Democrats will choose new party leadership today

Members of the Democratic National Committee will elect new leadership today, as the party out of power in Washington looks to recalibrate its direction after President Trump’s return to office.

Current chairman Jaime Harrison is not running for a second term, so the 448 voting members of the DNC will select his replacement during the party’s winter meeting held in the Washington, D.C. suburbs Saturday afternoon.

The next DNC chair will inherit a national party apparatus that has touted record fundraising, as well as record investments in data and organizing resources that has led to more coordinated infrastructure with state and local Democrats.

But the next chair will also take over at a time when Democrats have no clear leader, no clear answer for how the party lost in November and no clear strategy for how to handle the avalanche of executive actions unleashed by Trump in his first two weeks back in the White House.

Who is running for chair?

Eight people have qualified to be on the ballot for DNC chair, including longshot presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager Faiz Shakir and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

But the general consensus among voting members is that the next leader will either be Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin or Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler.

Both men have backgrounds in the type of party infrastructure building that is the less flashy side of the job, and both tout fundraising prowess that will be necessary to implement a year round, nationwide organizing strategy that they propose.

Without control of the White House or Congress, the new DNC chair will be one of many faces of the Democratic Party that is still figuring out how to move on from rejection at the ballot box.

What about other offices?

DNC members will also elect a treasurer, secretary and national finance chair, a vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation and three vice chair candidates.

The party’s rules also state that “DNC Officers are as equally divided as practicable according to gender,” which means candidates for the three vice chair positions may be restricted based on who wins the other positions.

At the in person forum in Detroit in January, the more substantive discussions included vice-chair candidates and there was more criticism of Biden for running for reelection before dropping out of the race with less than three months until the election.

Joe Paolino, a former mayor of Providence, R.I. mayor, said Biden did a “great job” in his first term, but had he not run again, “then there could have been a primary and we could have gone through that vetting process.”

Gun control activist David Hogg said the party had a problem with anyone who called for Biden to step aside before he ultimately made the decision.

“We are not a cult, we should not be a cult,” he said. “Increasingly we are becoming a party of subtraction, not addition.”

Who gets to vote for DNC leadership?

There are currently 448 voting members of the DNC, and while there is no official public list of names, more than half of the voting population comes from the chair, vice chair and national committee members from each of the states and U.S. territories, as well as Democrats Abroad.

The heads of affiliated groups like the Young Democrats of America are also members. The remainder are at-large members that include longtime party figures, union leaders and others with ties to former President Joe Biden.