For approximately eight months between 2016 and 2017, I was a member of the Delaware Green Party. The main reason was fairly simple: I had turned eighteen in the summer of 2016 and was immediately attracted to a group of insurgent progressive campaigns. Nationally, that meant Bernie Sanders for president and locally that meant Eugene Young for Wilmington Mayor. After I voted for both, just to watch each of them be thwarted by “the establishment,” I registered my disgust that September by switching my party registration.
For a few months, I attended meetings and contemplated my place in the movement, but after Trump’s election I set my sights on more mainstream theories of political change and plunged into involvement with the Democratic Party instead. Over the next four years, I served on the executive board of the UD College Democrats, served as a field director for a red-to-blue state senate election, and eventually served as secretary for my local Democratic ward.
The Democratic and Green parties are quite different, in ways that go well beyond ideology. In Delaware, like most places, the law recognizes the two-party system pretty explicitly. While all parties need to have at least .1% of voters registered to get on the ballot, there is a legal distinction between “major” parties which have at least 5% of registered voters and minor parties that don’t reach that threshold. It even clarifies that “principal” political parties are the two highest-registered ones in the state.
If you want to run in a minor political party, it is actually theoretically a lot easier. All you need to do is be appointed by the usually fairly-small party committee and you’ll be on the ballot in November. Somewhat ironically, this actually means that the lowly third parties tend to be both more informal and more dictatorial. If two people want to go for the same seat, that gets decided by a very small number of people, as opposed to an official primary. But since they basically never win, no one really seems to care.
Instead, most of our critique on the left is instead focused on the Democratic Party. It starts from a reasonable place: if you are left of center and want to have any say in elections, you basically are required to do so as a Democrat. And anyone who has tried to engage in the Democratic Party from the left can certainly attest that there is some resistance to prevent you from changing things up too much. As a result, left-wing insurgents tend to go after “the party” (which I will use from here on out to refer to the Democratic Party) for the various ills we perceive: “rigging” the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries, killing minimum wage legislation, or lifting up the same old and sick incumbents over new and exciting figures.
I was a member of the Green Party for a bit, so you can probably guess that I have been guilty of this in the past. However, as I became more involved in Democratic politics and especially after I moved into my current role with the Working Families Party, I began to see that the party was not just one thing. Rather, it is an amorphous blob of competing individuals, networks, and institutions. I still hold that a lot of these individuals, networks, and institutions are horrible. But if we really want to combat the worst of the party, then we have to understand what some of those different components are, and what needs to change in order to build a better government for all of us.
In this piece, I will mostly be focused on Delaware, the different levels of the party here, and what they do. However, this is not simply a guide for how to fix the party. Rather, near the end I would like to make a different case altogether. Fixing the way our government works goes a lot deeper than fixing the Democratic Party, so we need to have a different discussion about governing power and what needs to change there. But first, let’s talk about RD committees.
The Actual Democratic Party
To begin, it’s important to understand what the Democratic Party is at a basic level. In America, parties are most organized within each state, and each of those state parties elects delegates to the Democratic National Committee. The national and state parties each have their own elected leadership, which is separate from actual elected officials.
In Delaware, this is decided at the grassroots levels by “Representative District Committees,” or RD committees, which are allowed to have up to two representatives for each election district. Sometimes becoming a member is as easy as showing up, but if there’s multiple people who want one seat it can go to an informal election. Each RD then chooses a certain number of delegates to both the county and Wilmington parties, as well as to the statewide party, which then all choose their own leadership. The specifics of these elections vary: delegates to the national convention are decided before the presidential election, while reorganization of each RD happens after the presidential election.
The result of this fairly complex structure is a lot of competing fiefdoms. Different RDs might not like each other, leaders of different subdivisions might butt heads, and there are frequent disagreements among the RD, subdivision, and state levels. There’s not even a set of specific things that these committees are supposed to be doing on a month to month basis. Rather than diving into all of that, I think it’s important to understand what power all these positions actually hold, which is very little.
The biggest power that the party has is one that we saw recently: members of the RDs are able to choose the Democratic nominee in special elections. Since this is fairly rare, the largest powers are more subtle. The party chooses the filing fee that candidates must pay to run on their ballot line, the party is able to raise and give more money directly to candidates than individuals or PACs, and the party has control over and usually runs a “coordinated campaign” in the general election which focuses on getting Democratic voters to turn out for Democratic candidates. In recent years, the party also has control over who gets access to Votebuilder, the Democratic Party’s national voter file database.
While these different things are certainly important, it’s more notable what the Democratic Party can’t do. The party can’t force someone to run or not run, the party can’t choose to expel a member or elected official, and the party can’t even run their own elections; primaries are run by the state Department of Elections. Therefore, whenever you choose to get involved in the party as opposed to somewhere else, the opportunity cost must be considered.
Nationally, the party has a bit more power in how presidential delegates are decided through the delegate process, which has a fairly large impact on that election. But in Delaware, basically everything other than the short list above is decided by other groups. The most important of these groups is the voters.
Democratic Voters
I think it is probably safe to say that many of the elected leaders of the Democratic Party are not fans of me and the work that I do through the Working Families Party. However, I am a registered Democrat, which allows me to vote in Democratic primaries and even serve as a Democratic committee member and there’s very little that anyone in the party can do about that. This gets to one of the underlying truths about the party system in America: given that their membership is based on state-driven party registration and state-run primaries, they are at the mercy of people who choose to register with them, rather than the other way around.
This is particularly clear with the way the Republican Party has trended over the last generation. While Republican Party regulars preferred moderate candidates like George HW Bush and Jeb Bush, the voters of the party were much more interested in conservative firebrands like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Typically, the Democratic Party’s lack of a similar mechanism, where the voters continuously push the party to the left with no regard to electoral viability, is seen as a symptom of Democratic voters’ lack of agency in the process.
Unfortunately for those of us on the left, this really just means that Democratic voters aren’t really enthusiastic about throwing the establishment out, at least the ones who vote in primaries. Since the 1960s at least, the Democratic Party has served as a broad coalition of college-educated whites, union members, younger voters, most Black voters, and certain subsets of Hispanic and Asian voters. Over time, this group has become a bit more ideologically homogeneous due to polarization and partisan sorting, but there’s still a lot of competing interests.
Anyone who has had to work in primaries in deep-blue areas can attest, therefore, that being “more Democratic” is not the same thing as being “more progressive.” Older Black voters, who are some of the most die-hard partisan Democrats, often are just a bit more ideologically conservative than younger white voters. The same goes for most older voters, and different class and racial dynamics break down in different ways in different places.
Ultimately, when it comes to the election victories that you need to actually serve in government, Democratic voters are the ones who need to be won over. Sometimes, this happens through the official party, but outside a few cities with big machines it’s quite rare. Organizing voters can happen through light touches like door-to-door canvassing or phone banking, but real effective organizing goes deeper than that. Connecting with institutions like unions, churchs, and community groups that have bases of real voters is going to be a much
What makes this difficult is that most Democratic voters, and voters overall, do not necessarily make choices based on their own well-researched, utility-maximizing rationality. They also aren’t all necessarily directly connected to some existing institution. Rather, they exist in a broader ecosystem of networks and information that goes well beyond traditional organizations.
Democratic Influencers
Barack Obama, MeidasTouch, Jamelle Bouie, Whoopie Goldberg, and James Carville. What do all of these people have in common? They are not currently elected Democrats, but they have some influence in how Democratic voters and Democratic elected officials make decisions. Media has always had a big influence on how institutions are run, but in the age of social media things have only gotten more chaotic. Now, former presidents and newspaper editorials have to share the space with podcasters, TV personalities, progressive groups, and anonymous Facebook pages.
For most voters, the way they interact through politics is not by directly looking at C-SPAN recordings or poring through every single vote that a politician has taken. Rather, most of us interact with politics by following people who follow it more than we do. Sometimes that means listening to former politicians like Barack Obama, sometimes that means listening to Pod Save America, sometimes that means watching Hasan on Twitch. For a lot of people even elected officials can serve as influencers, as most people form at least some sort of emotional bond with their favorite politician.
Ultimately, a lot of the “culture” of the Democratic Party that people complain about, or like, is decided here. The tendency towards moderation over bold policy demands and the somewhat scolding nature of the party towards insurgents are largely enforced at the superstructural level of influencers. It even carried out the most consequential choice the party has made in the last fifty years.
In Delaware, Democratic influencers might look like former elected officials, Facebook pages and groups, blogs, podcasts, or even people who do serve in some sort of party or elected office. For better or worse, though, many of us are still operating downstream of the national Democratic media ecosystem.
This is where it becomes a bit more difficult to advocate a specific organizing strategy. Despite some projects that I’ve worked on, you’ll never hear me advocating the idea that everyone needs to start a podcast or comment on Facebook posts all day. There have been some innovations in left spaces around organizing narrative work that look to change that way that everyday people think and talk about political issues, but that requires a certain amount of influence and connections that most of us do not have. Nowhere does this become more clear than in the most notorious Democratic Party move of the last generation.
When Joe Biden decided to step down from his re-election campaign in July of 2024, he was not forced to do so by any official party apparatus. If he had made the decision to stay in, he had all the party delegates that he needed to be re-nominated without issue at the convention. Instead, after a horrible debate performance, it was the Democratic influencers who jumped in. Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney, Pod Save America, all started pushing the message that Joe had to go. Only once these validators started to push this message did things really begin to move.
However, there was one other large factor that drove Biden out that has been lurking under this whole piece as a major driver of what’s wrong with the party: the donors.
Democratic Donors
Contrary to what you might expect, Democratic donors actually tend to be to the left of other Democratic voters on both social issues, and about the same on economic issues. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than some initial studies might suggest. Ever since 2016, and to a certain sense even since 2004, the world of Democratic giving has changed drastically, with most money coming from a wave of small donors. They tend to be driven in the same way that voters are: by influencers. That is how you get candidates like Amy McGrath or Beto O’Rourke who capture the hearts of Democratic donors despite long-shot chances, while less exciting but more pragmatic candidates get passed over.
The small donors aren’t the group that people are really talking about when they’re talking about Democratic donors, though. In the last decade, a broad network of large money interests have popped up around Democratic politics that demonstrably have pushed the party more to the right: Silicon Valley, AIPAC, and crypto.
Even when the relationship is not as simple as being directly bought off, having that much money in the ecosystem affects the way that politicians and even influencers make decisions. If you don’t have any strong opinions on crypto but you know that speaking up against it will get millions of dollars spent against you, you might just choose to go along to get along. And if you need to raise a certain amount of money to run a viable campaign, or even a viable media network, eventually you’re going to find yourself seeking these sources.
Similar dynamics play out at the local level, just with a lot less money involved. In Delaware, it tends to be charter schools, law enforcement, and typical pro-business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or Delaware Association of Realtors that look to throw their money around, even in Democratic primaries. While most of these groups don’t have a veto on what happens or doesn’t happen, the influence they have on campaigns and the direct connections made through local fundraisers gives them an outsized voice in how decisions get made.
Luckily, just as it is possible to organize people it is possible to organize money. The typical relationship that many politicians have to fundraising is backwards. Even when it’s not direct, they often look for who has the money and seek those people out, often then adopting their viewpoints. This is not the only option though. Money can be generated from existing bases that you’re looking to represent, or gathered with a very specific intent in mind. There’s plenty of donors out there, large and small, who can help fund candidates and larger organizing projects. They just mostly don’t go through parties.
Democratic Elected Officials
As I mentioned earlier, the Democratic Party does not have much direct control over its voters, which also applies to its influencers and its donors most of the time. The same cannot be said of its elected officials. Within each legislative body, legislators are organized into caucuses, one Democrat and one Republican, which have an outsized say in how business is run. The Democratic caucus chooses its own leadership, which in blue states like Delaware, essentially runs everything. They decide who sits on what committees, which bills are able to get a vote, and even what staff get hired in the building.
Beyond the legislature, most senate and house caucuses also have their own PACs and campaign structures of some sort, both at the local and national levels. Technically, this is somewhat small-d democratic in that leadership of all these institutions is decided by the members of the legislature, but most of the norms that govern all of these decisions are heavily undemocratic.
One of the most notorious norms within Democratic governance is the focus on “waiting your turn.” In the context of legislatures, this usually looks like more qualified members being passed over for key positions by those who have been around for longer within the body. Another norm is that the ability to form relationships with other legislators and the lobbyists and officials who roam government buildings tends to be prioritized over representing one’s individual district. Of course, both of these norms are not problems solely of Democratic elected officials, but they are definitely still problems.
However, despite all the power that they technically have within our representative democracy, these elected officials tend to be the most susceptible to pressure from the other parts of the Democratic Party blob. They are elected by Democratic voters, raise money from Democratic donors, and listen to and converse with Democratic influencers. In the right circumstances, this gives a variety of opportunities to influence elected officials, not to mention the opportunities to organize the group right there in the building. Once again, though, it just largely doesn’t happen through the party.
Building Governing Power
If you know me personally, you know that I have mostly sworn off getting involved in internal Democratic Party business. I am still a registered Democrat, and still hold a spot in my local ward committee, but I serve in no leadership role and haven’t gotten involved in any internal fights other than voting in a local special election.
After two thousand words of explanation, the reason should be somewhat clear: the actual Democratic Party is little more than a ballot line with a small organization around it. If we are looking to truly influence the way that government works—in other words, to build real governing power—then we need to vastly broaden our scope of organizing and be more particular by how we interact with “the party.”
Untangling all of these different factors has been necessary in understanding the role that I now play as a member of the Working Families Party. If we understand parties simply as one coherent organization, then the idea of the Working Families Party also mostly being Democrats makes no sense. However, what we are trying to do has very little to do with the formal organization of the Democratic Party.
Instead, we are working to build up our own voters, our own donors, our own elected officials, and to a certain extent even our own influencers. Rather than the often amorphous way that the Democratic or Republican parties tend to build those things, we are doing so with one key goal in mind: building governing power for the multi-racial working class. A lot of the people we are working to organize are Democrats, but a lot of them aren’t. And a lot of Democrats aren’t fully aligned with that mission.
By unwrapping what it means when we’re talking about “the party,” we allow ourselves to be more specific in the work we are doing to reform it. Some people can and should just focus on the party apparatus itself. Others can focus on building bases of voters, creating new media to connect with people, electing new legislators, or raising money from donors who won’t make unreasonable demands. Only by clarifying our work can we carry it out effectively.