{"id":4779,"date":"2025-01-12T01:19:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-12T01:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/dnc-candidates-rip-dc-insiders-in-first-chairs-race-forum\/"},"modified":"2025-01-12T01:19:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T01:19:30","slug":"dnc-candidates-rip-dc-insiders-in-first-chairs-race-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/dnc-candidates-rip-dc-insiders-in-first-chairs-race-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"DNC candidates rip \u2018DC insiders\u2019 in first chair\u2019s race forum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee have found a common enemy: the D.C. consultant.<\/p>\n

In the first DNC-sanctioned forum in the body\u2019s low-profile race for chair on Saturday, DNC candidates channeled their frustration at the \u201cD.C. insiders,\u201d whom New York state Sen. James Skoufis vowed to \u201ckick to the curb.\u201d Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin pledged the \u201cD.C. consultants\u201d will \u201cbe gone when I\u2019m there.\u201d And Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler promised he\u2019d go into 2025 \u201cwith no commitments to anyone who’s been on a campaign payroll before.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sign of the times for a party that burned through some $1.5 billion<\/a> in the final months of the campaign, only to come up short against President-elect Donald Trump. As the party still searches for answers to its devastating losses in 2024, consultants became the punching bag while the DNC candidates largely avoided sparring with one another. They all agreed that the party needed to reground its identity with the working class and commit to a permanent campaign infrastructure across the country. But any light attacks \u2014 of which there were a few \u2014 came without names attached.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s forum was the first of four meetings scheduled in January ahead of a Feb. 1 DNC chair election, the first big decision Democrats will make to redefine their party in the second Trump era.<\/p>\n

Here are five takeaways from the virtual forum:<\/p>\n

Paging Jaime Harrison<\/b><\/p>\n

The candidates may have spent much of their 90-minute debate attacking D.C., but nearly all of them committed to moving to the capital if elected. It\u2019s a question that had been percolating for weeks among DNC members, many of whom have been frustrated by the sitting DNC Chair Jaime Harrison\u2019s decision to stay in South Carolina<\/a> during his tenure.<\/p>\n

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O\u2019Malley said \u201cleaders lead from the front, and they have to be present in the center of the circle,\u201d while Skoufus, the only sitting elected official running, said he would step down from the New York state Senate because \u201cthe next DNC chair must be fully committed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Wikler, who has a young family in Wisconsin, didn’t commit to a move. He said he planned to keep a \u201ccongressional schedule\u201d and be in D.C. \u201con a regular basis,\u201d but \u201cI think there’s strength that comes from being in a place where Democrats don’t win every election a lot of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

A mostly white, mostly male field of \u201cdudes\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Across the forum\u2019s hovering video-conference boxes on YouTube, it was hard to miss: The eight-member field of candidates are mostly white and mostly male. Aside from former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and entrepreneur Quintessa Hathaway, the competitors for chair come nowhere close to reflecting the diversity of the larger party.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fact that irks some Democrats \u2014 that the field is not more reflective of the party as a whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at our party, and you look at the elected officials who have actually, like, gotten stuff done and accomplished difficult things in difficult states, none of them are involved in this conversation,\u201d said Democratic campaign veteran Caitlin Legacki, who cautioned her comments were not targeted at the men in the field but a broader observation. \u201cThere are no women involved in this conversation. All of our biggest, most high profile pundits are dudes. All of the senators that are writing op-eds about the future of our party are dudes. And then you\u2019ve got these candidates for DNC are dudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s back\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Marianne<\/p>\n

Williamson, the bestselling self-help author, is bringing her woo-woo brand of politics to the chair\u2019s race.<\/p>\n

Like her 2020 and 2024 bids, she has almost no chance of winning. But at least she makes it interesting. Williamson presented herself as the kind of spiritual healer the party needs, noting that she\u2019s \u201cworked very up close and personal with people whose lives were in trouble, they were sick and they didn’t have health care, they lacked opportunities, educational and economic, and they did not feel seen by the political class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williamson brandished her iconoclastic bonafides saying that the DNC failed to push a \u201crobust primary\u201d last year, calling it the biggest mistake that the body made.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the name of saving democracy,\u201d she said, \u201cwe ourselves suppressed democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the economy, stupid<\/b><\/p>\n

Plenty of lip service was paid to what Democrats broadly believe was one of the core reasons for their electoral downfall last year: the party\u2019s economic messaging \u2014 or lack thereof.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Malley pegged Democrats\u2019 disconnect from Americans\u2019 kitchen tables as the party\u2019s \u201cbiggest mistake.\u201d Wikler lamented that \u201cthere were millions of Americans who didn\u2019t know that we were fighting for working families.\u201d And Martin decried voters\u2019 perceptions that Republicans, not Democrats, best represent the working class \u2014 a concept he said was only reinforced by Democrats\u2019 over-performance with wealthy households and college-educated voters \u2014 as a \u201cdamning indictment of our party brand.\u201d<\/p>\n

But they weren\u2019t offering many concrete solutions to bring those voters back to the fold on Saturday \u2014 a sign that while Democrats have diagnosed a major flaw in their messaging, they\u2019ve yet to figure out how to fix it. That\u2019s a major potential problem for the party, with Trump poised to take credit for an economy that began improving under President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Malley called for the next DNC chair to \u201creassert our dedication\u201d to being a party focused on people\u2019s economic security. Martin said the solution lay in year-round organizing in key communities. And Wikler\u2019s suggestion for a course-correction: \u201ccommunicate everywhere\u201d from conservative media to nontraditional platforms.<\/p>\n

So much for the resistance.<\/b><\/p>\n

For a party that has spent much of the past decade running explicitly against Trump, the candidates vying to lead the DNC had little to say about the incoming president.<\/p>\n

Call it a sign of the times.<\/p>\n

Sure, O\u2019Malley closed by saying the next DNC chair needs to \u201ctake on Trump and save our Republic.\u201d And Skoufis repeatedly referenced lessons he\u2019s learned from running and winning in a state Senate district Trump easily carried.<\/p>\n

But as Democrats recalibrate their resistance to Trump to reflect the changed political landscape between his two terms, it appears the people looking to lead the party\u2019s next chapter are taking note.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee have found a common enemy: the D.C. consultant. In the first DNC-sanctioned forum in the body\u2019s low-profile race for chair on Saturday, DNC candidates channeled their frustration at the \u201cD.C. insiders,\u201d whom New York state Sen. James Skoufis vowed to \u201ckick to the curb.\u201d Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}