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Since Donald Trump’s Republican Party took full control of the U.S. government 153 days ago, tens of thousands of civil servants have lost their jobs. Whole agencies have been hollowed out, years of scientific research have been flushed down the drain. Global confidence in the U.S. dollar has cratered. Masked government goon squads have fanned out in cities across the country, kidnapping people on the basis of their political speech and the color of their skin, and the military has been deployed to quell domestic protests.
So where is the opposition party?
Well, at least three of its members have keeled over in office since November, growing Republicans’ once razor-thin majority in the U.S. House. Congressional leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are functionally invisible, and the Democratic National Committee — the braintrust responsible for rebuilding the party after its humiliating defeat in November — is reeling from a prolonged slap fight with the country’s most prominent school shooting survivor.
Two weeks ago, David Hogg left his role as vice chair of the DNC — a position he was elected to in February —after a dispute over the role his Super PAC would play in Democratic primaries. Hogg was followed out the door by a pair of high-profile labor leaders — Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — party stalwarts who suggested, in separate statements, that they had lost confidence in DNC leadership.
For a party looking to shore up its waning support among young people and working class voters, the optics could not be worse. Allies of DNC chair Ken Martin, the longtime Minnesota state party chair who was elevated to national role earlier the year, are eager to chalk the turmoil up to lingering resentments from the internal DNC election results earlier this year, but the insider drama at the highest echelons of the party is percolating down to the grassroots.
One DNC member told Rolling Stone local party volunteers have been asked about the DNC’s squabble with Hogg while working in some of the darkest red swaths of their state. “This an unpaid volunteer —as far away from David as you could be —trying to do her work and she can’t seem to get out of this narrative that is happening at the national level,” that DNC member says. “It’s impacting all of us.”
Hogg became famous as a 17-year-old advocate for gun control after he survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. He went on to co-found the gun control advocacy group March For Our Lives, and later a PAC, Leaders We Deserve, which funds the campaigns of young progressives — including in Democratic primaries.
According to one person familiar with his plans, Hogg knew when he declared his candidacy for DNC vice chair that the role his PAC plays in primaries would create problems inside the party. The question of whether DNC officers should be able to put their thumbs on the scale has long been the subject of tension within the party, but efforts to formalize a rule forbidding it have failed. “I think he didn’t think past two minutes in front of him. He’s not a strategic thinker. He’s not a long-term operator,” that person tells Rolling Stone. “He didn’t think [about the obligations of the role] beyond ‘This will be good for my profile.’”
Instead of resolving the issue either in advance or immediately after his election by temporarily stepping away from his role at the PAC, Hogg transformed quietly simmering tensions into an open flame war with a splashy announcement in April that his PAC would be pouring $20 million into primarying ineffective Democrats. A person familiar with Leaders We Deserve’s efforts to primary incumbent Democrats says those plans grew after a trio of Democrats died in office. “It just became clear that greater action was going to be needed, Democrats were just asleep at the wheel, and did not seem to really grasp the situation with Trump and what was necessary,” that person said.
Even after the PAC’s big announcement, one DNC source tells Rolling Stone, officials inside the party were still trying to figure out a way for Hogg could stay in his role. “We were all trying to work with him to help figure out how he could remain an officer and have his PAC do the work that the PAC wants to do,” that person said. “We were talking with him about firewall policy, recusing himself— all this different stuff… None of this would have blown up the way it did if David Hogg wasn’t leaking stuff.”
Inside the DNC, Hogg is widely suspected of leaking audio of an internal meeting in which an emotional Martin told Hogg how difficult he was making his job. “No one knows who the hell I am, right? I’m trying to get my sea legs underneath of me and actually develop any amount of credibility so I can go out there and raise the money and do the job I need to to put ourselves in a position to win,” Martin said to Hogg, according to the tape, which was published by Politico. “You essentially destroyed any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to.” (Hogg tweeted texts from the Politico reporter asking him to comment on the story, taking pains to imply that he was not the source of the audio.)
The whole series events soured much of the DNC membership on Hogg, with roughly three-quarters of them voting to hold a new election to fill his seat. (That election took place on Friday; Hogg will be replaced by Shasti Conrad, the state party chair from Washington.)
But Hogg retained a few supporters inside the DNC, including Weingarten, the president of the AFT, who has been on the Democratic National Committee since 2002. Weingarten and AFSCME’s Saunders both previously threw their support behind Martin’s chief rival, Ben Wikler, before the DNC election earlier this year — and both were removed from their plum positions on the DNC’s influential Rules and Bylaws Committee after Martin prevailed in that election.
Inside the DNC, it is this decision, more than anything related to the labor movement or to Hogg’s removal, that is seen as influencing their decisions to leave.
A Democratic strategist who works with labor disputes the idea that Weingarten and Saunders’ decisions to exit the DNC were connected to the loss of their committee roles. “I think it’s bigger than the rules committee. This is really about the direction of the national party and how it is addressing this moment,” the strategist says. “How long can they, as labor leaders, who represent, cumulatively, over 3 million members, how long can they continue to rubber stamp this organization? I don’t think that they were willing to do that anymore — not just because of a rules committee.”
Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democrats who supported Martin’s candidacy, dismissed reports of internal tension as “normal transition stuff” that happens after a hard-fought election like the one that took place between Martin and Wikler.
“We see it every time a new leader takes office,” Kleeb tells Rolling Stone. “The most apt historical analogy would be [Howard] Dean.So many of the established Democrats, old guard, people in power, didn’t like Dean coming in and saying that he was going to shift more money to the state parties, get the DNC out of D.C. — the same type of things that Ken is saying. They sabotaged him every step of the way.”
Kleeb characterized the race between Martin and Wikler as essentially boiling down to the major donors backing Wikler, versus the underpaid foot soldiers on the ground who supported Martin, or as she put it, the liberal donor network “Democracy Alliance versus the state parties —and the state parties won.” (Through a spokesperson, Wikler declined to comment for this story.)
Howard Dean, Kleeb adds, was ultimately vindicated. Despite the hostility he encountered when he was named chair, she says, Dean “set us up for major victories in 2006 and 2008 because state parties actually had the money to build the infrastructure, to recruit candidates, to build county parties, to do voter registration — all the things the state parties do.”
Martin, who ran for chair on a promise to shift more resources to the state parties, has followed through on that promise since taking over, committing $1 million a month to 57 state and territory parties, a sum the DNC has touted as “the largest investment ever” to support the parties. But according to a recent New York Times report, at the same time that it is spending more on state parties, fundraising for the DNC from major donors has “slowed sharply.” (FEC filings show the DNC had just $15 million cash on hand at the end of May, compared to its Republican counterpart’s $73 million.)
The committee has sought to counter the narrative that they are struggling to raise funds with an announcement on Friday that Martin brought in nearly $40 million in his first four months in office, eclipsing the sum raised by his predecessor, Jaime Harrison.
Hogg’s PAC, meanwhile — the one that will ostensibly spend $20 million in Democratic primaries — burned through cash in May. According to FEC filings, Leaders We Deserve raised $848,000 that month,and spent $781,000 of it. The sum total the PAC gave to Democratic candidates last month was just $5,000, to congressional hopeful Robert Peters in Illinois. A person familiar with Leaders We Deserve operations tells Rolling Stone that the organization’s burn rate is similar to that of other PACs that do similar work, like EMILY’s List and Giffords.
The super PAC’s filings show Hogg and his co-founder Kevin Lata paid themselves $10,000 apiece, while another $94,000 went to various consultants. Speaking to Rolling Stone when he was campaigning for the DNC job earlier this year, Hogg complained about the corrosive influence of such consultants. “Our party has done such a good job of making our consultants so fabulously wealthy that they’ve become detached from reality,” he said.
As much as DNC members would like everyone to move on from the chaos currently engulfing the committee, painting it as nothing more than a series of as petty personal dramas, what is clear is thatthe underlying tensions are based on foundational disagreements that contributed to the Democrats’ loss in November: fights over the party’s connection to the labor movement and the working class, its deference to its oldest and most senior members, and the outsize influence of big donors.Those are fights that will need to be acknowledged and resolved sooner or later if the party ever intends to take on Trump.
