In Austin, DNC Candidates Pledge to Rebuild the Democratic Party from the Grassroots
You’ve heard it a million times from Republican candidates — the powers-that-be in Washington, D.C., are out of touch, and the federal monstrosity they control is sucking energy from the states, where power should ultimately rest. But that, too, is the message of the five candidates vying to chair the Democratic National Committee, who gathered at a meeting of the Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee on Saturday in an Austin hotel.
The two frontrunners, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, and the three others — state party leaders from Idaho, New Hampshire and South Carolina — promised their Texas audience a complete rebuild and refocusing of what is, for the moment, a broken and beaten party. Since 2008, Democrats have lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, and this year’s result was the Democrats’ worst drubbing since Reconstruction. As a group, they faulted the party leadership, though never by name, for losing touch with local Democrats outside of swing states, and they vowed to fix it.
The candidates each talked for about 10 minutes. Raymond Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said the DNC was opaque and inscrutable. He was pointed in his complaints about national Dems. New Hampshire flipped blue this year, Buckley said, only because “we’re the only battleground state that said ‘hell no’ to the Clinton campaign” running its own voter contact programs. Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton Brown, who declared her candidacy just yesterday, had similar critiques, as did South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison. “It used to be that the Democratic Party was the party that fought for all of us,” Harrison said. “Now what they get from us is TV ads.”
But the day’s headliners were Perez and Ellison, an outsider candidate tied to Bernie Sanders. Their competing bids have become a proxy war of sorts between two factions, reflecting the fact that the split exposed during this year’s Democratic presidential primary is here to stay. Those who still harbor deep resentment over Sanders’ candidacy can’t stand Ellison, and those who have a deep distaste for the party’s establishment see Perez as an agent of the status quo.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/austin-dnc-rebuild-democratic-party-grassroots/
Cross-posted in the General Discussion forum.
