Don't Be Fooled-- The Party's Elite Establishment Still Controls The Democratic Party

Trump is so disgusting. Reich is so right about him-- and his enablers in Congress. It seems impossible the Democratic Party could lose against them even if they try. How about if they try really, really hard? Ah... so we're talking about the DCCC. Did you see that piece by Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic on Monday: The Democratic Party Just Ticked Off Its Youngest Organizers? Pelosi really should get rid of Bustos before it's too late. "The youths in the Democratic Party are angry," wrote Godfrey. "Sixty-eight chapters of the College Democrats are urging voters not to donate to the party’s congressional-campaign arm after it instituted a new policy to protect incumbents from primary challenges. The protesting students say that the change will deter young candidates and people from historically marginalized communities from running for office. Their outrage isn’t just noteworthy because they represent younger voters in the electorate-- these young people are also some of the party’s key organizers and activists."

“As College Democrats, we did a lot of work to build the new Democratic majority,” says Hank Sparks, the 20-year-old president of the Harvard College Democrats, which is spearheading the boycott. “This is a policy that’s going to silence a lot of voices like ours.”

They did do a lot of work: College Democrats help form the backbone of the party’s organizing infrastructure. The chapters currently boycotting the policy change from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee canvassed and phone-banked for dozens of Democratic congressional candidates across the country, including some of the 40 so-called majority-makers who flipped House seats from red to blue. Alumni from these College Democrats chapters have gone on to work for lawmakers on Capitol Hill and as staffers on presidential campaigns, and some have even run for office themselves. And current members are already gearing up to help Democrats up and down the ballot win in 2020.

Until the boycott’s announcement, progressive organizations and lawmakers such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had been the most vocal opponents of the DCCC’s new rule. The fact that the College Democrats-- the party’s stalwart organizers and its future leaders, staffers, and reliable voters-- have joined in the protest demonstrates that they, too, are worried the party is setting itself up for failure.

The DCCC unveiled the new standards in March, which require vendors hoping to do any work with the committee-- political-consulting firms or campaign advertisers, for example-- to sign on to a set of terms. The one the College Democrats oppose is an agreement for vendors not to contract with any primary candidate who is challenging an incumbent Democrat. Explaining her opposition to the rule, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that “primaries are often the only way that underrepresented and working-class people are able to have a shot at pursuing elected office.” During a closed-door meeting with DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos on March 27, leaders of the House Progressive Caucus pressured her to reverse the new standards.

The controversy surrounding the vendor rule embodies one of the central debates currently roiling the party. According to the DCCC and other Democrats, the party’s core job is to protect its incumbents, even in safe blue districts: How can Democrats protect their House majority and win back the Senate, they wonder, if they’re spending time and resources mounting challenges to their fellow Democrats? But others in the party, many of them progressives, argue that the DCCC shouldn’t discourage primary opponents from challenging any Democrat-- even the longest-serving incumbents. After all, what if such incumbents no longer represent the interests of their constituents?

The protesting College Democrats, whose views run the ideological gamut, argue that the DCCC’s new vendor rule shows that the party is ignoring its younger voices—their voices—in favor of maintaining the status quo. The policy, they say, will only serve to stymie the evolution of the Democratic Party, which is skewing younger, browner, and more female.

The DCCC might see the victories of outsider candidates in 2018, such as Ocasio-Cortez, as a reason to impose the vendor rule. She mounted the first primary campaign in more than a decade against Joseph Crowley, beating the powerful Queens-based congressman who was long considered a future speaker of the House. But the College Democrats argue that victories like hers are evidence that the party should be allowing, if not encouraging, primary challenges, especially in safe blue districts; clearly, they say, the district was ready for new representation. (That’s not to say that progressive candidates were responsible for the House majority; to the contrary, moderate candidates provided the most wins in the last midterm elections.)

“We are stakeholders in the future of the Democratic Party,” says Ruby Schneider, the 20-year-old chair of the College Democrats at the University of Michigan, which worked on behalf of several state and federal candidates during the midterms, including Representative Elissa Slotkin. “We want to see a party that reflects diverse identities and is open to change.” Primary challenges, Schneider adds, allow for “necessary shifts.”

Several of the College Democrats I spoke with cited increased voter support across the country for progressive proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and suggested that preventing progressives from launching primary challenges will hinder the party from achieving those goals. “We have a bunch of younger and progressive Democrats who want the party to be taken in that direction only to see the leadership and the establishment not be responsive to our needs,” says Ben Pearce, the president of the University of Southern California College Democrats.

Pearce’s chapter, whose members helped phone-bank for candidates such as Representative Katie Hill in 2018, plan to avoid DCCC-sponsored volunteer events during the 2020 election, and will instead work directly with candidates. “I don’t think it does the party any favors to protect incumbents who might not be as responsive to the new voices that are coming forward,” Pearce says...

But the consequences of the DCCC’s new policy are already being felt on the ground, and the College Democrats I spoke with are troubled by it. Marie Newman, a 55-year-old progressive and former nonprofit executive, is challenging the anti-abortion Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinois’s third congressional district. Newman, who has the support of several progressive lawmakers in her party, ran against Lipinski in 2018, but lost by 2 percent. She’s trying again in 2020, but since the DCCC’s new vendor policy was enacted, four different consultants have dropped her campaign, Newman has said. (On the bright side for her campaign, however, the attention that progressive activists have brought to the vendor rule have helped her raise almost $45,000.)

Interesting that Shane Savitsky at Axios tried making the case that the establishment is losing power inside the Democratic Party. I wish it were so. But... well, let's hear Shane's rationale. "Traditional political kingmakers like the parties' national committees and powerful insiders," he wrote, "have lost their edge for 2020 as buzzy, insurgent campaigns have the ability to seize control of the narrative-- and bundles of cash. The smoke-filled room has burned to the ground, and the advantage now lies fully with the electorate to determine what they want. For Democrats, that means making sense of a massive field of more than 20 candidates-- while, for Republicans, that means bending to the originator of this trend: President Trump. We're seeing it as the 2020 race heats up, and the traditional voices of the establishment stay silent":

• The closest thing to a kingmaker for the Democratic field is President Obama. If you believe the spin from Joe Biden's team, they didn't seek his endorsement to allow the former veep to stand on his own. And Obama's team wants to stick close to a long-held D.C. custom: former presidents sit above the fray.
• The Republican establishment has been remade in Trump's own image and the old guard-- the Bushes and Romneys-- that could conceivably mount some sort of challenge are out in the wilderness, neutered.

OK, true for the Republicans, absolutely. But who cares. They could all drop dead tomorrow and the world would be a better place. As for the Democrats... that's a really weak argument. Biden, a congenital liar on a grand, almost Trumpian, scale, begged Obama for his endorsement and when Obama turned him down, he made up some cock'n'bull story about wanting to win it on his own.

"We're seeing it in the policy platforms that the 2020 candidates are putting forward-- many of which scare the hell out of the establishment," he wrote. Yeah, but those policies are being killed by Pelosi, even before McTurtle or Trump can get them. Neither the Green New Deal nor Medicare-For-All will ever pass the House while Pelosi and Hoyer are in charge-- not to mention $15 minimum wage or free public colleges. The Establishment doesn't want it and it doesn't make any difference to them that the grassroots or even the presidential candidates do. Which brings us to the Establishment candidate, Status Quo Joe, who they are determined to give the nomination to as clearly as they were determined to give it to Hillary, even though Biden will be beaten by Trump even worse than Hillary was.

And when you're part of the Establishment little things like this happen: "Cable News Is Covering Biden As Much As Every Other Democratic Candidate Combined." Biden was mentioned in more clips that any other candidate across the three networks last week, and he was mentioned almost four times as often as Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had been getting the most coverage of any 2020 candidate before Biden joined the race. For the second consecutive week, Biden was mentioned in about as many clips as all the other candidates combined.