DNC chair candidates

The DNC is headed by a chairperson, five vice chairpersons, a treasurer, a secretary, and a national finance chair, who are all elected by vote of members of the Democratic National Committee itself. 448 DNC members will vote on a chair; a simple majority of votes is required to win.  Voting takes place February 1 at the DNC winter meeting.  Wiki

I like Ben Wikler to lead the DNC. I also like David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives running for vice chair.  Below is the video of the virtual forum that was live on the Democrats.org YouTube channel over the weekend.

Above the video I have posted Ben Wikler’s response to the opening forum question because he gave an A+ answer.  He brought up an issue toward the end that many of us in Iowa have noticed with campaigns for some time now.  That is, they seem to be listening to consultants and ignoring grassroots activists except for the daily email ask for money.

First question to the chair candidates was this:

What was the DNC’s biggest mistake in 2024 and what would you immediately do to fix it?

Ben Wikler was called on first.

“In the last election there were millions of Americans who didn’t know that we were fighting for working families and if we’re going to correct that we need to communicate everywhere – that means on conservative media where conservative voices dominate and tell stories about democrats. That means building a progressive media ecosystem where we tell our own story and critically it means speaking to folks who are not tuned into politics who don’t trust either party – people who are paying attention to YouTube and podcasts and Tik Tok, people who are on platforms that often an older generation of democrats haven’t heard of but dominate news and information for younger voters. That means building a war room nationwide that is on offense laying out the fight for working people across race and ethnicity in rural areas, suburbs and cities alike.

And in every state building a strategy custom built for that state to be able to make the case that republicans are trying to divide us based on our identities in order to rip everybody off.

We know the uniting thing in this country is that everyone needs a safe place to sleep at night; they need food on their breakfast table, they need to be able to send their kids to great public schools.

In this country unions have tremendous trust. Small business has tremendous trust. But the democratic party and the republican party don’t have that trust because people need to see and feel that we’re fighting for them. Just as democrats in fact are fighting for working people in every corner of this nation. So it’s communicating, it’s organizing from the ground up across our full coalition in all the states.

And I’ll say this too. In the last election we lost touch with a lot of voters because we weren’t showing up where they were and there were consultants and people making decisions who we need to take a hard look at. We should go into this next election cycle with no commitments to anyone who’s been on a campaign payroll before and do a full audit top to bottom.

There are candidates in this race who are raising money from firms that made millions of dollars from contracts with the DNC. I am going into this race committed to convening DNC members to think about how we build our consultant networks and making sure we’re spending based on the path to victory, our coalition, and our values.”  [bolding BFIA’s]

And here is an MSNBC segment with David Hogg where he makes a very persuasive case for his candidacy and discusses why he’s running. In my opinion it would be a why-we-can’t-have-nice-things moment if we pass up this opportunity to put Hogg in a leadership position at the DNC. We need this impressive young man who at 24 years of age is older than his years.

So pick a candidate and lobby our IDP voting members.

Iowa DNC members:

Scott Brennan, DNC Member
June Owens, DNC Member
Jan Bauer, DNC Member At-Large
Sandy Opstvedt, DNC Member At-Large

IDP contact info:
5661 Fleur Drive| Des Moines, IA 50321|Phone: 515-244-7292|info@iowademocrats.org