Tales from the DNC

Running for Vice Chair helped me understand why Democrats aren’t connecting with voters

Adam Frisch is a two-time over-performing candidate who came within 550 votes of unseating Lauren Boebert. Frisch recently ran for Vice Chair of the DNC and shares his experience here at WelcomeStack.

THE PROBLEM

A recent poll placed the Democratic Party’s approval rating at its lowest-ever rating of 31%. Almost every pundit and politician agrees that Democrats have lost touch with large swaths of the electorate, an assessment that is worryingly not shared by DNC leadership.

Fresh off two over-performing Congressional races, I thought I might have something to offer the Party as it struggles to reconnect with the American people. Over the last three years, I’d driven over 77,000 miles across my district which was bigger than the state of Pennsylvania. It’s rural, working-class, a quarter Hispanic, and chock-full of the kinds of voters Democrats have been slowly losing over the past decade.

After a 77,000-mile focus group talking to steel-workers in Pueblo, potato farmers in the San Luis Valley, and ranchers in Grand Junction, I pivoted my focus 180 degrees to talk to the 450 members of the Democratic National Committee as a candidate for Vice Chair of the DNC.¹

THE CAMPAIGN

After announcing, I and the other 18 (yes, 18!) candidates for the DNC Vice Chair position received a list of 450 members and their contact information.² Each state and territory sent a minimum delegation of four members, with more adjusted for population.³ Other members are selected either by the Democratic committee for a specific office (think the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association) or chosen by a council within the DNC (Ethnic Council, Seniors Council, College Democrats of America). The last batch is hand-selected by the Chair of the DNC, and includes the Director of the prestigious Georgetown Institute of Politics, the leaders of most powerful labor unions and issue advocacy non-profits, and FDR’s grandson, among others.

Welcome has covered the political science making The Case for Strong Parties, as well as the reality that the modern era is marked by “weak parties and strong partisanship” - there is no CEO of Democrats, Inc. But the DNC is the most formal governing body of the party, and here are my takeaways from the experience of running for Vice Chair: too many degrees, and no one at the midfield.

Here are some quick takeaways from my experience:

• While roughly 38% of the adults in the country have a Bachelor’s degree, the only identifiable non-college graduates I talked to during this process were the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America. After spending three years focused on voters who sporadically had a college degree, it was a significant adjustment talking to the DNC members and staff who were almost entirely college-educated.

• My view of politics is best described via football. Eighty percent of the country is between the two 40 yard lines - the center of the field. Of the 450 people in the DNC's voter group, 80% proved themselves to be on the 10 yard line. And it’s not clear that they know that they're 30-40 yards away from the center of the field and/or do not care.

THE VOTE

Many pundits have aptly claimed that the Democrats are beholden to an amalgamation of intersectional special interest groups. Think: Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, and the ACLU. Democratic strategists and politicians love to break voters down into demographic groups (e.g. “White Suburban women for Harris”).

My week in National Harbor, Maryland, where the DNC elections took place, was the ultimate personification of these well-intentioned, but electorally destructive - and widely mocked bad habits."

The vote for DNC officers took place Saturday, and the prior Thursday and Friday were days dedicated to the DNC’s winter meeting. Of the 30 events scheduled over that period of time, 21 were dedicated to a specific Democratic identity group. So all 30+ candidates for the officer positions spent two days shuffling between these groups in an effort to show their support.

A steady parade of us would sprint from the “LGBTQ Caucus” to the “Interfaith Council” before speaking at the "Environment and Climate Crisis Council.” A literal pilgrimage to “The Groups.”

Needless to say, my 77,000 miles talking with voters in Western and Southern Colorado didn’t translate inside the Beltway. I wasn’t elected Vice Chair of the DNC. But after running two very different races, I understand the distance between the persuadable Trump voter and the DNC member. It is vast, but bridging that gap is the work before us.

In the meantime, it’s time to build our team of insurgent outsiders who lead by example and are ready to show the DNC how to build the kind of winning pragmatic coalition that can deliver results in the next election. Join us at Welcome Fest on June 4th, to build that coalition together.

1. I ran for one of the three At-Large Vice Chair slots. There are 7-8 Vice Chairs in total.

2. Of the 450 members, only 166 provided phone numbers to distribute to candidates. Given the majority of my time was spent calling these members, any candidate that was a current DNC member had a headstart - not just in relationships - but in actual ability to communicate to their voters.

3. According to the last Member-roster we received, the 29 DNC Members from the US Territories and Democrats Abroad (Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, ect…), had the exact same DNC representation as the 29 DNC members from California.