backing of various constituent groups leaders from within the party’s big tent. On Tuesday, they made their cases to the DNC Labor Council in a virtual forum that focused on rebuilding the party’s standing with working people and growing union power as a political imperative.
The 90-minute session represented one of the few opportunities to honestly assess their concrete ideas and populist plans, even if it required a lot of parsing through endless platitudes about the historic importance of organized labor, the need to message better, and which of their relatives carried union cards. After watching the forum several times, I edited down a version of the proceedings that contains only the candidates’ actual operational and political plans to fix this enormous problem.
You can watch the highlight cutdown of the video below, or check out a written collection of some of the more interesting quotes below the video.
NY State Sen. James Skoufis: We spent the majority of the past four years trying to convince voters the economy was doing well, when in fact, they go to the supermarket and see with their own two eyes that the prices of milk and meat and bread had doubled from just four years ago. So we've got to start being real and authentic with folks again and connecting with people where they are.
Nate Snyder: I would work more closely with unions to build a stronger partnership, and not just on election days. Too many times are we going to unions as a party and saying, “help, bail us out. Be that ATM, give us the volunteers. Have them hit the ground.” It's going to be now a partnership where, if you have an organizing drive and you need help, the Democratic Party is going to show up.
Jason Paul: I would steal pretty shamelessly from the union movement. The union movement has a process whereby its members pay dues and then get things for those dues and feel respected by paying those dues. Unions don't come back and say, “Oh, well, you paid your dues, but now I need another $10, I need another $5,” and bombard them, constantly asking for money. That is how the Democratic Party is currently operating.
I want to move to a model whereby the 20 million people who are this party, because they either vote in our low turnout primaries or give us money, are treated as partners and sign up for something much more, like a subscription model, like union dues and not a constant bombardment.
Minnesota Dems Chair Ken Martin: We worked in partnership with allies, including labor, to develop an economic agenda which focused on the struggles of everyday working-class Minnesotans and their obstacles to get ahead. This framework developed over a decade and called the Minnesota Values Project, led to one of the country's most aggressive pro-labor, pro-worker legislative packages to pass in the last decade or longer.
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We played an important role in ensuring that all of our DFL candidates and elected officials understood both during elections and, most importantly, when they are in office, the critical role that unions play in our state. Accountability matters.
Wisconsin Dems Chair Ben Wikler: We build our campaign plans and our priorities, we figure out how to navigate legislative sessions together, and we can do this nationwide. And that means regular meetings. If I'm DNC chair, with me and my senior staff will be the DNC Labor Council, international presidents and political directors, and on the way all the way down through the staff.
It means working with state parties to recruit candidates from the ranks of labor and to build relationships and accountability with Democratic candidates and staffers to the union movement.
Skoufis: The simple matter of fact is, with every one of those mailers or TV ads, there’s a 15-20% cut that's going to some friend of a friend of a congressman who has a vendor's contract that's ripping us off at the DNC. We've got to send that money to folks in the trenches like yourself, who can organize and organize year round, and person to person, peer to peer, begin to rebuild that once-grand coalition that we haven't seen in 16 years.
Wikler: Democrats need to listen deeply to working people and speak clearly in ways that actually reach working people who have other things to do than watch MSNBC. And to do that, we need a permanent campaign. The Wisconsin model is to communicate and organize everywhere all the time.
Martin: Let me just say we need to actually have union members out there talking to workers instead of celebrities. Who better to talk about education than a teacher? Who better to talk about hard work, getting up each and every day and having to go out and build affordable housing than a carpenter, right? I mean, the reality is is we've got great messengers. We just don't use them. We keep relying on the same failed tactics.
Paul: Another thing that I would want to think seriously about is that the organizers that I would have would absolutely be willing to engage labor and help them with the things they need. Cause there's another pair of hands around whose full-time job it is to make democracy work better, to make the party work better, and to make labor work better.
And so if there's another person who can, even if you wanna do an event, can go and grab bottled water for it, something very granular like that, I think if we have those kinds of people who can help and then we say, take the money that you were spending on the programs that we wanna do and go back to spending it on members, that's a partnership that's better than what we currently have.
Wikler: That starts with being on the hiring committee for the DNC's executive director and figuring out who should fill top staffing positions together.
That means regular meetings at every level of our organizations and building our strategic plans together.
It means not just a 50-state or 57-state party strategy. It means 57 strategies in each state and state party that unions help to craft and to implement, where we understand each of our capacities in the work that we can do together to fulfill our shared plans over a ten-year horizon. Because this fight is not one and done.
It means day-to-day solidarity in fights that come up unexpectedly or that are the fruit of years of planning like the Social Security Fairness Act that just got signed into law.
It means a labor education program developed with unions to train Democratic Party staff and campaign staffers and candidates so that they know how to live up to our party's values and partner with the labor movement in their work both when they run for office and when they are in office. It means working with union vendors.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley: So we need to recruit more candidates from labor to run for office, not down the ballot, but all across the ballot. We need labor's feedback in terms of message and tactics and what works and what doesn't work so that we can improve upon that every two weeks, not once a year.
Skoufis: I want new partnerships between the DNC and organized labor, whereby we are using DNC dollars, whether it's direct or through Super PACS to organize workplaces off-cycle, so that on-cycle we have larger membership roles to pull from and help our candidates electorally.
As DNC chair, I would look to as I've done as an elected official, bring the full bear of pressure and shame to bad-acting corporate interests when there are labor disputes, when there are contract disputes. But if it was as simple as showing up on a picket line, I think the election result would have been very different. We had the first president in history show up on a picket line for UAW. So it's not that simple.
We have to, as a party, not just show up at those episodic moments, we have to show up year-round.
We've got to go to your factory floor as both elected officials and party officials and lean into hard conversations because that trust has frayed, not just over the past year, the past election cycle.
Paul: What would really make a difference is if we could get Democrats, the 20 million Democrats who vote in all our who vote in the primaries or give to Democratic candidates, to do the same.
Because if the customers of those companies are unhappy because of the way they're treating their workers, then that's when they'll feel it and that's when they're more likely to kick.
And so that if we could get the regular ordinary Democrat to do that, then we would really be able to utilize our power. But right now, we can't utilize that power, because the Democratic Party has no means of communication to the average Democrat.
P.S. This is original reporting adapted from my newsletter, Progress Report. The newsletter covers political, labor, and policy stories that the media ignores, exposes conservative bigots, and supports grassroots movements. The journalism is entirely reader-supported, and this work can only continue with the public’s help. I will never spam you, sell your email, or let campaigns email you for donations. Please consider subscribing — your financial help would mean the world, but you can get it for free, too!
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