Know your DNC members
Over at The American Prospect, Micah Sifry has assembled a list of DNC members ahead of the election of new party officers on Feb. 1. The New York Times reported on the two front runners in November. (I have a favorite for chair.) Your state’s members might want to hear from you about yours. March for our Lives co-founder and Parkland school shooting survivor, David Hogg, is running for 1st vice chair. I haven’t followed who else is running.
Sifry writes:
So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.
The problem is that the DNC member list is not publically available. Some state parties publish the list of their members (mine does), but others do not. Some you can figure out. Kinda.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Kapp adds later:
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “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.”
That sounds familiar. When years ago I assembled county chair contact lists by state for distributing For the Win, there appeared to be no public listing of county chairs on the New York state party’s website (which seemed to exist primarily for soliciting donations; that has since changed). A former member of New York’s City Council at the time told me the reason was that the old boys in Albany didn’t want any independent organizing among their members either. (Albany County, BTW, seemed to have two live websites, one an obvious draft, misspellings and all.)
Sifry and TAP are providing the list so people outside the party’s inner circle might weigh in with their state’s members on who leads the Democratic Party after Feb. 1.
The list we are publishing was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
Read the whole thing and have at it.