2025 MDP Convention: Electing a Chair II
Candidates, Networks, and Sources of Power - Part 2
Al Williams has spent his career fighting for democracy—against both Republican attacks and Democratic Party establishment resistance. He has battled for increased public education funding, cannabis decriminalization, and internal party reforms to give grassroots voices real power, among other causes. For these efforts, the establishment has repeatedly tried to push him out, blacklist him, and smear him. But rather than back down, Williams has turned barriers into opportunities, proving time and again that he is ready for the fight against establishment control, which has created an environment of decreasing participation, lower membership, and a weaker MDP.
Williams built his own network outside establishment control. He founded a successful cannabis company with three dispensaries and an indoor grow facility, ensuring financial independence from political influence. He leveraged his business, Morehouse College, and activist networks to fundraise for Democratic and progressive candidates and causes, including managing Garlin Gilchrist’s 2017 campaign for Detroit City Clerk. Though the campaign was unsuccessful, it helped launch Gilchrist’s career, leading him to become Michigan’s first Black lieutenant governor a year later.
Early in his career, Williams led efforts to defend Affirmative Action in Michigan as an organizer with the Detroit NAACP and Michigan Young Democrats. He also fought to keep Michigan Young Democrats as the official youth arm of the Michigan Democratic Party (MDP). The establishment succeeded in expelling the group in 2004, but Williams and others got it reinstated the same year. Williams knows how to fight the establishment and win.
Later, Williams worked to empower precinct delegates, launching a first-of-its-kind training program when establishment leadership refused to act. In 2012, he managed the statewide campaign to end Emergency Management in Michigan, battling then-Governor Rick Snyder and corporate interests to restore local democracy.
In 2019, he led the fight to save Benton Harbor High School from closure, securing additional education funding, in opposition to Governor Whitmer. He also stood with catastrophic accident victims against Michigan’s disastrous 2019 auto no-fault reforms, challenging the establishment yet again. At every stage, he raised money and built alliances outside the establishment, ensuring he could act independently without relying on big donors or political patrons.
Williams understands party rules and is committed to enforcing them fairly. He supports seating alternates before proxies, electing rather than appointing officers-at-large as our rules already require (but aren’t followed), ensuring DNC delegates are chosen by a grassroots vote rather than the State Central Committee, and making membership non-expiring (you’re a member until you choose not to be), among other important reforms. He advocates for a fair, transparent, and inclusive Democratic Party that serves the people—not the political or financial elite. His vision for party reform seeks to rebuild trust with all constituencies, including Black and Latino communities, progressives, Muslims, union members, Jewish and Palestinian communities, environmentalists, anti-war and anti-genocide activists, and many more.
Despite his decades of service in the fight for democracy, Williams has faced relentless establishment attacks. Early in his campaign for MDP Chair he was unfairly targeted over missing campaign finance reports. He explained that his friend and campaign finance manager, Henry Sheppard, tragically died in a house fire, destroying records. Hertel says this isn’t a good enough answer, there should be bank records. Fair Point. Williams has requested the bank records several times, but has not received them. He has paid $18,000 in fines already and is paying off the remainder. Yet, despite no evidence of wrongdoing beyond understandably missing paperwork, the establishment has seized on this to discredit him. Meanwhile, the establishment regularly abuses, bends, or breaks our Party rules, and continues accepting massive donations from corporate interests, ensuring our politicians represent the 1% instead of the 99%.
The recent Michigan Senate vote to gut One Fair Wage is an example of the 1% controlling “our” representatives through the establishment network. Majority Leader Brinks brought the bill to the floor when she didn’t have to, State Senator Kevin Hertel (Curtis Hertel’s brother) sponsored the gutting, Floor Leader Singh and 5 other establishment Democrats joined Republicans to cut tipped workers’ wages by 50% on February 21st. All these establishment politicians supported One Fair Wage before they voted against it. Governor Whitmer campaigned on One Fair Wage, but now signals that she’ll sign the bill gutting it, a class war attack on some of our most vulnerable workers. It’s worth asking, why should anyone believe Curtis Hertel is less vulnerable to establishment pressure than his brother, Singh, Brinks, or Whitmer?
The real scandal isn’t a missing finance report—it’s the absence of public election financing. Without it, legalized bribery persists, and disclosure rules function as weak safeguards at best. Wealthy candidates hire compliance firms and exploit loopholes, while grassroots candidates face serious barriers. Establishment figures talk about campaign finance reform but refuse to act because they benefit from the status quo. During her 2018 campaign, Governor Whitmer, a major Hertel patron, told me that electing her was the only way to get meaningful campaign finance reform. That was seven years ago. Whitmer, and the establishment network behind her and Hertel, have done nothing.
Now, the establishment is smearing Williams as racist, using an out-of-context soundbite to manipulate Jewish voters before they see the full conversation. The only antisemitism here is the establishment targeting Jewish people with disinformation, triggering them to attack a good Democrat and a Black man, based on a deliberately manufactured falsehood. Our anger should be focused on prominent Democrats like Stevens and Hertel, for taking the bait and piling on or staying silent, instead of speaking out against these fascist tactics that fuel fear in the Jewish community, deepen divisions, and suppress engagement—all in service of maintaining establishment power. By their active or silent complicity, they are effectively endorsing establishment racism and antisemitism.
Curtis Hertel has spent his life inside the establishment, which routinely uses tactics like the above to drive distrust and division to break up resistance to establishment dominance, strengthening the establishment within a shrinking coalition, and weakening our coalition overall. It’s the political culture he’s most familiar with. While he now explicitly supports key party reforms, and I commend him for it, he has yet to take real risks or show the independence of thought and action needed to follow through. Instead, he helped divide the People’s Coalition and he’s effectively endorsing establishment antisemitism and racism—both example of establishment thinking that breeds division and fragmentation rather than inclusion and solidarity. To him, this is just normal politics. In our conversations, he’s failed to recognize the authoritarianism inherent in his actions, however unintentional on his part.
The network backing Hertel is the same one that smears opponents, takes big-money donations in exchange for policy influence, and bends party rules to maintain control. Expecting that network to reform itself is like trusting Lucy to finally let Charlie Brown kick the football. I know from our conversations that Hertel is a nice guy and he means well, but he has never had to fight against the system that shaped him—and he still struggles to recognize it even exists. He may be a more polished speaker, but polished speech isn’t what matters, and can serve to polish lies as easily as truth, or smoothly sidestep uncomfortable subjects.
What matters is vision, will, and the independence to challenge establishment power. After several conversations with Hertel, it’s clear he’s trying to get there. I commend him for working at it and encourage him to keep at it, but he still has a long way to go.
Williams, by contrast, has taken real risks, delivered real results, and maintained his independence from the establishment network. He understands the establishment’s tactics because he’s been targeted by them. He recognizes the cultural pressures that sustain establishment control and knows how to push back. Most importantly, he has the autonomy from establishment pressure to fight for real democracy in the Democratic Party.
This election isn’t just about policies—it’s about who has the vision and will to reverse the Party’s downward spiral in participation and membership, a crisis driven by establishment political culture and totalitarian tactics. Williams is ready for that fight. He has the skill and autonomy needed to pull the Party out of our current swamp of division and into a future of diversity, inclusion, and solidarity that strengthens and grows the Party.
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