Send Elon Musk to Mars!

The sooner the better. As the far-right mega-billionaire rifles illegally through the US government, opposition is rising fast. Plus, a post-mortem on the DNC chair race.

As I write this, people are in motion. Over the weekend, there were marches to defend immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Houston, Greensboro, San Jose and elsewhere; Monday morning, federal workers and others joined outside of the federal Office of Personnel Management to tell Elon Musk to “Fork Off” (a reference to the “Fork in the Road” email sent to two million feds last week urging them to take a buyout and leave government); Monday night a big crowd gathered near New York University’s Langone Hospital to demand that it keep providing life-saving healthcare to trans kids.

Outside U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters on Monday, workers and their supporters were joined by Members of Congress, where Rep. Jamin Raskin (D-MD) declared, to cheers, “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized the Treasury Department, but you don't control the money of the American people--the US Congress does that…We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.” Tuesday, a coalition of groups led by Indivisible are planning to rally outside the Treasury Department. Wednesday, a new decentralized protest group calling itself the “50501 movement” is aiming to stage protests in all fifty state capitols.

And they said resistance to Trump was dead and “accommodation and acceptance” were “the new watchwords.”

Fifty thousand people were on a “call to action” organized by Indivisible, MoveOn, the Working Families Party, the American Federation of Teachers and allies Sunday night (watch here if you missed it). They were urged to get in their Senators’ faces by going to their offices in person this week to demand that they use all their powers to gum up the works until Musk’s illegal takeover of the Treasury Department’s servers is reversed. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) clearly got that message and said he would put a blanket hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees until U.S.A.I.D.’s operations were restored.

We’ve entered a very dangerous part of the second Trump presidency. Not just because he and Musk are flexing their muscles, but also because street protests—especially ones that are spontaneous, un-permitted and semi-leaderless--have their own tricky logic. Will police in all those state capitols respect protestors’ right to free speech? Will protestors stay peaceful? Will instigators or agents provocateurs try to stage a confrontation to draw in repression? As protests spread, will Trump and Musk back down? Given how much Trump and many of his minions vocally lust for an opportunity to call on the military and police to suppress dissent, the risk of a terrible escalation is high. But what choice do we have but to stand up and put our bodies onto the gears of the machine to try make it stop?

In some other universe, we would already have a functioning, federated network of state organizations capable of organizing and coordinating opposition to the Trump onslaught, but instead we have the Democratic party on the one hand, and a loose coalition of national progressive organizations and labor unions that are mostly “associations without members” (in Theda Skocpol’s words), capable of speaking on behalf of lots of angry but atomized individuals but not deeply rooted in local bases that they know intimately. If we’re lucky, the energy of the next few months will go into making those associations stronger and more capable of organizing and coordinating local, state and national action. We shall see. No one else is coming to save us.

—Bonus thought: We need a unifying symbol. Maybe you’ve seen one out in the wild, and if so, share in the comments. I’m no graphic artist, so this is the best I’ve come up with so far.

I threw it out on BlueSky and got almost 100 likes. Your mileage may vary.

About That Democratic Party

Today, though, while memories are still fresh, I want to offer some notes on the state of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the contest to pick a new chair of the Democratic National Committee. In case you missed the news, on Saturday, Ken Martin, the head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party and also president of the Association of State Democratic Parties (ASDC), won the election on the first ballot. With a total of 428 (out of a possible 448) votes cast, Martin beat rival Ben Wikler, the head of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, by 246.5 votes to 134.5. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley came in a distant third with 44 votes. Four DNC members abstained, two voted for Faiz Shakir, and one voted for Jason Paul. The actual roll call vote has yet to be released.

As I’ve previously noted, the fight between Martin and Wikler was not ideological. Both said they wanted to strengthen party-building across the country, both expressed due deference to Democrats’ aging leaders in Congress, both had nothing but loyal words for President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (though, speaking before a Democratic youth conference, both said they would have included a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic convention last summer). Martin started the race for chair with a big advantage, as his years steering the ASDC enabled him to build strong relationships with state party chairs. By my count, 39 party chairs publicly came out for him before the vote, compared to just five for Wikler. On the other hand, Wikler made the most of his greater strength as a public communicator, racking up early appearances on TV programs like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and endorsements from influential columnists like Michelle Goldberg. He was also endorsed by eight national unions and many progressive organizations including Indivisible, MoveOn, and Way to Win—but unfortunately for him those groups don’t have many voting members of the DNC.

And if you go by the endorsements of elected officials, you’d also be hard-pressed to pigeonhole either Martin or Wikler. Martin was backed by machine Democrats like South Carolina’s Rep. James “Ridin with Biden” Clyburn, New York state chair Jay Jacobs (a noted left-hater) and Queens Democratic party boss Michael Reich, but he also had the support of rural organizers like Nebraska party chair Jane Kleeb and progressives like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and congressional Rep. Ilhan Omar, who stood beaming behind him on stage at the DNC as he celebrated his victory. Wikler had the unions and “the groups” but he also was publicly backed by Democratic gerontoweights like Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries..

One inside interpretation of the vote suggests that the party chairmanship was Martin’s for the taking ever since he took over leadership of the ASDC and defended the state parties’ control of the Democratic voter file from an effort called Alloy, led by billionaire Reid Hoffman, to open up more access to the file back in 2017-2018. This history came out in a variety of ways against Wikler, who had raised significant sums from Hoffman for the Wisconsin party in the past. Martin and other DNC candidates made their donors public; Wikler waited until Friday night to post his list. And sure enough, alongside about a thousand donations in two-, three- and four-figures was a $250,000 check from Hoffman. (He also got $250,000 from a George Soros-funded PAC.)

But the attacks on Wikler for his connection to Hoffman were not in good faith or well-grounded, in my humble opinion. Dark grumbling from other DNC candidates and their supporters about “billionaires” backing Wikler ignored how many other billionaires had funded Martin’s efforts to rebuild the Minnesota DFL—or the fact that a scion of the Rockefeller fortune, Alida Messinger, was funding his campaign for chair now. O’Malley, whose candidacy only made sense as a bid for some reward from Martin in the future, wasn’t above jabbing Wikler for being “backed by crypto money” at the DNC meeting last week (as activist/journalist Brad Johnson documented). And many DNC voters apparently were convinced that they couldn’t trust Wikler because Hoffman had sought to profit off the voter file. As California delegate Michael Kapp, a Martin backer, wrote me Sunday, “My problem with Reid Hoffman is that he tried to privatize state parties’ voter files. State parties (and I) haven’t forgotten what that would mean for all of us.”

In fact, Alloy was a nonprofit venture backed by Hoffman and Todd Park, a California technologist who was one of the driving forces behind the effort to modernize government tech during the Obama years. It was not an attempt to privatize anything—it was an effort to build a parallel and better system for accessing and maintaining Democratic voter files. Alloy was trying to improve the data’s quality, share information between partisan and non-partisan advocacy efforts, and make it more widely available to parts of the democratic ecosystem that were priced out of access but doing critical community mobilizations. As Theodore Schleifer detailed for Vox, it failed in that quest due to “intense internal strife and sharp external mistrust.” I’m not going to revisit the details here, other than to note that the external mistrust was indeed led by Martin, who opposed the Alloy effort. As Kevin Robillard and Daniel Marans reported back then for the Huffpost, Martin claimed it was being done “on the backs of state parties” and declared that any effort to modernize Democratic data is “not going to be done by putting us out of business.”

And here we finally get to the nub of the problem. What keeps state Democratic parties afloat in the age of bowling alone? Two things: private donations from a combination of wealthy interests and grassroots activists, and income they earn from renting access to the voter file to Democratic candidates. (Some also make a lot of money from being early primary states.) That access has been a protected monopoly codified for years by the DNC and ASDC, which gave two private companies—NGP VAN and TargetSmart—privileged roles in the system. (Candidates access the data through VAN; other advocacy groups through TargetSmart—either way, state parties get a cut.) Had Alloy succeeded, it would have been a useful addition to the mix. Arguably, Hoffman and Park’s support for it helped spur the buildout of the Democratic Data Exchange, a for-profit chaired by former DNC chair Howard Dean.

But DNC members voting for Martin over Wikler because they thought he would protect the interests of state Democratic parties against the predations or instability that private capitalists might bring to the Democratic tech stack can be forgiven for not understanding how things actually work or who has privatized what. Last Tuesday, Higher Ground Labs, a leading progressive tech incubator, held a DNC candidates forum for all the people running for chair. Betsy Hoover, one of its founders, asked them the following question:

“This next question, there was a lot of interest in this. We actually got this a few times as a suggestion. Over the next four years, Democrats need to make critical investments in our technical infrastructure to ensure access to data and good tools. There's a question of where that should be housed. Should our core voter file data and technology belong to private sector firms, or should it belong to the national and state parties?”

This, as longtime readers of The Connector know, is not just a question about the voter data. It’s about the 800-pound gorilla of a problem currently facing the party, which is that its core technology tools for working with voter data have not only been private for years, but now aa big pile of them are owned by an overseas private equity firm that has emphasized cost-cutting over innovation, Apax Partners, which bought NGP VAN and bundled it into a new for-profit company called Bonterra. (More on this here.) I’ll spare you the answers from all eight of the candidates and just share what the top three said:

Ken Martin:

“I think it's really important we will never privatize the voter file. We also need to recognize that we've already found a way to leverage data to help all of us through the National Voter File Co-op. So simply, party control of the file is necessary to ensure that the file is always available of high quality and not subject to the whim of a private company. In nearly every aspect of our ecosystem, we have seen vendors with the best of intentions enter this space, stand up data and technology products and systems, and then have to substantially change or revise their product or service due to financial pressures or issues in delivery. That decide to leave politics to focus on other markets because it's fraught for them, politically or financially, or they shut down because they can't make a go of it due to the cyclical nature of political spending. The voter file must remain stable, be updated frequently, frequently, regardless of the part of the cycle we're in, and remain available to our candidates and campaigns at all times, no matter what, even if it's not financially viable as a business.”

Martin O’Malley:

“Yeah, this is a hugely important question, and I believe that it absolutely positively needs to stay with the states and the national party. I am the only candidate in this race, I do believe who has published all of my donors, been totally open, been totally transparent. This party needs to be on guard against very wealthy interests moving underneath this campaign whose agenda just could be to take our voting files and monetize it for personal gain. I've called on all of the candidates in this race to make public their donations before the vote and not after it.”

Ben Wikler:

“Voter file ownership, staying in state parties and then building out to a national voter file in partnership with state parties, with a sealed agreement, a signed agreement with every state party, is a bedrock of how we work and how we need to work. This cannot be privatized. This is my consistent view, and something that I know we fight for as state party chairs, and that our national party fights for, and I'm grateful for Ken Martin's leadership on this. The key thing is that the national party keep investing in building out an extraordinary technology team that can help to make sure that we are adding to and making that voter file more valuable, that we keep acquiring more data so that we can add on and pile on to make sure that when you're a local candidate, you're working with the very best data that our National Party has to offer. The Democratic Data Exchange is a brilliant solution to making sure that our allies and partners and the party itself can, in a fully legally compliant way, make full use of that data. And I think we need to double and triple down on this investment, because it's a classic public good candidates will trust that they can work with state parties in coordinating campaigns in the DNC when they know that the data is in the party's hands.”

What will Ken Martin do about the DNC’s contract with Bonterra, which owns NGP VAN? It’s a critical question, because Democrats can’t do anything with their holy voter file without tools owned by Bonterra. And unfortunately the contest for DNC chair shed no light on the topic.

And here’s a dirty little secret about the Democratic voter file. It’s not that valuable. There are other ways to get a usable list of registered voters, either from other companies or from secretaries of state. The voter contact histories in the Democratic file, which you don’t get from those other sources, aren’t all that valuable either, given how much voters evolve in their thinking, and how much interpretation or guesswork is required to make sense of those histories. Knowing a stack of things about a particular voter—that they responded this way to a phone call or that way to a door-knock—which is the essence of much of that information, also doesn’t add up to having an actual relationship with that voter. The extent to which the Democratic voter file has been fetishized as the source of some kind of valuable truth is ridiculous. But god forbid Democratic state parties have to find another way to sustain themselves!

—Footnote: Kyle Tharp has a somewhat different take on the DNC chair race over on his new Substack, Chaotic Era. Don’t miss what he has to say about the vote for DNC finance chair; the short version is “the swamp won.”

--Related: Meredith Shiner, “Primary Every Democrat,” The New Republic, February 3, 2025.

Useful Reading

—Garrett Graff, “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government,” Doomsday Scenario, February 1, 2025. The news here as if a journalist were writing about a coup overseas.

—Mark Leon Goldberg, “The Death of USAID: These People Are out of Their Freaking Minds.” The New Republic, February 3, 2025. From the article: “The world’s richest man and its most powerful one have killed the one government agency that does the most to support the world’s most vulnerable people. There will be consequences.”

—Jason Leopold and Antony Cormier, “Behind DOGE’s Standoff at USAID: Desk Searches and Elon Musk Calling,” Bloomberg, February 3, 2025. A chilling blow-by-blow account.

—Jay Kuo, “Is Somebody Doing Something?” The Status Kuo, February 3, 2025. A great and heartening roundup of the different levels of opposition under way.