Tag: dnc
Jaime Harrison

DNC Chair Announces 'Record' Fundraising As 2024 Election Looms

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is flush with cash as the party gears up for what may be one of the most high-stakes presidential elections in U.S. history.

On Thursday, DNC chairman Jaime Harrison tweeted that, when accounting for contributions from joint fundraising committees and affiliated PACs as well as direct donations, Democrats raked in $12.3 million as of December.

"That brings the DNC’s cash on hand to $20 million, according to aides — which, they tell us, breaks the party’s cash-on-hand record heading into a presidential election year," Harrison posted to X (formerly Twitter).

Harrison contrasted his party's good financial fortune with the chaotic finances of the Republican National Committee (RNC). In a subsequent tweet, Harrison linked to a Newsweek article, which reported that the RNC's $9.96 million cash on hand was the lowest amount of money the GOP had available to spend since the 2016 election. This trend has reportedly been ongoing, with the DNC outperforming its counterpart in the cash on hand metric by a two to one margin in the last two consecutive reporting periods.

One Republican told Newsweek that the party had been "demoralized" since the onset of the Trump presidency, with donors likely not enthusiastic about writing checks to the party that has seen significant losses in each federal election cycle. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats captured a whopping 41 seats and regained control of the House of Representatives. Republicans went on to lose the White House in 2020, and lost ground in the US Senate in 2022. Even though the GOP won back the House with a razor-thin majority in 2022, it has so far failed to effectively wield power amid relentless infighting among the House Republican Conference.

"The RNC's electoral record since 2017 speaks for itself," RNC member Patti Lyman told the Washington Post.

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who has led the party since 2017, has been facing increasing pressure to resign from Trump allies, particularly in the wake of the GOP's multiple failures in the most recent round of state elections. Under McDaniel's tenure, Republicans this year failed to retake the governor's mansion in the GOP stronghold of Kentucky, lost control of the Virginia legislature and failed to stop a pro-abortion rights ballot initiative in Ohio, which has a Republican trifecta government.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Jim Marchant

Nevada GOP Candidate Urges Execution Of DNC And RNC Leaders

Republican Nevada Senate hopeful Jim Marchant agreed in a radio interview last week that the leadership of both major national political parties should be executed.

Marchant, who served one term in the Nevada State Assembly, appeared on the June 23 episode of What’s the Story/LeRue Book Hound, a right-wing talk show, to talk about his campaign for Senate.

“I am not liked by the lobbyists. I’m not liked by the uniparty,” he told the program’s hosts, “I’m not liked by the large corporations that tried to buy me, and certainly they buy other legislators, and so I’m swimming upstream, trying to get elected for this seat, because, like I said, I’m not liked by the uniparty, and that’s exactly what we have out there.”

The failed 2022 GOP Nevada secretary of state nominee has frequently used the term “uniparty” to suggest that there is little difference between the Republican Party establishment and Democrats.

Co-host Ed Noel urged: “So I think, just take all the RNC and DNC people and stand them up, side by side. There you go,” referring to the Republican and Democratic national committees.

“And shoot ’em,” added co-host Doug Ashby.

Marchant laughed and responded: “Exactly. So that’s my point. How do you — to me we have what we call RINOs, ‘Republican In Name Only,’ right? They’re in the way. They kept President Trump from passing laws that would really benefit our country and get our economy really going.”

A Marchant campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this story.

Marchant has a long political history that includes falsely claiming election fraud, pushing to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and opposing LGBTQ+ and abortion rights.

Citing debunked claims that many undocumented immigrants vote in Nevada, he said in a September 2021 interview that he would force every voter to re-register to vote.

He said in March that he was “kind of hoping” the U.S. military intervenes in the 2024 election to ensure election integrity.

In March 2022, he said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and philanthropist George Soros, both of whom are Jewish, are part of a “cabal,” a term often used in antisemitic statements to suggest that there is a conspiracy of Jewish people running the world.

In May, he announced that he would seek his party’s nomination to challenge first-term Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in 2024. “We have to encourage principled America-first MAGA candidates to run for office,” he told attendees at his kickoff in an anti-LGBTQ+ church in Las Vegas. “That is why I’m announcing today that I am running for United States Senate.”

That event featured QAnon conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn and white nationalist Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

GOP Quits Presidential Debate Forum Over Alleged Anti-Trump 'Bias'

GOP Quits Presidential Debate Forum Over Alleged Anti-Trump 'Bias'

The Republican National Committee (RNC) announced Thursday that its members had voted unanimously in favor of withdrawing from the Commission on Presidential Debates, a bipartisan panel that has overseen presidential debates between leading candidates for 34 years.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel attacked the commission in a press release, calling it “biased” for its refusal to “enact simple and commonsense reforms to help ensure fair debates,” a sentiment shared by former President Trump, who repeatedly accused the commission of anti-Republican bias.

The unanimous vote bans future Republican presidential nominees from taking part in any debates organized by the commission or other non-GOP sanctioned parties, a rule all candidates must agree to in writing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The resolution passed by the RNC gathered in Tennessee reads, in part: “Any presidential primary candidate who does not agree in writing, or who participates in any debate that is not a sanctioned debate, shall not be eligible to participate in any further sanctioned debates.”

This move is a new escalation in the intensifying disagreement between the RNC and the commission, which saw President Trump withdraw from the second debate of the 2020 presidential elections after labeling the commission a hotbed of “Trump Haters and Never Trumpers.”

The vote makes good on the threat that McDaniel, who is mulling a fourth term at the helm of the GOP committee, issued to the commission last year that RNC would warn future Republican candidates not to take part in CPD-held debates.

In January, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison dismissed the RNC’s accusations of bias as “tantrums” and said that voters could “count on hearing from President Biden and Vice President Harris, who are proud of their records."

Is Iowa’s ‘First Primary’ Franchise About To Expire?

Is Iowa’s ‘First Primary’ Franchise About To Expire?

The jockeying has begun over which mix of states might take part in a series of coordinated opening primaries for 2024’s Democratic nominee.

In the past half-century since the Iowa caucuses have led off the presidential nominating season, only one Democratic candidate who was not already president — a U.S. senator from the neighboring state of Illinois, Barack Obama — went on to win the White House. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden all lost in Iowa in their first bid for the presidency, even though they went on to win the nomination and the election.

The record for Democratic presidential candidates in New Hampshire, the nation’s first presidential primary election, isn’t much better. In the same time period, only Carter — in his first campaign for the presidency in 1976 — won the state’s primary, Democratic nomination, and White House.

These awkward facts, coupled with criticism that both states’ voters do not reflect a sufficiently diverse cross-section of the national electorate, and a technical meltdown during Iowa’s 2020 caucuses that led to its results being delayed, have led the Democratic National Committee to open its first review since 2005 to reassess which states will open the 2024 presidential nominating season.

“Our party is best when we reflect the people we are trying to serve,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison told the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) on March 28. “I want folks to understand that this process, like all of the processes that we have gone through time and time again after each election cycle, will be open. It will be accessible. And it will incorporate the diverse perspectives that make our party strong.”

Harrison’s language, like much of the RBC meeting, was cordial, and emphasized transparency and inclusiveness. But it was clear, from the comments made by several RBC members, that Iowa’s days as the nation’s first contest, a party-run caucus, may be numbered. If the state kept an early role, it would be conducted as a party-run primary — not a party-run caucus — which, in itself, would be a major change inside the state and nationally.

More pointedly, the jockeying has begun over which mix of states might take part in a series of coordinated opening primaries on the same day in different regions of the country. While it is impossible to predict what will emerge from the RBC’s review, which it hopes to present this August, voices have suggested that Michigan, New Jersey or Wisconsin should replace Iowa, amid concurrent elections in Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“As things stand right now, the first state to hold a delegate selection process in 2024 would be Iowa, whose 80 percent white electorate hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in a decade,” wrote Morley Winograd, a former RBC chair and top party official who oversaw the creation of the party’s opening primary schedule, in a March 25 blog at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “The second state would be New Hampshire, which may have more of a historical and legal claim [since 1920] to be ‘first in the nation’ but whose electorate is even whiter, 90 percent, than Iowa’s… Most importantly, neither state voted for Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020.”

Morley was welcomed at the March 28 meeting by James Roosevelt Jr., RBC co-chair, who said that the panel looked forward to hearing from him. At the meeting, Harrison announced that the RBC would be holding “three national virtual listening sessions” in coming months to gather input from the public and stakeholders. RBC members also suggested that state parties, unions, political scientists, and past and future presidential candidates should all weigh in.

But the groundwork was already being laid for reconfiguring what the RBC committee refers to as “the pre-window period,” which are the nominating contests before the numerous primaries held on the first Tuesday in March, called Super Tuesday, and the final contests in mid-June.

As Roosevelt summarized, the RBC is envisioning a process where state parties would apply and make their case for an early slot. The panel is looking at several criteria, which are priorities but not inflexible. States should commit to a primary election, not a caucus. States should also play a competitive role in the fall’s general election. And they should have a diverse electorate.

New Priorities, Led by Diversity

At the meeting, some RBC members began to press various constituencies’ cases, starting with a push for choosing early states that have a more racially diverse electorate.

“We know that we can engage more diverse groups that we need to help us win in the general election,” said Donna Brazile, a former DNC chair, presidential campaign manager and recent Fox News analyst. “It’s time for us, Mr. Chairman, to take a hard look at this.”

“We cannot be stuck in a 50-year-old calendar when we are trying to win 2022 and 2024,” said Leah Daughtry of New York. “This idea of considering the changing electorate is so important. Our country is very different than it was when we first set up the [pre-Super Tuesday] window… African Americans comprise 25 percent of rural America, and when you add [in] Latino Americans and Native Americans, rural America is nearly 40 percent people of color.”

But other members countered that the presidential campaigns prefer smaller states.

“[What] presidential candidates have always wanted from us… is that the early states be small states, and I do not see that listed in this framework,” said Carol Fowler of South Carolina. “And presidential campaigns have very good reasons for that. It has to do with cost. It has to do with a candidate who is not well known being given a benefit about campaigning in small states before they move onto larger states. I do hope that will be something that we can consider.”

“Carol’s right,” said Scott Brennan of Iowa, speaking several minutes later. “I think it would be very helpful to hear from presidential campaigns, folks like that, because, again, well, I think the touchstone is electing Democratic presidents.”

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa, recently wrote a Washington Post opinion piece where he said the DNC was poised to bypass and disrespect rural America, and, with that, extinguish the prospect of another candidate like Obama emerging and triumphing.

“Yes, the Democratic National Committee is holding its quadrennial ritual of lashing us deplorables because, its notables believe, the two early-voting states do not represent the electorate and because politicians hate having discerning voters run the show,” he said.

“The caucuses are misunderstood—they were never meant to pick a winner,” he continued. “Their role is to winnow the field—down from 10 or 20 candidates sometimes to five or six viable campaigns going into New Hampshire. In 2020, the Democratic winner was picked by Black women turning out in droves for Joe Biden in South Carolina.”

But even South Carolina, despite Biden’s debt to that state’s Democrats, might not make the RBC’s final cut, as it hasn’t elected a Democratic presidential candidate in the fall since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and is not a battleground state. (The DNC, however, historically follows an incumbent president’s preferences.)

Nevada, despite its diversity, has other problems. The state party has internal leadership fissures after Democratic Socialists swept all the positions, prompting Nevada’s top elected Democrats to create a “shadow party.” In 2020, the state party ignored the RBC and used untested software to tally its caucus votes, causing delays in announcing the winner that were longer than Iowa’s breakdown weeks before. (Because Bernie Sanders won by a large margin, the press ignored the technical snafus.) In 2021, Nevada passed legislation making it the earliest presidential primary state in the West.

In contrast, Iowa, which has become an increasingly red-run state in recent years, has not passed legislation to replace its caucuses with a government-run primary. That means Iowa’s Democratic Party would have to stand up another entirely new voting system in 2024 — if it preserved its early role — after the high-profile failure of its new voting system in 2020.

And Winograd, who led the RBC decades ago and had a major role in shaping the party’s current schedule, apart from pushing for Michigan to replace Iowa (he was that state’s Democratic Party chair in the 1970s) also noted in his recent blog post that New Hampshire might have to change its primary rules to satisfy the committee’s new requirements.

“There is, however, one thing New Hampshire can do to assure their first in the nation status, at least for 2024,” he wrote. “To deal with the state’s lack of diversity, the party should permit only registered Democrats to vote in its primary in 2024, abandoning their tradition of allowing voters from one party to vote in the other party’s contest.”

The RBC is heading into stormy waters. The politics, voting rules, and election administration details quickly become complicated. For example, other states, such as South Carolina and Virginia, have open primaries where voters who are not registered Democrats can participate. The RBC is unlikely to pursue a rule change that would upend more states than necessary.

No matter what the RBC decides, some states will not be pleased, which raises another possibility. The earliest nominating races, while high profile, only involve a small number of the delegates needed to win the nomination. Thus, small states might ignore the DNC and proceed no matter what, even if the RBC sanctions them after the fact—as it did in 2008 when Florida and Michigan moved their primary dates. (The RBC stripped both states of half of their delegates, but restored them before the national convention.)

Meanwhile, the competition to be first only promises to become more heated.

“Why not end the early primaries with the most bitterly contested swing state in the nation — Wisconsin?” wrote the New Republic’s Walter Shapiro, a veteran political journalist who first covered the Iowa caucuses in 1980, endorsing yet another Midwestern state.

“What matters more than anything is that the Democrats retain for 2024 and beyond the most democratic aspect of running for president,” he wrote. “And that is creating a system under which candidates do not view most of America as flyover country as they race from major media market to major media market. Even in a nation of 330 million, personal campaigning should matter.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.