Opening the DNC's Black Box

Making public the names of the 448 voting members of the Democratic National Committee, as the party prepares to pick a new chair.

I have a big piece that just got published this morning in The American Prospect about the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee, which is holding leadership elections in three weeks. If you are a politics junkie and/or a grassroots activist, you may have already heard something about the leading candidates for party chair, Ben Wikler and Ken Martin, who are respectively the state chairs of the Wisconsin and Minnesota parties. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is also a longshot contender. But for all the attention on who will be the next chair, in a position to lead Democratic efforts to respond to Trump as well as to change how the party operates, until now the names of all 448 people who will vote for that person as well as other top officers has been a secret.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s in the article: Power at the DNC is concentrated at the top, which is hardly a surprise. Seventy-three members owe their positions to the chair, Jaime Harrison, who appointed them as a bloc in 2021. The DNC by-laws say that there’s supposed to be a vote on these “at-large” appointees, but Harrison – like his predecessors – pushed them in as a bloc, subject only to an up-or-down vote en masse. Many of those are DC insiders, including people like Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Harold Ickes, and Maria Cardona, all of whom have sidelines as lobbyists. Some of these at-large members are big fundraisers, including one whose main claim to fame was that he was a consultant to Sam Bankman-Fried back in 2021-22. Some are political cronies of President Biden from Delaware, including a lobbyist who was a childhood friend of his son Beau. And a good number of at-large members are union leaders, several of whom curiously do not make that info public in their bios.

Then there are the state party chairs and co-chairs, 114 in all (though Ken Martin is also a national officer of the party as head of the Association of State Democratic Committees). You can find their names on state party websites. But each state gets at least two additional DNC members, with larger states getting more, and many of those people have been invisible until now. There are 213 of those people on my list (the DNC says publicly there are only 200) and many of these folks, especially from big industrial states like NY, NJ, PA and OH, are not listed on their state party websites. And some are real doozies, as you’ll learn from the piece.

Prying open the membership roster of the DNC is just a small step towards making the Democratic Party more transparent and accountable. But it matters for a variety of reasons. Michael Kapp, a DNC voting member who is one of California’s elected representatives to the committee, told me that even members like him have had a hard time getting contact information for fellow DNCers. That, he said, is all part of how the poohbahs at the top of the party keep control. “There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp told me. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”

When there’s a Democrat holding the White House, the party chair has been traditionally selected by the president. This is somewhat understandable, given that as the party’s nominee, that person has earned a majority of the national convention delegates. Harrison, a corporate lobbyist himself who ran a very expensive and failed bid against South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in 2020, was appointed by Joe Biden, no doubt in part as payback to Rep. James Clyburn, whose endorsement there helped seal his 2020 victory over Bernie Sanders. (Pour one out for Clyburn, who was “ridin’ with Biden” til the bitter end last summer, and more recently made the brilliant suggestion that the president should pardon Trump before he regains office.) But the DNC under Harrison took further steps to entrench its own power, passing a by-laws change in 2022 that gave it a veto over any rules changes that a national convention might pass. So efforts for internal reform, like one to ban the use of dark money during party primaries face an uphill battle.

A new party chair elected at this moment of Democratic doldrums might have more latitude to change how the party operates. Both Wikler and Martin are talking a lot about upgrading how Democrats engage the media and they agree about shifting more resources from the national party to help build state party infrastructure. Both have also been very successful fundraisers for their state parties, though that may make them too well-qualified to actually change anything. There’s no incentive for them to challenge a donor-led culture, after all, and until ambitious younger party leaders who want to ascend find a different way to rise, that won’t change.

Since my piece appeared this morning, I’ve heard from party activists in various states who have shared stories about how they have organized, in some cases for years, to wrest control away from local machines. It’s hard work, and often party regulars outlast reformers because they have sources of income and patronage to dole out. Or reformers get co-opted, or accept jobs inside the system, or just give up. If there’s a rebellion brewing now inside the Democratic Party, that would be news to me. But hope springs eternal.

--Bonus link: Some people have been on this beat for years, most notably David Moore of Sludge and David Sirota of Lever News. I benefited greatly from their work in reporting this piece.

Some notes on the current moment

(With apologies to the Harper’s Index)

—Value of the rare watch Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was wearing as he announced the end of fact-checking on Meta’s platforms: $900,000

—Number of pornographic ads Meta showed to users in Europe last year: more than 3,000.

—Date in science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower when wildfires overwhelm a fictional city called Robledo near her home-town of Altadena, California: February 1, 2025.

—Number of residents of Altadena and Pasadena that have been forced to flee from the current Eaton Fire ravaging the Los Angeles area: 33,000 so far.

—Year Butler wrote that book: 1993.

—Number of mutual aid groups in the Los Angeles area that you can donate to right now: 246.

—Legal limit on how much individuals or corporations can donate to a president’s inaugural fund: Infinity.

—Record-breaking amount that Trump’s inaugural fund has raised to date: $170 million.

—Amount raised by Biden’s 2020 inaugural fund: $62 million.

—Amount that Amazon is paying Melania Trump and her colleagues for the rights to make a vanity documentary about her: $40 million.

—Number of campaign rallies where Trump has tilted against windmills: 29

—Number of times he has claimed windmills drive whales crazy: 18

Must reading

Mike Podhorzer: “How Trump ‘Won’.”

Sherrilyn Ifill: “This Is It: Facing Trump 2.0.”

Anand Giridharadas: “How to live under Trump II.”

Will Oremus: “Meta’s ‘tipping point’ is about aligning with power.” (gift link)

Must listening

—Leah Greenberg of Indivisible on Chris Hayes’ podcast on “Strategies for the Resistance 2.0.”

—Abraham Josie Reisman on the Conspirituality podcast discussing “Trump the Babyface, Trump the Heel.” (This interview convinced me more than ever that the professional wrestling code of neo-kayfabe explains Trump’s ability to dominate national discourse better than anything else.)