As DNC fight sharpens, Democrats move past Biden

The Democrats who entered the DNC chair race first remain ahead in public DNC member commitments; the winner needs a majority of their 448 votes when the party meets outside DC on Feb. 1.

Based on a public count of endorsements, the frontrunner is still Martin, who led the association of state Democratic Party chairs during the Trump and Biden presidencies. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley trails him; Wikler, who does not discuss whip counts, continues to land support from high-profile activists and labor leaders hoping to influence the process.

“I’m honored to carry the endorsement of AFSCME, of AFT, of the NEA, and of the SEIU,” Wikler said at the start of Thursday’s forum inside the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel. (The unions’ leaders have endorsed him, not their full membership, but no candidate challenged the statement.)

Martin came into Thursday with the first endorsement by a former candidate — New York state Sen. James Skoufis, who folded his outsider campaign, and said he had some supporters he could bring over.

“You can’t argue with an undefeated 25-0 statewide record,” Skoufis told Semafor, pointing to Martin’s scoreboard in Minnesota. The contrast with Wikler, who led a recovery of the Wisconsin party but couldn’t quite win the state for Harris, is a theme of Martin’s campaign.

Still, the field grew larger this week, as another candidate entered and more qualified for the final party-sponsored forums. Faiz Shakir, who managed the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, jumped into the race out of frustration at the nuts-and-bolts discussions of fundraising and media outreach. His idea: A party fully reoriented around the labor movement.

“What are you going to do with the authority and the power of a $100 million-plus DNC and state party network?” Shakir told Semafor. “Just paint on a blank canvas? How would you change anything about how the Democratic Party is received? What’s the brand? What’s the change, what’s the big thing? And there’s nothing there.”

Shakir entered the race too late to qualify for Thursday’s forum, but candidates with sharper criticisms of the party have not struggled to meet the threshold: Forty signatures from voting members. Robert Houton, a fringe candidate from Maryland who urged Democrats to endorse the Trump tax cuts and “get rid of this gender-affirming care,” said he had qualified for the final forums. Three little-known party activists shared the stage on Thursday, along with Marianne Williamson, a two-time presidential candidate who did criticize the party for how it handled the Biden crisis.

“For a year and a half, the Republicans were giving their message, and we were silent because the DNC was acting like a suppressant,” said Williamson. “Nobody can talk. We all have to vote for Joe Biden. We all have to vote for Joe Biden. Why? Because the DNC said so.”

Outgoing DNC chairman Jaime Harrison sat in the audience as she said that, arms folded, with no visible reaction. In an interview, he said that he expected criticism for the 2024 primary, but the process for replacing him was wide open.

“I think we bumped up a little bit the number of signatures you need to get on the ballot,” he said. “But what we noticed was that DNC members have pretty much signed anybody’s petition.”

Candidates for the party’s three vice chair roles were more critical of Biden, engaging with Politico’s moderators and largely agreeing that the outgoing president should not have run again. Harrison, responding to the idea that the party needed to align more with labor, said that it had taken a page from Biden, and done so: “The DNC unionized, for the first time in its history.”

The conversation on Thursday was more about how the party could persuade angry voters and ex-Democrats that its populism was for real. In the forum, Martin said that he didn’t “hob-nob with billionaires,” a veiled reference to how Wikler had courted LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; the veil was removed as the candidates discussed the failure of Alloy, a data firm that burned through Hoffman’s cash with no help to the party.

“My argument has always been that state parties needed to own their data,” Wikler responded. “So even if someone disagrees with me about something else, I will say, Look, why don’t you donate to parties to help us win elections for folks up and down the ballot?”

Martin got more personal. At a small labor rally before the forum, Martin called himself “the only card-carrying member of a union” in this race, whose mother “wasn’t a college professor” and grandfather “wasn’t an ambassador.” Both of those details applied to Wikler, who has never been a member of a union. (“Not yet,” he said at a virtual labor forum this month.) At the forum, Martin added another bona fide: He had not gone to an Ivy League school. (Wikler’s political career started at Harvard University, where he became a close aide to Al Franken.)

The Wisconsin Democrat never responded to the personal jabs. And like Martin, he passed on the chance to criticize Biden.

“We’re four days away from Trump’s inauguration,” he told the moderators. “We can disagree about all kinds of things about the past. The fundamental question is, what do we do now? We need to unite and fight for working people against an administration that’s going to try to divide us and rip us all off.”

While the Democrats argued in public, I remembered that the Republican National Committee was holding its own meeting, in DC, ahead of the Trump inauguration. The only media coverage of that was a short, exclusive Fox News interview with chairman Michael Whatley, about how well things were going.

Republicans don’t see the point of hashing out their party business in public. Democrats are committed to it, even as they agonize over how badly their messages travel in the new world where liberals rage-post on Elon Musk’s X about Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. The loudest applause I heard on Thursday was for Jason Paul, a fairly obscure Democratic strategist and chair candidate who used the “should Biden have run” question as a cue to rip into the media: “Our mistake was, we trusted you.”

The party is clearly moving past Biden, who hasn’t tried to influence the DNC race, and is mostly unhelpful to any rebrand. (Republicans instantly rebutted the attack on “oligarchy” in his farewell address by noting that he’d just given medals to George Soros and David Rubenstein.) The big question I heard in Detroit was: How do we get people who’ve tuned us out to take us seriously? That’s where Martin’s sharp new attacks came from, but the shared premise was that nothing will click with voters until and unless Donald Trump screws up.