Opinion Dems' future -- and democracy itself -- might depend on the DNC chairman pick - WaPo Rubin

[question everything]

As Democrats try to rebuild after the losses of 2024, there is lots of chatter about creating new organizations to work on communications or messaging or policy development. Democrats are effectively looking for workarounds to the DNC, which is no longer perceived as capable of meeting major challenges. Ask Democratic activists, donors and politicians about the DNC’s race for a new chairman for early next year, and you likely will get an eye roll or a comment about the DNC’s irrelevance.

Although the DNC hauls in massive donations, sets the presidential primary calendar and performs other functions, it was created in another era — before the internet, MAGA and the explosion of dark money. The DNC doesn’t need to be replaced, but it needs an overhaul. The DNC contest is about more than one party. In an era in which there is only one small-d democratic party, fashioning it into an instrument to effectively organize, message and combat disinformation is critical.

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who announced his run, last won elective office in 2010; another potential choice, Rahm Emanuel, served in the first Obama term. If the DNC wants business as usual, any of these (or the stolid Minnesota chair Ken Martin, who also announced) would do. But none seems up to reinvigorating the DNC to make it central to the party’s — and democracy’s — revival. If the DNC wants someone of a different generation who possesses the energy to shake up the party — and to improve the party’s standing in the critical Midwest — then Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler is the obvious choice.

Wikler has not announced (nor agreed to talk to me about it) but I know of no other contender who has mastered online communication and organizing, and who can enlist influencers to reach apolitical voters — all critical tasks among the many necessary to innovate a moribund party. An Atlantic magazine piece last year praised him (“Wikler’s talent is getting people to show up”) for dragging the state party back from “virtual irrelevance” and dubbed him “the man who has been hailed as ‘the best state chair in the country.’” You would think the DNC would want to nationalize his organization, described as “a comprehensive digital operation, an in-house research group, and a full-time staff of youth organizers.”

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As a sunny Midwesterner from a “nail-biter” state — rather than a deep blue enclave — Wikler understands how reaching ticket-splitters and moderates would be a plus for a party perceived as heavy on coastal elites. One Democratic think tanker tells me, “Harris won 14 of 19 states that touched the Atlantic or Pacific. She won 5 of 31 states that did not. A DNC chair from the interior of the country — like Ben Wikler — is a must.”

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