Its time for Change

We don't need DNC chaos for chaos reasons - we just need an adult willing to step up and take a six month job.

For the record, I’ve met Ken Martin once, for about 30 seconds. He is a perfectly nice man, and I appreciate what he has given to the cause of party activism. But in my nearly three decades of grinding at the cause of democracy, I’ve never seen the DNC held at lower regard. In fact, many people I respect argue it is no longer a necessary institution. And that is a problem.

I grew up in state party politics, and early in my career, I saw first-hand how the DNC could be a vital piece of the party infrastructure. The big party committees focus on federal races, meaning a strong DNC has its biggest impacts down the ballot. I saw it first hand in 2006, when thanks to Howard Dean’s DNC 50-state plan, I had competent staff who could manage state legislative races.

In fact, now Congressman Darren Soto is a direct line to Dean’s plan. Darren’s first win, a special election where we flipped a GOP state-house seat, was managed by a young Florida Man named Nate Jenkins, one of Florida’s 50-state staffers. Nate himself went on to work in the Obama White House, and to this day, remains one of the most talented people I’ve ever known.

So when Martin was elected, every media chance I had, I tried to validate what they were doing, to say that even in the face of a lack of donor confidence, we still very much needed a robust DNC. For me, 2026 symbolizes a lot more than a one cycle wave - it is potentially a generational opportunity to rebuilt trust in parts of the country, and with constituencies who have left us. Trump has opened a massive door, and it is on us to take advantage. A strong DNC helps with this.

I participated in the autopsy. My perspective was one who had been intimately involved in the lead up to the launch of the eventual nominee, and then going off months later and running an IE for that raised and spent just under $100 million for him. I never worked in the Biden White House (heck, I never even went to the Biden White House), then ran the same IE in 2024 under a very different outside effort set-up. The DNC autopsy team wanted to know best practices from 2020 and 2024 in terms of how the independent efforts worked, and they were curious how our data either agreed with, or contradicted the data they got from elsewhere. I have a lot of opinions on this that I shared with the autopsy folks. You can read some of them in the piece I wrote for Bulwark about the election in the winter of 2024.

While the conversation, for entirely personal reasons, was cathartic, I was honestly skeptical it would lead to anything. I’ve never worked on a campaign that read the after-action report of the previous losing race, and in the end, how the DNC and IEs are set up will fall to the eventual 2028 nominee, and while I would hope they learn from the previous cycles, it will be their call, and largely their call alone.

In the end, despite the desire by some to see blood in the streets, the autopsy was never really about ascribing blame, or laying out things that are obvious. Rather, I saw the autopsy as having one goal: closure.

Activists, donors, and everyday Democrats leaned in hard in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and fair or unfair, particularly a lot of donors I’ve spoken to felt misled this last cycle about just how rough the situation was out in the states as they were urged to keep writing checks with lots of zeroes. But in the end, we all know why 2024 was bad, and the autopsy had no reason to be complicated. Frankly, a simple document that said: “Here is what the polling showed, here are the decisions that were made, and here are some best and worst practices” would have sufficed. The DNC needed to check a box - albeit for some, a very important box.

An autopsy done in the spring of 2025 would have created a bunch of bad news stories. People would have complained it didn’t go far enough, but it would have been over. Even if the DNC had dropped this incomplete product in December, we’d be living this exact media cycle, but eventually everyone would have moved on. But the fact we are still talking about as we are about to go to June in 2026 is why we need change. This week’s news is entirely a self-manufactured, self-imposed crisis.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out something extremely obvious to a reporter, that the DNC paid a “penalty” with many donors and activists for not finishing the autopsy. Martin’s response was pure gaslighting (just go watch that PodSave interview if you want to see what he said).

And this has been the experience for many who have dared even suggest anything about the DNC for month, while anyone with any kind of comms-brain knew one obvious point: Until the autopsy came out, it was going to repeatedly bubble up as a story. Every time it predictably did, the Martin response was defensive and dismissive. No wonder the operation is in debt.

I appreciate Martin’s desire to lean into state parties (and his own personal commitment to his own state party). This is the right call. But it is hard to do that in a meaningful way when you have a negative balance sheet. And everything that has happened at his DNC in the last 24 hours — the last 2 weeks — the last 2 months — and frankly, the last 2 years has made it easier to solve that problem. There are two choices now: stay the course and make the best of it, or find someone with real political stature to step up.

My hope is someone of stature would step up. A former Governor or Member of Congress (or even sitting one), or even someone like a Rahm or Joe Kennedy III (or asking Howard Dean to come back for a few months), would be ideal, as would a well-regarded operative. When you don’t control the White House, winning elections is the only job of the DNC Chair, and there are any number of highly competent and trusted operatives who could do this job (looking at you Greg Schultz!).

In a perfect world, someone would be willing to carry the mantle for six months, then oversee more thorough conversation about who can lead the institution through the primary process in 2027 and 2028. Given that person is going to have a huge impact on the primary calendar, debate schedule, and early investments in the 2028 map, having a leader who has the confidence of everyone running will be vital.

As for 2024, in the end, it was a really shitty environment for dems. Combine this with the fact our coalition has been shrinking since 2012, and losing was the most likely outcome. President Biden, who I am proud to have helped in 2020, had no business running again (and I still believe had he announced this on day one in 2019, he would have won by a much larger margin in 2020). The economy was (and remains) shit. Voters are rightfully mad. It was a change cycle, and we didn’t offer change - and swing voters thought we had lost our ideological minds. It doesn’t take a 200 page unfinished document to say that.

There are a lot of things the DNC has traditionally done that other groups can do, but there are things really only the DNC and state parties can do. I’ve lived in a state where the decision was made to outsource much of the basic party building operations to outside groups, and well, you tell me if the Florida experiment has worked. We need a strong DNC, and the fact is to get one, we need to move forward. A new leader would give us the chance to do just that.