Dem
47
GOP
53
There is an old saying, certainly familiar to readers, that when it comes to presidential candidates, "the party decides." The notion is that, when all is said and done, it's a bunch of muckety-mucks in the upper ranks of party leadership who really determine which aspiring president will get the nomination.
The Democrats in 2024 notwithstanding, this conventional wisdom isn't particularly true anymore. If it was, Donald Trump wouldn't have gotten within a country mile of the Republican nomination one time, much less three times in a row. These days, the party does NOT decide who will run the country; the voters do. On the other hand, the party DOES decide who will run... the party.
It would appear that newly minted DNC Vice-Chair David Hogg is about to learn this lesson the hard way. As readers will recall, he has decided—to paraphrase the immortal words of Lyndon B. Johnson—to stand inside the tent and piss out, using the PAC he leads to back young and progressive challengers to older and entrenched Democrats in deep-blue districts. This is not done, at least in part because DNC officials have access to information and resources that could unfairly impact the primaries. The rule is that if a person wants to do some pissing, it has to be from outside the tent.
And so, it is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east that the folks who run the Democratic Party have begun a process that will likely lead to Hogg's ouster. Kalyn Free, a longtime Democratic activist who was defeated by Hogg (and one other candidate) in the vice-chair election, filed a formal protest in which she argued that the election was administered improperly. It's a little weedy, but the basic idea is that the DNC has rules about making sure all races, genders and sexual orientations are represented in party leadership, and Free says those rules were not followed properly.
By all indications, Free is correct here, and there really was a procedural error. It is fair to wonder, however, if that procedural error would have been "discovered" if Hogg had not decided to start mucking around in Democratic primaries. In any event, he's not yet out on his rear, but his election, and that of the other vice chair elected alongside him, have been voided, and a new vote will be held. Given that Hogg has now stepped on more than a few toes, his odds of being re-elected as vice chair appear to be roughly as good as his odds of being elected pope. Has he ever been to Chicago?
It's not clear how Hogg will respond to all of this, once his ouster (presumably) becomes official. Surely he had to know that sometimes, if you mess with the donkey, you get the hoof. He played the game, and the game sometimes has consequences. He'll still lead a PAC with eight figures in the bank, so he'll still have a voice and an outsized influence on Democratic politics, just from outside the tent. (Z)