The Democratic Brand and the DNC Mess

As you have undoubtedly read, the Democratic National Committee is in debt and in turmoil, at a time when a June Supreme Court decision has liberated party committees to funnel unlimited sums to candidates. To be precise, the Republican National Committee has $128.5 million in cash on hand, while the DNC has a debt of over $2 million.

In addition, the DNC’s beleaguered chair, Ken Martin, has been ridiculed for a badly flawed “autopsy” report that he commissioned on the 2024 loss, refused to make public, and then released under pressure. The author of that report, an obscure political consultant named Paul Rivera, just leaked to The New York Times a key chapter which he claimed Martin refused to include. Martin insists that he never received it.

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The DNC’s woes have become part of a broader narrative about the Democrats’ inept leadership and damaged “brand.” So what’s really at work here?

For starters, party national committees don’t matter a great deal except on a few things. They don’t make policy, and candidates are free to ignore them.

Where they do have real power is in their role in setting the rules of nominating conventions and in setting the calendar for primaries. The DNC has just revised the primary calendar for 2028, so that South Carolina, with its large African American population, goes first at the expense of nearly all-white New Hampshire. (Ironically, this could give South Carolina less power than its cleanup spot from 2008 to 2024, when it played a major role in choosing the last two Democratic presidents.)

The rules for the 2028 convention have yet to be set, but the rules for 2020 were the subject of a titanic struggle between Bernie Sanders forces and DNC members loyal to Hillary Clinton. Serious reforms were eventually enacted, thanks to the work of Larry Cohen representing Sanders and then-party chair Tom Perez, as well as Keith Ellison, the Sanders-backed candidate for party chair whom Perez narrowly defeated for the job.

The reform rules provided that so-called superdelegates may vote only if no winner is nominated on the first ballot. Any citizen can show up the day of a party primary, change their registration if necessary, and vote. And caucus votes must be recorded. The unity effort strongly recommended getting rid of caucuses entirely in favor of primaries. By 2020, all but three states had shifted to primaries.

Ken Martin’s stumbles are a little surprising. He was a very effective chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, one of the strongest state parties, and also chair of the Association of State Democratic Committees.

Martin’s goal was to have the DNC funnel more money to state parties. He is evidently not great at raising money, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seem to get plenty of money.

But as former DNC Chair Howard Dean told me, “When you lose a presidential election, it’s always hard for the DNC to raise money because you don’t have the White House. It’s always easier for the DSCC and the DCCC because this is corporate and other special-interest money aiming to influence Congress.”

The DSCC and the DCCC have been under fire for intervening in party primaries and backing centrist candidates (who often lose) at a time when the party base is clearly moving left. The key players in those decisions are Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries. Both have been widely criticized for being overly close to corporate Democrats, to AIPAC, and for being too quick to make legislative deals with President Trump.

Both could well face leadership challenges in the next Congress. Some in the Jeffries camp have actually tried to exclude from the Congressional Black Caucus Democratic members of Congress who won’t commit to re-electing Jeffries. To the extent that the Democratic Party has a “damaged brand,” the faces of that damage are Schumer and Jeffries far more than Ken Martin, whom most voters have never heard of.

Howard Dean added, “The attacks on Martin are classic Beltway BS. He came in and fired a lot of the inside-the-Beltway consultants. They have been the Democrats’ main problem for at least 20 years, and they’re all mad at him.”

The good news, sort of, is that the story of a damaged Democratic brand is oversimplified and overstated. Since 2025, Democrats have won by large margins in one off-year election after another. Effective candidates, both left and center-left, proved far more important than the Democratic label.

Spillover damage from the 2024 presidential loss did not prevent Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in New Jersey and Virginia from winning governorships by landslide margins, to say nothing of the New York success of Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, and dozens of down-ballot Democrats.

If Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed manages to win a close Senate election in Michigan, it will be because he runs an effective campaign, not because of his party label. If anything, thanks to Trump, the Republican label is now far more of an albatross.

That said, the Democratic label is indeed toxic in much of the Mountain and Prairie West, which is why Democrats in several states, including Idaho, Nebraska, and most recently South Dakota, have stepped aside in favor of independents who might actually beat Republicans.

In trying to build a 50-state party, Ken Martin’s role model was Howard Dean, who served as party chair from 2005 to 2009. Dean was serious about pumping resources into parties, especially in red states.

When Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008, he won it by defeating Hillary Clinton in red states, building on Dean’s work. His thank-you to Dean was to fire him as party chair and to dismantle the grassroots party groups that Dean had built.

So elected officials are far more important than parties or party brands. Their folly, repeated over and over again, is to undermine parties and, in the case of Schumer and Jeffries, to try to impose their own preferences on voters.