The Scene
David Hogg was thrust into politics weeks before his 18th birthday. He survived the mass shooting at his high school in Parkland, Florida. With a group of classmates, he co-founded March for Our Lives, began advocating for an assault weapons ban and other gun regulations, and faced a deluge of angry, sometimes conspiratorial reactions.
Hogg also got involved in the Democratic Party, where he grew unhappy with how it fumbled its messaging in 2024, how poorly it mobilized “influencers,” and how it talked about young people. Now 24, Hogg is one of the candidates for DNC vice chair, a role that often goes to elected officials — several of them are running for the three seats — to do unglamorous party work. Hogg had other ideas for the position, sharing them at a moment when the party is panicking about its inability to compete with the MAGA movement in social media and podcasts. He talked with Americana about that, and this is an edited version of the conversation.
The View From David Hogg
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
David Weigel: Democrats have been deluged this week, and I see a lot of unhappiness with how they’re responding to Trump. What would be different, if you were in the DNC right now?
David Hogg: I’d be going everywhere and talking to young people and pushing back against the right-wing narratives. Now that Trump is repealing a lot of these Biden executive orders, a lot of people are asking: Wait, Democrats did that? Wait, we had that office to work on abortion rights? Biden did what to lower prescription drug costs? Oh, man, that sounds pretty good! But now only that Trump’s been elected are we actually hearing a lot about it. That’s a prime example of what we did wrong this cycle.
If I’m elected to this position, I want to go around the country and talk to younger people in the areas that we saw shift the most to the right. A lot of the areas that we saw shift most dramatically to the right were where rents went up the most. There’s obviously going to be an inherent disconnect between them and a bunch of rich Beltway consultants dictating our messaging, because they don’t worry about the rent. But the biggest shift to the right that we saw with young people was related to whether they were in high school during COVID. Gen Z is not a monolith.
A lot of people older than you are asking why young men shifted to the right. What happened during COVID? What else explains it?
It exacerbated the loneliness epidemic our young people are going through. That was acutely affecting young men, as a result of them being online more. And a lot of these social media companies, in part because of their fear of being broken up, have started promoting a lot more right-wing propaganda. Why are we seeing Mark Zuckerberg talking about masculinity and how great Donald Trump is? Not because I think he necessarily believes it, but because he’s afraid of being Meta broken up.
That said — and this might be a bit controversial — it doesn’t feel to me like there’s a place for men in our party right now. Frankly, I think that there’s a lot of work that we’ve got to do to address that. Empathy isn’t a zero-sum game. That’s one of the things that kills me most about the mentality in our party. We act as if we can only talk about what young women are going through — that we can’t also talk about what young men are going through — and we have to break that mentality.
What explains that?
I feel like Democrats have just become uncool. For a long time, Republicans were the ones walking around with moral superiority. If you weren’t a God-fearing, straight person that has a white picket fence and a nuclear family, you were inherently the problem with America. That was before. Then people reacted so viscerally to Donald Trump’s election that a lot of liberals started policing everybody around us. It gave us a sense that we’re morally superior, we’re better than other people.
We’ve got to change that. Young men might not even disagree with us. They agree that we need to address gun violence and climate change. But they don’t want to be judged. And there’s this mentality that I’ve heard on the left: “It’s not my job to educate you.” We have to end that. It is our job to educate people! If you don’t want to do that, frankly, politics probably isn’t for you. I know from my work on gun violence that it’s not comfortable conversations and surrounding ourselves with people that agree with us that’s going to make progress. It’s uncomfortable conversations.
What sort of uncomfortable conversations did you have?
I’m not saying that everybody has to do this, or everybody can do this, but there were armed gunmen that followed us around on our tour when I was 18 years old. At some stops, I went out and talked to them and had a conversation. I could either choose to live in a comfortable delusion, or I could choose to live in an uncomfortable reality where change actually might be possible. I was able to break through the disinformation, because I could show them that I’m not a crisis actor. I really am just a young person that doesn’t want kids to be shot in school anymore. I could say, hey you know that AR-15 that you’re holding right now — should someone who threatens to shoot up a high school be able to own that?
I was in the shooting club in college. I wasn’t, initially, very popular there. But I didn’t call these guys names and say terrible things about them. And I think the reason we were able to create change after Parkland is that it wasn’t scripted, and it was real. If somebody asked us, should we ban assault weapons? We didn’t pivot. We answered the damn question, and we said yes, despite what all those pollsters and those consultants would have told us to do. I’ve heard, “Well, we’ve just got to get on Discord,” or, “What if we get on TikTok?” But a good message will move itself.
How did the Democrats play the TikTok story, after voting to ban it unless it was sold to an American buyer?
Honestly, not great! Trump is once again using a stunt against us. We didn’t go out there and talk about how he was the guy who wanted to ban it. Now, I’ll tell you, the low-information voters that we’re talking to are going to think that Donald Trump saved TikTok, because that’s literally what the company said, and that is a huge problem that’s only going to make our youth vote issue a hell of a lot worse. We cannot afford to be a watering can when Donald Trump is a fire hose of constant content and media. That means not being afraid to go on podcasts and talk to people. There’s so much vetting of these podcasts or networks before people go on. Come on. We just need to get out there and share our damn message.
One criticism I have heard of you running for this position is that you went after Mary Peltola after she lost her seat in Alaska. Was that a mistake? Was that the sort of bold thing Democrats can do to draw attention?
What I wish I put in that tweet, in the first place, was that she voted to defund and permanently abolish the office of gun violence prevention that survivors of gun violence and so many others had fought for years to create. This was about helping to address gun suicides and making sure that there was funding available to respond to mass shootings in the same way that FEMA responds to natural disasters. I know there can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to politics. I know this firsthand after years of campaigning in swing states and red states. But she didn’t just vote against some gun law. The reactions I saw were like: Is David upset because she voted against banning assault weapons? No. Of course you can’t do that in Alaska. It was something that eight Republicans voted for. I wish she’d voted for it, and I wish she won.