The DNC is MIA
Daniel Schlozman on the Democrats’ internal struggle
Back in May, the Democratic National Committee belatedly and reluctantly released its autopsy of the 2024 election. The report itself was, Daniel Schlozman writes this week in the NYR Online, a mess, “full of truisms and potted histories,” while its publication—from conception down through the DNC’s efforts to suppress it—invited criticism from leftists and centrists alike. Indeed, he continues, “It is probably fair to say that the rising forces in today’s party, from Abundance-pilled moderates to socialists, view the DNC as much less central than their predecessors did.”
Schlozman tells the history of the DNC, from before the Civil War to today, and makes the case that it has been weakening ever since the end of the Obama administration, giving way to a web of ultrarich donors and various unaccountable PACs (lately empowered by the Supreme Court to raise and spend more money than ever). And while there is much to criticize about the committee, Schlozman argues that we may miss if it drifts too far out of relevance: “A heroic party is hard to imagine at this juncture, but it’s still worth trying to build a competent one.… If the alternatives are off-the-record weekends where billionaires and politicians watch glorified TED Talks, then party meetings in sad ballrooms don’t look so bad after all.”
Below, alongside Schlozman’s essay, we have collected five four from our archive about the DNC.
The DNC Against Itself
Daniel Schlozman
“Democracy is a very old institution,” explains the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election, belatedly released in May. “And yet what keeps democracy going is the ability of those who seek to lead to look at the data and determine the source of success as well as setbacks.”
The report that followed did no such thing. It was a bizarre document, full of truisms and potted histories (“The breakthrough tools that powered ‘Yes We Can’ in 2012 proved that they could not keep up just four years later”), poorly documented lists of spending patterns, and a grab bag of comparisons between candidates who performed better or worse than the Harris-Walz ticket. We learn, for instance, that “pulling people in is one of the hardest things to do in elections, especially in a modern information and cultural ecosystem where a lot of people are content to sit on their couch and be on the phone, as opposed to being out in their communities and engaging and learning about what’s going on in the world around them.”
Left unmentioned were nearly all the questions a serious autopsy of the 2024 election ought to have considered: how the Democrats should have responded to the post-pandemic inflation that doomed incumbent parties across the rich democracies; whether the fading president should have run again; whether the nominee in his stead should have had to prevail in a contested process; whether the DNC under Biden’s handpicked chair, Jaime Harrison, should have broken sooner from its role as the president’s praetorian guard; whether Harris should have distanced herself from the administration in which she served; whether to have emphasized themes around democracy, as the Harris campaign did, or the economy, as the leading Super PAC Future Forward did; and how to have handled fallout from the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli government as it prosecuted its bloodbath in Gaza. Not all these questions have definitive answers, still less before all the dust has settled. But to ignore them, as the autopsy did, was to forgo any chance at understanding why a party determined to stop the return of Donald Trump failed in its mission.
For months the autopsy had gone unreleased. In over his head, its author, the longtime New York political consultant Paul Rivera, handed in an incomplete draft last December with no accompanying notes. (Rivera has yet to publicly tell his side of the story, and the details remain murky.) The DNC and its chair, Ken Martin, spent the next several months sitting on it, rather than starting from scratch. Amid weak fundraising and concerns about his leadership, the pressure on Martin accumulated. “What’s in the report that you wouldn’t want publicized?” the podcaster and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau asked him in a cringe-inducing interview in April.
When Martin finally released the document, on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, the DNC had included prominent red boxes that identified mistakes and uncited sources. “I am not proud of this product,” he said in his announcement. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.” It was a telling statement. By virtue of being so godawful that the party spent months trying to bury it, the autopsy has, ironically, opened up questions that a mere mediocrity never could.
Not least of these are questions about the DNC itself under Martin’s troubled leadership. Since the 2016 primary, when the DNC scheduled debates at inconvenient times such as Saturday nights and supporters of Bernie Sanders complained about a “rigged” process, critics from the left have cast the national committee as a powerful obstacle. The reality is closer to the opposite. The DNC has relatively modest influence beyond its formal authority to set the primary calendar, organize the convention, and help maintain the “voter file,” with its troves of individual-level data. With the exception of writing the party platform, a quadrennial activity dominated by the presidential nominee, the committee’s role is rarely ideological in a straightforward sense.
The DNC is full of scheming and plotting, alliances and rivalries. But the turmoil tends to the internecine. The crucial work that the party undertakes in a decentralized political system—informally coordinating across all the politicians, donors, interest groups, and activists jostling for influence—largely happens elsewhere, whether at conferences ostensibly devoted to new progressive ideas or policy agendas, or at discreet confabs where donors and pols rub shoulders. The first serious study of the national committees, a 1964 book by the political scientists Cornelius P. Cotter and Bernard C. Hennessy, was called Politics Without Power, and the title remains apt.
The DNC, as observers often say about Congress, is a “they,” not an “it.” The chair is the all-important fundraiser-in-chief, and, especially when the party is out of power, an emissary who tamps down disputes and builds up the brand. Underneath the chair, the staff do the work of the institutional nerve center, spending on ads and operations and liaising with all the outside vendors. Finally there is the sprawling, fractious committee itself, whose membership comes predominantly from state parties. The approximately 450-strong roster—the DNC does not maintain a public list, though leaked ones circulate—includes the chair and vice chair of each state and territorial party, plus more than two hundred members elected by those parties in proportion to population and Democratic vote. The remainder are “at-large” members chosen by the chair and ratified in bloc, who are party insiders and figures from important constituencies like labor; and then a grab bag of representatives from entities like the National Democratic County Officials and the Young Democrats of America.
In Martin, the longtime chair in Minnesota, the state party stalwarts with the bulk of the votes saw a chance to put one of their own at the apex of the party. In February 2025 he relied on their support to win his race for DNC chair over his more nationally prominent Wisconsin counterpart, Ben Wikler. And yet by electing Martin the state parties have only further emphasized the limits of their power—and indeed those of the DNC itself. In recent decades, state parties have found themselves on the backfoot in an ever costlier and more nationalized politics. The Democratic Party is shaped far more by the interlocked worlds of money, media, and ideas in New York, D.C., and maybe California than by the loyalists grinding it out in Augusta or Jefferson City.
Since assuming the job Martin has increased funding to the state parties, funneling them guaranteed dollars every month. But he has struggled to command respect from the party’s other principals. The DNC’s financial position is dire, with debts larger than its cash on hand as it heads into the peak of the midterm spending cycle. And the more the DNC’s members expend their energies on internal contests for prestige and recognition like the one that got Martin elected, the more the committee isolates itself from the larger drama of where the Democrats ought to go, and how they ought to get there.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Party Blues
Randi Weingarten on what Democrats can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign (2025)
Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld on the disastrous aftermath of Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election (2024)
Joseph O’Neill on the moral case for saving the Democratic Party (2020)
Joan Didion on the Democrats’ ill-advised turn to focus-group politics (2004)
