The DNC Against Itself

“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 hand-picked 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.¹

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.

The DNC’s origins go back to before the Civil War, but only after the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson did the committee begin to operate outside presidential elections. In the following decades it began working to build a national brand, with bureaus for ethnic outreach and a Women’s Division—featuring hard-charging leaders like Molly Dewson and India Edwards—that for a time before its dissolution in 1953 was the largest line item in the party’s budget.² And yet it remained a limited operation. The most ambitious national chair was Paul Butler, who in 1957 set up the Democratic Advisory Council, a pioneering attempt to put the national party on record in matters of public policy whose members later made important contributions to the New Frontier and Great Society. But that bid for party-driven policy was a one-off. Sam Rayburn, the House speaker trying desperately to preserve comity in his regionally divided caucus, wanted no part of it, and forbade his members from joining.

An old adage, which Cotter and Hennessy quote, has it that the national committees serve as the umbilical cord between the nominating conventions. In the pre-reform nomination system that existed until 1968, power in both parties flowed upward from potent state organizations. State parties had leeway over how to choose their delegates (which they often did secretly and capriciously), and conventions still determined presidential nominees. Then came the disastrous 1968 convention. By 1972, following the party’s McGovern–Fraser reforms, widespread use of primaries to select delegates had transformed the nomination process. State parties lost their most important job, and the DNC began to oversee the elaborate rules that translate primaries and caucuses into delegates at the national convention. Still, those new powers hardly meant a healthy or functional national organization.³

The modern DNC dates to 1981, when Charles Manatt, a Los Angeles lawyer, assumed the chairmanship of a bedraggled committee. (In 1980 it owed its largest creditor, AT&T, $600,000 in phone bills dating back to 1968—amounting to $2.5 million in today’s dollars.) Emulating innovations at the Republican National Committee in the prior decade, Manatt and his successor, Paul Kirk, ramped up fundraising sharply, and the DNC transformed into a high-budget professionalized outfit that invested in up-to-date operations and technology. It marketed itself aggressively to high rollers and at the same time courted low-dollar donors through direct mail, the predecessor to today’s ubiquitous online solicitations. A Democratic Business Council offered its members a “stockholders’ report” on the party’s activities.

At the same time, Manatt determined that the DNC would be a nuts-and-bolts operation and not a setting for ideological disputation. In 1974 and 1978 the party had held off-year conferences that operated as mini-conventions at which to hash out substantive priorities, but a stripped-down 1982 gathering was the last. That decade ended with the ascendence of a rare universally praised DNC chair, Ron Brown, who served from 1989 to 1993. A D.C. consigliere who had run Jesse Jackson’s convention operation, he channeled the party’s fundraising apparatus into detailed state-by-state plans, written by his able political director Paul Tully, that did much to power Clinton’s victory in 1992.  

More recently the committee’s most transformative leader was Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who, after a presidential run that first showed the power of online organizing, served as DNC chair from 2005 to 2009. Dean took the reins from the Clinton confidante (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe, a gifted schmoozer who had largely ignored party infrastructure, and shifted course drastically. The professionalized party that had developed over the preceding quarter-century was a top-down affair. By contrast, Dean’s Fifty State Strategy emphasized building from the ground up. The DNC political team traveled to each state party and drew up blunt assessments listing their needs, from new computers to legal assistance. “There were a lot of states that were in terrible shape,” Dean later recalled to the journalist Ari Berman.⁴ Teams of staff on DNC payroll soon arrived to help fix them.

Dean clashed with Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, then running the party’s congressional campaign committees, over his decision to allocate resources more widely than they would have preferred as they hunted for narrow majorities. The 2006 and 2008 cycles, however, largely vindicated his strategy. With the wind at the Democrats’ back in a less predictably nationalized environment than today’s, his choice to build everywhere reaped dividends: in 2006, for instance, Democrats unexpectedly picked up three House seats in Indiana. Inside the world of the DNC, Dean’s embrace of the state parties would come to be remembered as a golden age.

In the years since, even as its budget has continued to climb, the DNC has receded in prominence. In the Trump era a wave of money, originating with everyone from small givers to tech billionaires, has inundated the Democratic ecosystem. But those new funds have flowed more often to para-party groups than to formal parties themselves—a shift that has much to do with the changing legal landscape around campaign finance.

After Watergate, Congress enacted a range of reforms that limited contributions and expenditures for candidates, parties, and Political Action Committees (PACs) alike. In 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court upheld the limits on individual contributions but struck down those on expenditures and outside spending. The stage was set, as political entrepreneurs worked the new system, for a rise in giving from individuals and PACs, mostly from business but also from labor and more ideological players left and right.

In 1978 the Federal Election Commission blessed a loophole that allowed unlimited fundraising for “party-building activities.” It was a capacious term. In the subsequent years that “soft money” giving expanded swiftly. Much of it went to “issue ads,” sanctioned by another loophole that allowed parties and outside groups to pay for campaign ads as long as they did not explicitly call for a candidate’s election.

Hoping to tout their good-government bona fides, in 2002 congressional Democrats and a smattering of Republicans led by John McCain­ passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, pronounced “bick-ruh”), which banned both soft money and issue ads. (George W. Bush disliked the bill but signed it to deprive Democrats of a potent election-year issue.) The Democrats backing the bill ignored warnings from party insiders, who pointed out that they had been big winners in the soft-money era and feared that the law would weaken formal parties at the expense of unaccountable outside groups.

That is, in fact, what came to pass, albeit in unexpected fashion. In 2010, in Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down the law’s major provisions. The result left in place certain restrictions on the parties themselves but opened the floodgates to spending nominally uncoordinated with campaigns, notably by “Super PACs” freed from contribution limits. Since then donors have found ever more ways to exert influence from outside the machinery of the national parties. To cross the firewall that separates the “hard side” of candidates and parties from the “soft side” of outside money, campaigns post B-roll and suggested messages for Super PACs to exploit. All the money on the soft side has drawn talented staffers—especially in the world of data and tech—away from the hard side.

Across the Democratic constellation, partisan but not party-linked groups loom ever larger: policy shops aiming to set strategic direction such as the Center for American Progress and Searchlight Institute, ideologically aligned media outlets like MS NOW and figures like the historian and Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson, and purveyors of services from candidate recruitment to voter contact. Some of these figures clearly do see themselves as speaking for a larger Democratic whole. Jon Favreau has his material interests in Crooked Media and his political legacy, to be sure, but he has, for better or worse, as good a public claim as the beleaguered DNC chair to speak on behalf of the party.

The big players around the party—whether from business, labor, or advocacy groups—historically regarded cultivating influence inside the DNC as a reliable way to ensure their clout, often via at-large membership on the committee; the especially devoted could aim for a seat on an influential body like the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which sets the primary calendar. The idea is less that the DNC is a great power center than that it is a good perch from which to make connections, observe political talent as pols tromp through, and keep tabs on everyone else. That logic still holds, but 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.

Above all, megadonors, and the donor advisors who shape their giving, tend to focus their contributions on optimizing for each cycle, rather than on the challenge of long-term party-building. The soft side is the way to put vast sums to work and avoid the remaining campaign-finance restrictions that limit spending and force timely disclosures. And with enough money comes better opportunities to rub shoulders than the DNC can offer. Who needs a seat just behind the long-serving vice chair of a state party when there’s an “intimate gathering” with someone getting mentioned for a 2028 run?

The latest shift in post–Citizens United campaign-finance law came on June 30, when the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down Watergate-era rules that had long restricted how parties could coordinate with candidates—originally part of an effort to keep big spenders from getting around the ceilings for campaign contributions by routing donations through parties. The majority opinion by Brett Kavanaugh is all paeans to free speech and political parties; the dissent by Elena Kagan painstakingly explains how the money actually flows.

The upshot of the Court’s ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission is that parties can now spend directly alongside campaigns in joint party-candidate committees. This makes it easier for parties to raise revenue that flows to candidates; donors can give up to $44,300 to a national party committee and $10,000 to each state committee, while the candidate maximum is only $3,500. It also lets the joint committees pay lower ad rates: now they can benefit from the Federal Communications Commission’s Lowest Unit Charge rule, which prevents stations from jacking up rates for campaigns in the window before elections, when demand for ads is highest.

In the short run Republicans will be the decision’s big winners, because their party committees—leveraging deep relationships with business-linked donors—have tended to raise more and their candidates in tough races less than their Democratic counterparts. The effects will also be dramatic for the DNC’s frenemies at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who now find themselves free to work with candidates directly, without separate arms for their independent expenditures.

From the parties’ vantage point, the ruling might seem a step toward restoring their centrality to the political system. And yet turning the parties, in Kagan’s words, into “an alternative checking account for a campaign” is hardly the road to restoring their full measure of legitimacy. Nor will the ruling do much to close the widening gap between the formal Democratic Party apparatus and the larger trends across the party’s orbit. That gap has had particularly dramatic implications for the state parties, which were already struggling to keep up. Now they find themselves in a battle for relevance.

State parties undertake a grab bag of tasks. They recruit candidates (though in some states, including Wisconsin, the state party is forbidden from putting its thumb on the scale for candidates before the primary, even informally). They serve as custodians of their ballot line, and depending on state law they can fill vacancies when nominees resign or die. They train volunteer-led local parties in the brass tacks of politics, from fundraising and compliance to strategies for effective voter contact, and offer them ways to engage with state-level politicians. Where vibrant local parties are thin on the ground, it falls to state-party staff to help cultivate them.

This is far from an easy process. Often the actual work devolves to the paid canvassers who offer a kind of simulacrum of grassroots politics. As a matter of cost-per-vote efficiency, “paid field” is expensive. And if your goal is actual party-building, paid field is a weak substitute for the real thing, hard though that may be to come by. Since the “Resistance” emerged during the first Trump term, local Democratic organizations have seen signs of revival, especially in swing states and districts, buoyed by older college-educated white women—but this energy has more often flowed into organizations like Indivisible than into parties themselves, leaving the parties struggling even as they underpin the rest of what is sometimes called “the ecosystem.” As a state party leader said in a 2016 report from the Brookings Institution, in a line that still holds, “We are the stewards of the brand, regardless of what progressive organizations out there may be doing. We’re the ones that exist forever.”

Crucial to their fight for influence is that each state party controls the state’s voter file—a shorthand name for the vast repository that brings together records of voter turnout, campaigns’ own contacts, caches of consumer data, and exposure to digital ads, and then uses models to generate scores for predicting voter behavior. This complex accretion has its origins in the mid-2000s, as Democrats marveled at Karl Rove’s microtargeting of voters and wanted to replicate it themselves. The voter file is perhaps not so central now as it was in the 2010s; in the intervening years, platforms have restricted access and other vendors have begun to offer the same kind of information. Still, for state parties it remains a source of both revenue and leverage.

The state parties reap the financial benefits via a dense web of often secretive ownership and licensing arrangements. The DNC pays TargetSmart, a well-connected for-profit vendor, which cleans and adds additional layers to the data, and the company pays the state parties a cut in turn. (Its new CEO, appointed last summer, came straight from chairing the Ohio Democratic Party.) The DNC processes the data and has built out its own tech platform—but the ability to make money from the voter file remains with the state parties. The National Voter File Co-op, led by state party chiefs, brings the data to outside progressive groups and unions. When door-knockers and phone-bankers access the voter file, it is through an interface called VoteBuilder, the work of NGP VAN (a company now owned by private equity).

At the same time, however, what remains of BCRA (Congress never repealed the law that the Court gutted) still imposes requirements on state parties. Often they can exploit loose state-level rules, but onerous federal regulations consume extensive staff time and limit their ability to coordinate with outside partners in federal elections. All of this has worked to diminish their influence. “In absolute terms, state parties are holding their own,” the Brookings report concluded. “But in relative terms—that is, compared with the political competition—they are losing ground.”

State parties once had little collective identity. Before air travel became widespread, state bosses (except for those in Congress) could go the four years between national conventions without laying eyes on one another. Now, as they seek to resist the diminution of their status, the state parties have begun to form an effective bloc with common interests. State party chair, traditionally a nights-and-weekends volunteer role for a well-connected notable, has become a paid full-time job. Tellingly, the Association of State Democratic Chairs, a club of state party leaders, renamed itself in 2017 as the Association of State Democratic Committees, a sign that it now claimed to represent the state party organizations in toto.

The state party loyalists direct their ire far more widely in the vast Democratic ecosystem than at the DNC alone. Their laments extend to consultants and ad-makers—who get dollars that in their view should have gone to shoe-leather organizing—as well as to a wide variety of other targets, from left-wingers who haven’t paid their party dues to centrist billionaires playing out their own flights of fancy. Whatever their gripes, the vote for DNC chair, when the entire membership gets its say, is the single moment when they can channel their grievances into decisive action.

The task of holding together a fractious DNC falls to the national party chair. Especially for a party that does not hold the presidency, this is one of those jobs—like college president, or congregational rabbi—that requires wearing many hats. The chair needs to be pleasing on television, socially at ease in Park Avenue living rooms, articulate at the lectern through a punishing pace of rubber-chicken dinners, and dexterous at keeping up connections across the House and Senate caucuses and the state capitols to tamp down controversies before they get too raw. Out of power, the chair needs to figure out what mix of investments across systems and operations will get the party in a position to win again. When the party is in power the office is less prominent, but the chair still serves as a kind of political scout, ideally representing the party to the president and the president to the party. The most successful national chairs have had a sense of how their work serves a larger whole and brings disparate actors together. For Brown, that meant getting the infrastructure in order; for Dean, it meant sharing the party’s resources more widely.

In Martin, the state parties saw a chance to increase their clout. A protégé of Mark Dayton, an heir to the Target fortune who preceded Tim Walz as governor, Martin spent more than a decade as chair of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, during which he adroitly maneuvered among the state’s progressive factions. More importantly, he spent eight years, right up to his election as DNC chair, schmoozing with the state party loyalists as chair of the Association of State Democratic Committees.

In the February 2025 election for party chair, Martin’s chief rival was Ben Wikler, his counterpart as state party chair in Wisconsin, who formerly worked at the progressive group MoveOn. Pitched as it was between two white liberal men from the Upper Midwest, this contest turned less on ideology or demography than on intricate alliances that flowed from accumulated favors and slights. Leftists and moderates looking for change tended to back Wikler, who also, in a sign of the distance between the DNC and congressional centers of gravity, won support from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

In Wisconsin, Wikler had cultivated national donors in ways that state party chairs traditionally had not. When he explained to readers of The New Republic in 2022 that “in every corner of America’s tipping-point state, the battle is joined,” it was a kind of infomercial to the chattering classes. But not all of Wikler’s big-name allies endeared him to party insiders. His DNC campaign received backing from the billionaires George Soros and Reid Hoffman. Those with long memories found Soros mercurial and held a grudge against his one-and-done outside group America Coming Together, which had arrived for the 2004 cycle only to disband soon thereafter. More importantly, Hoffman had drawn state parties’ disfavor during the first Trump administration by trying and failing to build what he imagined would be a cutting-edge alternative to the lumbering centralized voter file.

It was Martin who, leveraging his contacts from ASDC, spoke for the state parties as something like a class in their own right, promising a DNC that would be more responsive to their brand of close-to-the-ground politics. Without using specific names, he railed against the “consultant class” in D.C., pledging to cancel their contracts and juice online fundraising to supplant the big givers. He also showed his savvy in negotiating the national committee’s internal processes. Nowadays the umbilical cord between conventions runs through the DNC’s control over the primary calendar, set by the Rules and Bylaws Committee. Candidates for chair can use seats on the RBC as bargaining chips—and if whispers are correct, Martin played that game assiduously. He won his election as chair in February 2025 by a vote of 246.5 to 134.5.

Since becoming chair, Martin has followed through on his promise, delivering a total of $1 million per month to the fifty-seven state and territorial parties—$17,500 to each party and an extra $5,000 to red states. Under Dean the DNC had paid for staff. Now, accelerating earlier shifts begun under Tom Perez in the first Trump administration, everyone gets cash automatically. State parties, in other words, have figured out how to get paid en masse every month by the very national party that they oversee. Meanwhile, an amendment passed in August 2025 guarantees state party chairs and vice chairs a minimum of a quarter of the seats on Rules and Bylaws and other major DNC committees.

Yet the dollars to state parties still make up less than a tenth of the DNC’s expenses. In a sign of just how much the DNC continues to rely on the despised consultant class, outside vendors like TargetSmart and NGP VAN are still getting paid even as FEC filings indicate that Martin has slashed spending on polling and message testing, which in any case was always a modest share of the budget. What remains unaddressed is the larger problem that systems and expertise are concentrated in outside vendors, not in-house with the DNC’s staff.

Martin’s solicitude toward the state parties has sowed deep concern about his leadership across the rest of the party’s elite circles—above all among elected officials, but also with donors, staffers, and allied groups. Sometimes they go on the record. As Representative Marc Veasey of Texas said soon after the autopsy’s release, “There doesn’t seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking. November is literally around the corner.… I believe it’s time for him to move on.” More often, insiders grouse anonymously and the strong statements come from outside. “Ken’s gotta go,” Amanda Litman of Run for Something, which recruits candidates, wrote on her Substack. “For the good of the future of the party, we have to clean house.”

Critics like Veasey and Litman might not vote on Martin’s immediate fate, but they still decide whether he gets taken seriously—and collectively they can force a crisis that the committee’s membership would find hard to ignore. They have reason to worry. Uneasy in the spotlight, Martin has yet to show the party beyond DNC members how his priorities serve a coherent vision. Fundraising under his watch has been weak. At the end of May the committee had $14.9 million on hand, less than its $18.3 million in debt. The Republican National Committee, in contrast, had no debt and more than $125 million. The DNC paid $20 million to the Harris-Walz campaign to cover late expenses in a handshake deal that Harris would fundraise for the DNC in that amount, then paid $6.5 million for Harris’s email list. These sorts of arrangements are not entirely unprecedented, but they still raise eyebrows: it’s hard, after all, to discern if the immediate beneficiaries ultimately fulfill their end of the bargain.

If donors stop giving and force the DNC to take out another loan or turn off the spigot to state parties, Martin’s days could be numbered. The committee’s straitened circumstances are all the more palpable now that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the NRSC case has opened up enticing possibilities for coordinated expenditures. What happens inside the DNC no longer seems like such a sideshow. A disappointing midterm result could be a catalyst to pull out the long knives, though a successful one could allow Martin to muddle through. But he has a lifeline as long as the state parties remain pleased enough with his support and no crisis intervenes.

In this sense, the Martin chairmanship exposes an institutional design failure. Succeeding as DNC chair requires pleasing multiple constituencies, but only the state party insiders—now conscious of themselves as a bloc—make up the selectorate. Just when the external stakes for the Democratic Party are highest, Martin won power, and now may keep it, thanks to internal factors that would strike many outsiders as picayune.

Deep into the second Trump administration, the debates within the Democratic Party have an anachronistic quality. Everywhere else, the mid-2000s are remembered as a prelude to the convulsions of the Great Recession and the rise of MAGA. Inside the DNC, however, the Fifty State Strategy and the centralized voter file remain burning questions. “We haven’t been taken seriously since Dean was chair,” complained Jane Kleeb of Nebraska—a close Martin lieutenant, now leading the ASDC—to The American Prospect in 2021. So, too, the Democrats are still litigating the legacy of Barack Obama, both the most successful Democratic president in many decades and a lousy party-builder. Obama for America, the engine behind his 2008 win, started out working closely with the legendary organizer and teacher Marshall Ganz and ended up as an appendage of the DNC that sent out fundraising emails.

The work of setting the party apparatus on a better course will fall to whoever emerges as its presidential standard-bearer in 2028. Once in office, Democratic presidents have rarely shown much interest in party mechanics. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who chaired the DNC from 2011 to 2016, resorted to cornering Obama at photo lines. She proved hapless, sharp-elbowed internally and ignored by the White House, but he couldn’t be bothered to fire her. The Harrison years under Biden were largely a missed opportunity for party-building. (Harrison’s memoir next spring, Chair with No Table, may settle some scores.) But given the DNC’s present state, whichever Democrat next retakes the presidency will face pressure to clean house. If a determined White House political operation wants to slash the committee’s membership, find new leaders for crucial posts, and untangle the voter file mess, the newly emboldened state chairs will huff and puff, but the party’s other power centers will be unlikely to come to their defense.

Anyone who imagines a less nationalized, more rooted party system—one that meets voters where they are—should want to strengthen state parties. But putting dollars to work in a way that rewards long-term talent rather than playing favorites is easier said than done. To get a better party, whoever next chairs the DNC will need to ease out plenty of good, loyal, long-serving Democrats and replace them with ambitious newcomers hungrier to win. In state after state, party chairs will have to do the same. Democrats will have to cultivate grassroots supporters without imagining that “organizing,” however necessary, will somehow solve all the party’s problems, and start figuring out just what durable party loyalty means in the time of TikTok.

But they will also need to answer far larger questions about just what a center-left party ought to look like. An heroic party is hard to imagine at this juncture, but it’s still worth trying to build a competent one. For all their sclerosis, the formal parties retain advantages over Super PACs and the “soft side.” 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. The formal parties conduct their business in the open, and they give meaningful opportunities to ordinary partisans, plenty of whom are not rich. These days that is no small feat.