I watched the DNC Forum Last Night

And now what I really want is a bottle of whiskey

I chose not to spend my Thursday night watching a forum on the next DNC Chair, but my one of my sweet dogs had other thoughts. Somewhere around 5:00 AM, the older one decided she and I needed to go inspect a potential threat to the back yard (she awakening me with a roundhouse paw to the face), so off we went.

Fortunately, we determined the perimeter was indeed clear, so she went back to sleep, but alas I did not. In my attempt to join her in slumber, I decided to watch last night’s DNC Chair candidate forum hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Politics.

Having read some of the twitter commentary, my hopes weren’t high. Those low expectations were met.

Let me start by saying what I wanted to hear.

• I wanted to hear a serious conversations about how exactly we grow the party, both geographically and from a coalition stand point.

• I wanted to hear candidates talk about how we stand up real state party infrastructure, particularly in competitive and potentially competitive states where there is currently little to none.

• I wanted to hear about how we support the down-ballot, how we grow the party from the bottom up, how we would empower the voices of people who are winning elections in tough areas, and generally, how we start winning elections where we are losing.

• I wanted to hear them talk about the looming reality of the next census, how it will change not only our path to the presidency, but our path to majorities in congress.

• Basically, I wanted to hear them talk about how we lift up winning.

I don’t think more than 2 minutes was spent on any of this.

For me, Jason Paul, one of the candidates for Chair, said the one thing I wish they had spent the entire forum talking about. He noted, rightly, that in many parts of the country, there are voters who don’t have any friends who are Democrats, don’t really know anyone who is a Democrat, and don’t know any Democratic candidates or office holders that they admire. He was saying a real truth: that we, as a party, are simply irrelevant to the daily lives — and simply not a part of the community of a huge swath of America.

Not only does this have real world implications for delivering a message, it also has caused us to fall off the map electorally, even inside of states where we have invested real money. For example, if you look at the Presidential election results in the 580 counties that make up the following eight states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Democrats have lost ground since the 2012 election in all but 90 of those counties.

And we haven’t lost just a little bit of ground.

Lets look at the size and scale of the GOP gains from the 2012 margin

• More than 10 points: 364 of the 580 counties

• More than 20 points: 158 of the 580 counties.

• More than 30 points: 29 of the 580 counties.

By comparison, the Democratic gains:

• More than 30 points: 2 counties

• More than 20 points: 7 counties

• More than 10 points: 27 counties.

And just to level-set what this means. The two counties where Democrats gained 30 points since the 2012 margins added a total of 56,431 votes to our vote margins.

For sure, that is great. But, by comparison, Republicans more than made all of that up in one swing-state county, Macomb County MI, where they have gained 17+% points since 2012, costing my side 85,786 votes off the Obama 2012 margins (As an aside, I am looking forward to doing some focus groups with Unite the Country in Macomb in a few weeks).

Did the DNC forum talk about this?

Nope. In fact, I am pretty sure more time was spent talking about who would serve as at-large members of the DNC than was spent talking about any of this.

But I can promise one thing: if the DNC isn’t focused on this for the next 2-4 years, the foundation will be shaky for 2028.

During the forum that Jonathan Martin hosted in Michigan, he asked a candidate which was more important: fairness or winning. The candidate gave a word salad of an answer, but winning wasn’t really part of it. And winning is the only job of the DNC.

I think the DNC is an easy scapegoat for activists. I don’t believe the DNC wins or loses elections, rather, I think they create the environment and the toolbox for elections to be won. Further, for all the handwringing about the place, there are some really smart people at the DNC right now. For example, Sam Cornale, who currently runs the place, is easily one of the best operatives that our party has (and a genuinely nice human), and the next Chair should beg him to stay.

But that being said, the next Chair is going to enter the building with very little of the infrastructure that existed for the last Chair. There is no President to help raise money - and there are no majorities in either the House or the Senate to serve as a draw. This is why the next Chair has to be laser focused — laser focused on the things that actually grow the party, that improve our chances to win elections — that set us up for success in a post-2030 map.

Those things aren’t sexy. They don’t create viral moments, or get activists all fired up. And I honestly don’t care if I ever see the next DNC Chair on TV standing up some agenda, or pushing back on Trump. There are plenty of elected voices for that work. I want my next DNC Chair laser focused on the work.

That is what I wanted to hear this morning when I watched last night’s forum, and that is what I hope to hear from whoever wins this thing when they walk into that building on South Capitol Street, SE.

Not a single one of us can control what Donald Trump does - hell, not even the people who work for him can. But we can control what we do to build a stronger foundation for electoral success.

Just this week, data showed Republicans gained about 1,000 net voters in New Mexico in the last month, and flipped voter reg in Hillsborough County from a Dem plurality edge to a GOP one. Neither of these data points care who is on the audit committee, or who signed a pointless pledge, but both matter to whether we win or lose. That’s the forum I wanted to see.

*Just for the record, I have never worked for the DNC in any capacity and I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than winning.