Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Three weeks from now, the Democratic National Committee will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to elect a new party chair and other national officers. For Democrats reeling from the defeat of Kamala Harris, this will be their first opportunity to anoint a fresh face for the national party to replace Jaime Harrison, who is stepping down.
A new chair, particularly one elected via an open vote and not merely picked by an incumbent president, as is the party’s tradition, could also change how Democrats operate at both the national and state level. So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.
But who will make this decision? Officially, it’s a secret. According to the DNC, there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 “at-large” members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Today, we’re going to open up the DNC’s black box.
The list we are publishing was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
KNOWING WHO IS ON THE PARTY NATIONAL COMMITTEE matters for the members of the committee themselves. Members can request the official roster, but they must know where and how, and that information isn’t necessarily obvious. Kapp, who works in Los Angeles County government, is currently vice chair of the DNC’s Western States Caucus and the former chair of its Youth Council. “I have never received from the DNC, nor do I expect to receive, at least under this and the last administration, a list of contact information for all my members,” he said. To build email listservs for both groups, he told me he had to hunt down their information himself.
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”
The DNC member list also matters because of ongoing efforts to get Democrats to strengthen their internal ethics rules—some of these party insiders also make a cushy living as corporate lobbyists—and try to reduce the role of dark money in Democratic election battles. Two and a half years ago, during its summer meeting, the DNC’s Gang of 448 voted to give itself the power to overrule any amendments to its bylaws that a national party convention, a much broader body with greater public input, might vote to enact. As Akela Lacy reported for The Intercept at the time, paid DNC staff whipped votes to ensure passage of this change, leading voting member Jessica Chambers of Wyoming to call the DNC “the least democratic organization that I’m involved with.”
You can view the list sorted by title or by state. Both shed light on how power is concentrated and flows inside the national party as well as in many states.
If you view the list sorted by title, the first group that jumps out, both alphabetically and by its sheer size, are the “at-large” members. The 73 listed here were all whisked into their current positions on the DNC roster by Jaime Harrison in 2021. According to DNC bylaws, at-large members must by voted in by the rest of the membership, but the current class was put forward by Harrison as a single slate that was voted on up-or-down as a bloc.
A new chair, particularly one elected via an open vote and not merely picked by an incumbent president, could change how Democrats operate at both the national and state level.
Some of the at-large members have been on the national committee for many terms. Those include stalwarts of the party establishment like Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Minyon Moore, and Maria Cardona, triple-hitters who have led national campaigns or party conventions, show up frequently on cable TV as political commentators, and buckrake as lobbyists and/or well-paid public speakers. Brazile is a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm” Purple Strategies, which has worked for BP, United Airlines, NASCAR, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and PhRMA. Ickes is a partner at Tiber Creek Group, whose clients include the Greater New York Hospital Association. Moore and Cardona are both partners at the Dewey Square Group, whose clients have included Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Springfield, Sony Pictures, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and which has engaged in lobbying to undermine state labor protections.
The at-large members also include upstarts like Faiz Shakir and Larry Cohen, who were brought into the DNC fold as part of the accommodation the party establishment made with Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign after 2016. Others, like five at-large members from Delaware added by Harrison, were almost certainly added at President Biden’s behest; one of those, a government relations director at Elkstone Partners named Brian McGlinchey, is a childhood friend of the president’s late son Beau Biden, who later served as Biden’s federal projects director in the Senate.
The hacks definitely stand out among Harrison’s handpicked cohort. Those include top fundraisers Kristin Bertolina Faust and Alicia Rockmore of California, Carol Pensky of Florida, and Deborah Simon of Indiana, as well as David Huynh of New York, whose main claim to fame appears to be his work as a consultant to now-jailed cryptocurrency hustler Sam Bankman-Fried when he appeared to be the Next Big Funder of the Democrats in 2021-2022.
Elaine Kamarck, a pillar of the Brookings Institution, was reappointed as a DNC member; she is the only “thought leader” with a DNC berth. A lot of union leaders also made Harrison’s cut, including Marisol Garcia of the Arizona Education Association; Becky Pringle, president of the NEA; Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers; Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, the public employee union; April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Eric Dean, president of the Iron Workers; Edward Kelly, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters; Roxanne Brown, vice president of the United Steelworkers; John Costa, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); Timothy Driscoll, president of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers; and Anthony Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Many of these union leaders do not include their DNC membership in their public bios; if we erred here in listing any of them, we will correct the error.
When you add up the DNC’s at-large members and its officers, plus leaders of various affiliated groups—state-level elected officials from governor to secretaries of state to county officials, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Democratic Municipal Officials, the House and Senate campaign committees, High School and College Democrats of America, and some interest groups like the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Council, the National Democratic Seniors Coordinating Council, and the National Federation of Democratic Women—that brings together about 122 voting members, a little more than one-quarter of the Gang of 448.
THE REMAINDER COME FROM THE 50 STATES, seven territories, and Democrats Abroad, which is more apparent if you view the list sorted by state name. State party chairs and vice chairs are all automatically DNC members, which accounts for 113 votes. And another 213 (not 200, as the DNC says publicly) are elected or selected by their state party, with every state and territory getting at least two and those with larger Democratic populations getting proportionally more. A good part of this segment of the DNC’s voting membership is public, if you know where to look. Nearly every state chair and vice chair is listed on their state party’s website, and in most cases the two additional voting members that every state is allocated (at a minimum) can also be found there.
A decent number of these people are elected (like many chairs and vice chairs) by the state party executive committees; these are arguably the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about. Some state parties are very good at making all of this transparent; if you are a grassroots activist and you want to get involved in how your state party is run or seek to be one of its representatives to the DNC, the pathway is open in those places.
The biggest exceptions come in two varieties: small backwaters and big cesspools. For example, the Democratic Parties of tiny American Samoa and Guam, as well as Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, and Vermont, don’t list all their state’s DNC reps, though the Mariana Islands’ party website does. But that only amounts to about two dozen voting DNC members whose existence has been hidden from public view until now. (Florida, a big state with a very weak Democratic Party, also is delinquent in listing the names of its 11 elected members, as is the Democrats Abroad delegation of six.)
Seven big states—Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—collectively have 69 DNC voting members apportioned to them. But only 14 of them—in each case, the state’s chair and vice chair—are publicly known. What could these seven states remotely have in common with each other than being places where local party machine behaviors still permeate?
The missing 55 from these states were chosen, by some opaque process, by their state party’s leadership. Some may seem unobjectionable to anyone who thinks Democrats should be fighting for working people. Among them are Greg Kelley, the SEIU president in Illinois; Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, from New York; James Weston, director of political action for Ohio’s Association of Public School Employees; Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio AFT; and Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO. And some, like four from Minnesota, ran well-publicized local campaigns to get elected as DNC reps from their state and are thus presumably known to their party grassroots.
On the other hand, some appear to have gotten their DNC slots without any publicly transparent selection process by their state. That appears to be the case in Illinois and New York, where I could not find any sign that party members were given an opportunity to run for the position or that a vote was taken. But some belong in the political dictionary next to the words “corporate Democrats” or “local party bosses.” Those include:
• John Graham, the owner of Fairview Insurance and publisher of InsiderNJ, whose son runs America’s Future First, a campaign super PAC. Four years ago, state party leaders unsuccessfully tried to get Graham—whose company is one of the largest political donors in the state—to give up his DNC post after America’s Future First started spending heavily on behalf of a Republican running for mayor of Parsippany. The city’s Democratic mayor had canceled its insurance contract with Fairview, leading the New Jersey Globe to report that the PAC’s move “may be more about landing a lucrative public insurance contract that about political ideology.” Graham was also one of several New Jersey power brokers who gave the maximum legal amount, $10,000, to disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez’s legal defense fund.
• Michael Reich, one of three partners in the SRB law firm that is at the heart of the Queens, New York, Democratic party machine. As the New York Daily News reported back in 2017, with his partners Gerard Sweeney and Frank Bolz, they’ve effectively controlled “one of the largest Democratic organizations in America” for more than 30 years. “No Queens judge rises through the ranks without the party’s blessing and regular donations to its housekeeping account,” the paper noted. As New York Focus recently reported, Reich and Bolz make up two-thirds of a Democratic Party panel that interviews judicial candidates for endorsement. The most lucrative part of this machine is centered at the county’s Surrogate’s Court, where the Sweeney-led firm has earned more than $30 million in fees since Sweeney was appointed counsel to the Queens Public Administrator, where he decides who should inherit when a borough resident dies without a will.
• Christopher Lowe, chief investment officer of SteelRiver, a private firm that invests in gas and oil companies. His main qualification for DNC membership from New York appears to be his prolific fundraising; according to the FEC, he’s personally donated more than $551,000 to the DNC since 2017.
In addition, several of these obscured-from-view DNC members make their livings as lobbyists, including:
• Scott Brennan, a DNC member from Iowa who works in government relations for Dentons, a top lobby shop whose clients include ByteDance (owner of TikTok), JPMorgan Chase, and PhRMA.
• Modia Butler, a partner in Mercury Public Affairs who was Sen. Cory Booker’s chief of staff. Mercury’s clients include Shell, Korea Zinc, Camel Energy, Alibaba Group, Energia Naturalis, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.
• John Cullerton, a former Illinois state Senate president who is a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP.
• Emily Giske, a senior partner at Bolton-St. Johns in New York.
• Bernadette McPherson, a senior vice president at Millennium Strategies, a firm packed with former aides to various New Jersey Democrats that makes its money securing government grants for local municipalities across New Jersey and neighboring states.
• Marcus Mason, a DNC member from Maryland who is the senior partner at the Madison Group, where he lobbied in 2024 on behalf of Alphabet, Bally’s, Berkshire Hathaway, Cerberus Capital, Coinbase, MTN Dubai Ltd., and Navient, among others.
• James Roosevelt III, a DNC member from Massachusetts and the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who is a registered lobbyist at the law firm Verrill Dana, where he advises health care interests and insurers.
Making the DNC’s membership roster public may have little overall effect on the direction of the organization. It is, after all, highly dependent on big money and exquisitely attuned to the political needs of the party’s leading officials in Congress. According to Open Secrets, the top contributors to the DNC in the 2023-2024 cycle, after House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s campaign organization, were Bain Capital ($2.9 million), Google parent company Alphabet ($2.6M), Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins ($2.5M), community media conglomerate Newsweb Corp. ($2.5M), Jeffrey Katzenberg’s holding company WndrCo ($2.5M), Microsoft ($2.4M), Reid Hoffman’s VC firm Greylock Partners ($2.4M), real estate developer McArthurGlen Group ($2.2M), and hedge fund Lone Pine Capital ($2.2M).
SO FAR, EIGHT CONTENDERS FOR THE DNC CHAIR have demonstrated sufficient support to be included in a series of public candidate forums that the DNC has organized: Quintessa Hathaway, an educator and failed congressional candidate from Arkansas; Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic Party state chair; Martin O’Malley, former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate; Jason Paul, a local Democratic party activist from Newton, Massachusetts; James Skoufis, a New York state senator from the Hudson Valley; Nate Snyder, a national security expert who served in various positions in the Biden administration; Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party state chair; and Marianne Williamson, the author and two-time Democratic presidential candidate. The first of these forums is tonight.
Of these eight, most attention is focused on Martin and Wikler, whose time in the trenches of state party organizing and fundraising, and whose success improving Democratic fortunes in their respective states, has made them the strongest contenders for the job. In 2017, the last time the DNC chairmanship was up for an open vote, the contest cleaved along clear ideological lines, with supporters of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid, many labor unions, and progressive organizations backing Minnesota then-Rep. Keith Ellison, while outgoing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and many state party chairs backed Labor Secretary Tom Perez. The latter won the vote, 235-200, on the second round, after several lesser contenders dropped out.
This time, the top two candidates are both drawing support from across the Democratic spectrum, with Martin (who got his start in politics as an intern to Sen. Paul Wellstone) calling himself a “pro-labor progressive,” and Wikler, who worked for MoveOn before moving back to his home state of Wisconsin to enter party politics, promising that he won’t take sides in factional disputes and instead would be an “honest broker” building a big tent. Wikler has the endorsements of Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Brian Schatz, two of Congress’s more liberal members, but has also been endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as well as the centrist group Third Way. Martin, the current president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, claims to have 100 DNC members in his column already, including party chairs in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, who have made their support public, along with his own state delegation.
If there is a meaningful difference between Martin and Wikler, it may be more generational and stylistic than ideological. Martin, aged 51, took the reins of the Minnesota party in 2011 and rebuilt it the old-fashioned way, steadily building up its coffers from $8 million in the 2012 cycle to nearly triple that in 2024. Wikler, aged 43, stepped into the Wisconsin chairmanship in 2019, and has been a prodigious and creative fundraiser, pulling in nearly $150 million over the past three election cycles using tactics like virtual events featuring the casts of The West Wing and Veep.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics, so being good at fundraising may be the most important qualification both men have for the job they are seeking. That skill may qualify them too well to maintain the DNC status quo. But the status quo doesn’t change by itself. Knowing who has actual voting power over the DNC’s governance may give grassroots activists around the country who care about the party’s future some greater capacity to focus their efforts on the people who actually pull the levers. What they do with that potential is up to them.
