This, from the New York Times, is incredible:
Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.
Mr. Hogg, 25, who emerged on the political scene as an outspoken survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said his party must squelch a pervasive “culture of seniority politics” that has allowed older and less effective lawmakers to continue to hold office at a moment of crisis.
And so he is planning through a separate organization where he serves as president, Leaders We Deserve, to intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts as part of a $20 million effort to elect younger leaders and to encourage a more combative posture against President Trump.
And Hogg’s quote about the whole thing is even more remarkable: “This is going to anger a lot of people.”
Uh, yeah.
When you are in the leadership of the national party committee specifically charged with electing and re-electing incumbents, it’s, uh, sort of strange to also be the head of a group planning to spend millions of dollars to knock off said incumbents.
It’s like if I was a member of the Substack leadership team — to be clear, I am not — but I was also a consultant to a conglomerate of major legacy media outlets aiming to squelch the rise of independent media.
Like, those two things do NOT go together.
This sort of move is what Democrats feared and Republicans hoped for when the DNC elected Hogg earlier this year. Hogg became a national gun control spokesman in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. But in recent years he expanded his political portfolio — taking controversial positions like calling for ICE to be abolished and to defund the police.
As Politico wrote in February of Hogg:
Inside the Democratic Party, Hogg’s election — and the resulting coverage — has been accompanied by frustration among centrists that a 24-year-old March for our Lives co-founder with a million followers could hurt the party’s brand, especially in swing districts. They vented that his ascension is representative of Democrats’ failure to grapple with some voters’ frustration that the party is overly concerned with diversity and appeals to the far left.
“The most worrying thing is if he carries into this new job a belief that saying what he was saying, but louder, is the way to prevail in red states,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way. “Because it isn’t … If he believes that it is, that’s going to be a real problem for our candidates in those places.”
Bennett added, “He came up as an activist, but now he is a party leader, and that’s a very, very different role.”
It does not appear that Hogg has made that transition from activist to party leader. Or even believes such a transition is necessary.
But, I can tell you this from my many years covering politics: Every Democratic incumbent in a safe seat is going to read that story in the Times and immediately think Hogg and his new group is planning to go after them. And they are going to be pissed. And complain. Loudly.
My take? Democrats should have known what they were getting (and maybe they did!) when they elected Hogg as DNC vice chair. Tigers don’t change their stripes.
This is a FREE post. But all of this only works if you are willing to invest in independent journalism. Which is why I hope today is the day you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. It’s $6 a month or $60 for the year.
Share this post