Chuck Schumer weighs in on DNC chair race
This is new (Politico):
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is endorsing Ben Wikler to lead the Democratic National Committee, a boost for the Wisconsin state party leader in a race that has drawn little attention and few big names.
Schumer’s endorsement — shared first with POLITICO — comes as Democrats prepare for a month-long campaign to run the DNC, with four candidate forums in January. Following the party’s bruising losses in November, members of the committee will elect their new chair on Feb. 1.
Schumer, the most prominent Democrat so far to weigh in publicly on the race, called Wikler a “tenacious organizer,” a “proven fundraiser” and a “sharp communicator” in a statement. He emphasized Wikler’s work in 2024, when Democrats in Wisconsin held on to their Senate seat and flipped 14 state legislative seats, even though Kamala Harris did not win the state.
“Ben has what Democrats need right now — proven results — and that’s why I’m backing Ben,” Schumer said.
Kudos to Wikler, 43, who I met in 2019. But the Democratic Party needs more than a solid field guy running the DNC.
There is a serious discusssion going on among friends about decades-old narratives deeply embedded in people’s preceptions of the country, their place in it, what Democrats have to offer, and whether people can even hear that offer, however well-crafted, amid the din of what early bloggers once called the right’s Mighty Wurlitzer. That’s a long-term challenge not easily addressed by swapping out personnel.
(Still, I can think of more than a few personnel I’d like to see Democrats swap out on Capitol Hill.)
After stinging losses like Democrats experienced in November, the finger-pointing and plethora of hot takes on what Democrats did wrong obscures what (and where) Democrats did right. That’s where Wisconsin comes in, as Peter Slevin writes at The New Yorker. “How Much Do Democrats Need To Change?” reads the headline. Not that much, if they emulate Wisconsin (or North Carolina, I’d argue; emphasis mine):
The mood among Democrats on a December morning in the Wisconsin state capitol was celebratory. Ten Assembly candidates—among them a school administrator, a tavern owner, an accountant, and a county politician—had flipped Republican seats after the state Supreme Court threw out a heavily gerrymandered map. “I am super excited. Who else is super excited?” Representative Lisa Subeck, the caucus chair, said. Some of the newly elected spoke about what they hope to deliver: affordable housing, broadband, clean energy, and more money for public schools. One said he wants to show “that government can be a force for good.”
In addition to the Assembly candidates, four Democratic state Senate candidates won Republican-held seats. Though the G.O.P. still controlled the state legislature, its margins narrowed significantly. Further up the ticket, Senator Tammy Baldwin, a widely liked Democrat, won a third term. Though Kamala Harris lost her Presidential bid, the popular vote, and seven swing states to Donald Trump, the message—even in Wisconsin, which Harris lost—is not so straightforward. The same is true in North Carolina, where Harris was defeated by Trump but Democrats swept the other six statewide races. Of the five battleground states where a Senate race was on the ballot, Democrats won four, losing only Pennsylvania’s, and that one by a mere fifteen thousand votes, or 0.2 per cent. Looked at another way: Donald Trump won the national popular vote, but if one hundred and fifteen thousand of the eight million Trump voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted instead for Harris, she would be headed to the White House.
“I’m not setting fire to any playbooks around here,” says Ryan Spaude, 30. He flipped a Republican-held seat near Green Bay. “We nudged this district to the left on a day when the whole country was moving to the right,” adding that an idological pivot is not what’s needed.
“Just tell working folks how you’re going get more money in their pockets,” says Ryan Spaude. Telling working folks is the rub. Democrats have no billionaire owned and funded Wurlitzer.
Rebecca Cooke who lost her bid for WI-3 by three points thinks national Democrats have a branding problem. If so, it is among their problems.
Organizer Bill Hogseth thinks branding is not it exactly:
What struck him most as he knocked on doors this year was how few voters even mentioned the Presidential race. “I can count on my hand the times where I heard people say, ‘Well, hopefully So-and-So gets elected and then this will change,’ ” he told me. “More often than not, it was, ‘Something needs to happen in my local community,’ ‘We need to take on the landlords,’ or ‘There needs to be rent control.’ ”
Wikler’s influence and staffing a year-round organizing effort has been what’s pivotal.
Donald Trump plans to upend government within hours of his inauguration. He’ll pardon Jan. 6th convicts and arrestees and launch a deportaion program that will besmirch whatever positive brand America has left in the world.
That will be followed by a raft of other combative moves, including a Republican attempt to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favored corporations and the wealthy. As Wikler put it, “We’re about to have a big defining battle that gives us a chance to show who we are.”
Same-old at the DNC won’t cut it. Even Schumer seems to understand that. There is too much focus on what Democrats (Harris) might have done wrong in an otherwise impressive short-schedule campaign, and too little being learned from states where things went right and why.
