Rakes. Dems. Steps.
“It would probably be better” if the DNC “turned the lights off and padlocked the building for the next two years.”
WHEN THE CENTER-LEFT THINK TANK Third Way put out a list last week of forty-five words and phrases that Democrats should avoid (“patriarchy,” “birthing person,” “BIPOC,” etc.), I heard from a number of rather annoyed progressive strategists. From their perspective, the party had dramatically moved away from that type of alienating language after the 2024 election. It felt to them like the folks at Third Way were picking a fight that the left had already largely conceded.
I went into the weekend thinking that those progressive strategists had a point. Most Democrats running in competitive Senate races and high-profile House seats have eschewed the “woke litmus tests” that defined the party’s approach to Donald Trump’s first term. The party largely rallied behind Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s calls earlier this year to ditch abstruse phrases like “justice-involved population.” Even New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani backed away from his previous support for “defund the police” and past accusations that the NYPD was “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
Then, the Democratic National Committee meeting happened.
As DNC officials and reporters gathered this week in Minneapolis for the committee’s annual summer gathering, it seemed as if the party had been transported back to 2019. The Monday morning session opened with a land acknowledgment, which conservative media outlets and allied Republicans predictably mocked. Then there was a polling presentation from Vera Action—a group that works to “restore dignity to people behind bars”—encouraging Democrats to emphasize being “serious about safety” rather than talk about being “tough on crime.” And when the DNC’s Resolutions Committee met on Tuesday, it unanimously passed a resolution in support of the much-maligned “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The Minneapolis meeting was cut short on Wednesday morning following a tragic shooting at a nearby Catholic school. But by that point, the distinctively lefty language had already set off fresh panic among some Democratic officials, who feared that the party still hadn’t learned the lessons of 2024. Although Insha Rahman, a director at Vera Action, told me her presentation was taken out of context and that she was actually advocating for Democrats to take crime seriously, not everyone was convinced. Even former DNC officials with whom I spoke were questioning the relevance of the DNC and expressed concern that the organization was doing more harm than good.
“The DNC is making itself a counterproductive force to winning elections,” Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (the two had a public falling out), told me in a phone interview. “It would probably be better for the party as a whole if it just turned the lights off and padlocked the building for the next two years.”
At the center of concerns about the DNC sits the committee’s chair, Ken Martin. Here’s why: