Details of Why Democrats Lost in 2024

DNC Report (2023)

This is the Report on the DNC I presented to several caucuses and interested people in July 2023. It goes deeper into the lack of democracy in the “Democratic” Party, and how and why it drives down participation, especially among young people, minorities, and the working class - in order to preserve the dominance of the 1% over Party activities and policy. I’ve linked the google doc to some of my substack articles earlier, but I thought it would be good to publish it here directly. Especially following the recent election and the article I wrote about Why Democrats lost in 20204. The details below are a massive part of the reasons why.

Link for Accompanying Slides

Hi everyone,

I’m Liano Sharon. I’m one of your representatives on the DNC. Many of you don’t know me, so I’ll introduce myself with a summary of my experience in the Party.

Since I joined in 2016 I’ve served in many positions in the Party, including 6 years on the State Central Committee, 4 years on their Rules and Bylaws Committee, and 2 years on their Executive Committee. I’ve served on Executive Committees and Rules Committees for County and Congressional District units of the Party, and state-wide Caucuses. In 2020 I served on the State Platform Committee and was elected to the Democratic National Committee, where I’m currently in the middle of a four-year term. Because MDP rules anti-democratically double and triple dip, as a DNC member I’m also automatically a voting member of our State Central Committee and its Executive Committee.

My goal here is to start a conversation with you - the grassroots of the Party. The people who actually do the work and make things happen. I want to start a conversation about how our Party functions now, how you expect it to function, and how you want to handle any problems.

It’s our Party and it should function the way we want it to.

How our Party functions matters to our ability to win elections and continue winning elections. Let me explain exactly how it matters.

At the DNC Executive Committee session at the February 2023 meeting, the Party’s top data crunchers gave two presentations on the demographics of the last several elections. Here’s what they said:

First, 70% of young people across all demographic groups are progressive. I want to emphasize, young Black and Brown people, of all genders and identities, are progressive. All demographics. Progressivism is not a white thing or a guy thing, it’s 70% of all young people.

Second, we need to win 18 - 29 year olds by about 23 points on average, and 30 - 44 year olds by about 5 to 10 points in order to win in 2024 and beyond. These two cohorts (Gen Z and Millennials) were about 40% of the electorate in 2022, and they are only increasing in number and potential impact, provided we can inspire them to turn out and vote. By 2028, they’ll be 60% of the electorate.

Third, “perceptions of Black political power directly correlate with participation … the less powerful Black voters feel, the less likely they are to vote. Perceptions of power are lowest among Black men and Black adults under 50.” Black voters showed the largest gender and age gap of any demographic, with turnout among Black men down 12 points compared to Black women, and Black voters under 50 down 32 points compared to those over 50. 

Fourth, to quote the header on one of their slides: “Attitudes towards politics are deterring many more Black voters than structural or suppression barriers.” For example, asked why they didn’t vote, among Black people of all age cohorts, men and women, answers like 

“voting doesn’t change things that matter to me” and 

“the candidates didn’t represent my values” 

were more than twice as common as answers like “the lines were too long” or “I didn’t have the proper identification.” 

In fact, in every demographic the perception of political power they wield is directly correlated with their level of participation. It isn’t just Black people who need to see their political power materially realized to motivate them to participate, it’s everyone - though the effect is more pronounced among Black people and other minorities who have been systematically disempowered.

Let me stop here and remind everyone that we didn’t win in 2022 - the Republicans lost. They ran Trumpian candidates and the people rejected the Trumpians. Having a Trumpian opponent was worth 4% to 7% to the Democrat in the race, across the country. Without those 4 to 7%, we’d have lost the House by a lot more and we’d have lost the Senate. At least 44% of Biden voters in 2020 told exit pollsters they didn’t vote for Biden, they voted against Trump. We didn’t win 2020 either, they lost. Our candidates aren’t bringing the winning numbers to the polls, our opponents are so awful people are showing up to vote against them, even though they don’t like the option we’re presenting.

As some of you know, I ran the Dana Nessel campaign for the State Party nomination in 2018. As part of that job, I helped organize one of the largest Party recruitment drives in State Party history, nearly doubling MDP membership from around 10,000 to about 20,000. I personally turned in over 1,900 membership forms. Last I was told around a month ago, MDP membership is around 8,000, down more than half. I’ve talked to many of the people who left, particularly young progressives. There are four themes that are common to nearly every progressive, young and old, minorities and whites, leaving the Party:

1. Undemocratic rules, anti-democratic institutional culture, and rampant rule breaking.

2. An institutional culture of disrespect for new members generally, and progressives particularly, sometimes written directly into the rules, often exacerbated by ageism against young people, and racism and sexism in many places.

3. The lack of progress on key progressive priorities, like the environment, economy, and justice, among others.

4. The lack of even the prospect of progress on progressive priorities evident from the deliberate marginalization of all proposals that meet the scale of the problem.

These are also the consistent themes you hear on progressive and leftist alternative media, which is also dominated by young people from all demographics, both on-screen and in the audience. 

Young people and minorities aren’t coming back into the Party because they recognize the Party demands time, money, and labor from them - is desperate for volunteers who can canvass, etc - but doesn’t give them a voice in Party governance. The Party projects the illusion of small-d democracy to create the perception of democracy, while entirely failing to actually be democratic.

Notice the DNC presentations talked about perceptions of political power. They did not talk about actual political power. 

Young people, Black folks, and other minorities actively leaving the Party are not going to come back unless they have at least the perception of political power. We’re well past the point where leadership can fool most people into believing they have political power when they actually don’t. People aren’t buying it anymore. I used to have arguments with Chris Jensen, currently the Executive Director for the Michigan Democratic Party. I’d say, “breaking rules like you folks do is driving people away from the Party”. She’d say, “no one knows the rules or cares about them except you.” And I’d reply, “people don’t need to know the rules to understand when a process isn’t fair - they notice the inequality and discrimination without needing to know any rules.” People aren’t buying the illusion of political power anymore. They’re leaving, in droves.

Remember, more than twice as many Black folks say they don’t vote because voting doesn’t change anything important to them, than because they didn’t have voter ID or similar overt suppression tactics. Think about it. That means our Party is responsible for twice as much voter suppression as Republican voter ID and suppression laws. The Party’s top data crunchers are admitting that our Party suppresses more votes by denying people political power - both in the Party and in civic government.

The most effective way to systematically increase the perception of political power is to actually increase political power. The most effective way to actually increase people’s political power is to ensure everyone has equal power over all decisions at every level of the Party, while protecting the rights of minorities and marginalized groups among the membership. This is easy to do, using a combination of direct voting and proportional representation we ostensibly already have, but which doesn’t actually function as advertised.

Why doesn’t the Democratic Party operate democratically?

Everyone knows why, though few people are willing to say it.

The Party’s big donors don’t want the Party to operate democratically.

Because big donors don’t have the votes to control an organization with 1-person 1-vote democracy, and they don’t want to give up their dominant position.

Big donors are less than 1% of the population according to Opensecrets.org. Something like 0.5% of the population accounts for all donors giving $200 or more, and around 0.1% give $2,900 or more. The big donors know people down here at the grassroots are trying to make the Party work for the working class, and they don’t want that.

Here are some examples of what the big donors are forcing on us in order to remain in control.

1. At the second of three in-person meetings we’ve had this term, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee recommended and the DNC approved a rules change that eliminates the power of the grassroots to change DNC rules. Let me explain how that works.
   
   Every four years,  the grassroots of the Party, in our Counties and Congressional Districts, elect delegates to the National Convention. It used to be that National Convention delegates could take a rules change to the floor of the National Convention, and if it passed, it became the new DNC rule. Now, if the delegates of the grassroots pass a rules change, instead of becoming the new rule, it doesn’t. It first goes to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee where it can be edited however they want. When this was pointed out in the Rules Committee meeting, the Chair of the Rules Committee said (I’m paraphrasing) ‘well, we’d never change the intent of the delegates’ and when pushed harder, he said ‘we can always fix it later’ and moved on. It won’t be fixed unless the grassroots organize to force the big donors out of their positions of power over the Democratic Party.
   
   That’s not how you run a small-d democratic organization.

2. At the last two DNC meetings, progressives brought a resolution to ban dark money in our primaries. Both times, it was proposed by a State Party Chair, supported by many other State Party Chairs (though not our Michigan State Party Chair), and other important progressive leaders in the Party. In both cases, the Resolutions Committee refused to even debate it.

3. At the first DNC meeting I attended, Chair Harrison made 188 appointments. Geographically they were heavily skewed towards the East Coast generally and DC specifically. The DNC divides the country into 4 defined regions: East, West, Midwest, and South. Nearly half the appointments (47%) were from the Eastern Region. One city - DC - has more than twice the representation of any State and more representation on the Executive Committee than three of the four regions. And of course, many of them are lobbyists.

4. DNC meetings are designed to blast information at DNC members, not to organize and do the work of governing the Party. The vast majority of “meetings” aren’t really meetings, they’re just information sessions where all or the vast majority of available time is taken up by scheduled speakers or unexpected guests. When I first raised this issue in the Poverty Caucus and the Midwest Regional Caucus, they both promised to address it. At the next meeting of the Midwest Caucus, the agenda had time set aside for discussion among us delegates. When that agenda item came up, it was ignored and unexpected guests were given the time to speak instead of us. When I asked the Chair why he ceded the floor to these unexpected guests, he said “Well, when the Second Gentleman calls you and says he wants to speak, what else am I supposed to do?” I said, “If the Democratic Party is a democracy, then you tell him sorry, you aren’t on the agenda and we don’t have extra time. Maybe we can put you on the schedule for next time.” In the current culture of the Party, subservience to the establishment is the norm and deviating from that subservience is unthinkable.

When I explain this to progressives - young and old, male and female, Black, Brown, Indigenous or other minorities, or white, they say, “well, they’re shutting out the people and laying out the red carpet for the wealthy - why should we put our efforts and energy into a Party that serves the 1% and discriminates against everyone else?”

This is why young people in particular do not trust the Democratic Party. I’ve had this exact conversation with many younger Democrats from all over the country. I didn’t need to bring it up, they did. They’d seen me be outspoken about problems in the Party and asked me straight up why they should stick around a Party that’s actively hostile to the interests of young people, working people, and only caters to the 1%?

The only answer I could give them was “fight to change the Party.”

To fight to change the Party, grassroots people have to get to the meetings. The February meeting was held in Philadelphia. The cheapest room at the hotel where they held the meeting was $270 a night - that was the special group discount price and doesn’t include taxes and fees. My entire stay at the Airbnb I rented was $460, including taxes and fees, plus the night I took to recover from the 17 hours bus and train ride I used to get there, and the extra two days I had to stay because my train was delayed as a consequence of the toxic freight derailment in Palestine Ohio you may have heard about. I took the train because it was the cheapest reliable transportation, given recent problems with the airlines.

Both MDP and DNC rules explicitly forbid discrimination on the basis of quote “economic status” unquote, but neither even makes an attempt to follow that rule. Neither the MDP nor the DNC provides any support to DNC delegates. We’re all expected to be wealthy enough to afford such luxuries, which is discrimination on the basis of economic status. I know people who think about running for the MDP State Central Committee, but don’t because they wouldn’t be able to afford the trips around the state for the meetings. If people who want to participate don’t have the money to get around the state, how many more don’t have the money to get around the country? I’m privileged. I don’t have much money and I don’t make much money, but I own my home and my expenses are relatively low. But I can’t afford this out of pocket either - please consider donating, here’s the easiest ways to help out:

Cash App: $LianoSharon
Venmo: @Liano-Sharon.

When I asked the Secretary of the DNC, Jason Rea, about following this specific rule, he said “set up a gofundme” and blew me off. When I asked the Chair of the DNC, Jaime Harrison, he’s a better politician. He said “we’ll look into it and see what we can do” or something to that effect, I don’t remember the words exactly. That was at the first in-person meeting the DNC held since I was elected in December 2020. I haven’t heard from his office about anything at all, certainly not relating to eliminating discrimination on the basis of economic status. The meeting this February was our third in-person meeting of the term. Because of covid they cut the number of meetings per year, and it looks like they are going to keep the cuts, so delegates have even less opportunity to organize.

If I have to pressure an organization to follow its own rules, what kind of an organization is it? Certainly it’s not organized to follow its own rules.

Here are some examples of problems with the rules in virtually every unit of the Party across the country from the DNC all the way down to local clubs and everything in-between. These deficiencies allow and often facilitate an anti-democratic institutional culture, leading to rampant rule breaking.

1. Neither Officers nor Executive Committee members are subject to removal or reversal by the membership. We can recall poorly performing governors, state legislatures, mayors, city council members, but not the chair or executive committee members of a unit of the Democratic Party if the grassroots doesn’t like how they’re doing their jobs. Even if they’re egregiously corrupt we have no power to remove them unless they’re demonstrably malfeasant, and then it is a very difficult process effectively controlled by the same people we’d be trying to oust or their friends - unless there’s a major dispute at the top levels of the Party, it’s virtually impossible. There’s no provision anywhere for the grassroots to reverse decisions of our elected Party leaders.

2. We do not have proportional representation in the MDP, or the DNC for that matter, despite the fact it’s required by the rules. In the MDP, we elect State Central Committee members by proportional voting, but at the first meeting of the SCC the results of the proportional voting election are overturned by appointing - not electing - as many voting members as the majority likes, usually between 80 and 100. This means a faction that wins a bare majority (51%) or more can give itself as large a supermajority as it likes, eliminating even the meager power of a minority to stop rules changes, for example. When such appointments are used, the results of the proportional voting election are overturned - the composition of the State Central Committee no longer reflects the will of the voters, it reflects the will of the Chair.

Let me take a moment to emphasize the critical importance of proportional voting and the resulting proportional representation. Proportional voting means any coalition with X% of the vote will win that same X% of the positions up in the election. Without proportional representation, the largest coalition always wins all the elections. When a single coalition holds all power, minorities don’t feel represented, because they aren’t represented. This is why proportional representation is so important. 

It’s the only way minorities can win their own representation. 

Without proportional representation, minorities are reduced to accepting “appointments” graciously granted them by the largest coalition - just so long as they don’t step too far out of line. Appointments put minorities under the thumb of the established powers. Proportional voting of one form or another is the only way out from under that thumb. This is a tactic used to disempower Black people and other minorities. As the DNC’s own data crunchers said, when Black people feel disempowered, their participation drops. This is true of every demographic, including progressives and young people. If we’re going to juice participation by minorities, progressives, and young people, we have to stop practices like this that directly disempower them. 

3. The rules are dense and legalistic, making them largely opaque to the vast majority of people. I know this because I’ve spent the last 7 years fielding people’s questions about the rules, and probably 80% of the questions I get would be answered by a good user’s manual with step-by-step procedures and examples. Not that I mind taking questions, but imagine how many people get to the same frustration point with the rules but don’t have anyone they can call to ask. And in the MDP they can’t rely on the rules being followed or enforced, even when they are clear.

4. In 2021 the MDP Appeals Committee replied to an appeal about the 88 people the Chair “appointed” as “Officers At Large” to the State Central Committee, on the basis that the rules very specifically state that “Officers” must be “elected” not appointed. The Appeals Committee’s response was effectively, “well, we’ve done it this way for a long time, so it's perfectly ok to keep doing it that way.” This ruling is explicitly forbidden by the rules - the rules are very specific - written rules are always a higher authority than unwritten rules. In other words, the committee charged with enforcing the rules is helping the Chair break the rules by making the Chair’s lawless acts appear legitimate.

These are just four of the most egregious problems, there are many other unfair, exclusive, opaque, and anti-democratic provisions in the current rules common to virtually every organization in the Democratic Party. Here is the MDP reform platform MISolidarity ran on in 2021, which addresses many though not all of the issues in the Michigan Democratic Party.

I believe in small-d democracy and I believe the only way to grow the Party is to make sure everyone in the Party has equal power at every level of the organization, either by direct voting or by proportional representation.

This is science, not speculation. The science of the wisdom of crowds (not mobs, crowds are organized, mobs are not) demonstrates conclusively that a large and diverse (together meanings inclusive) population making decisions independently and aggregating them equally makes vastly better decisions vastly more often than any decision making system that lacks these features. Inclusivity and independent decision making aggregated equally is just democracy.

We also have the science behind Dr. Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Core Design Principles. After decades of research, Dr. Ostrom found that every system that sustainably manages common resources operates on the 8 Core Design Principles she discovered. She won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this research. Some of the 8 Core Design Principles are (1) equitable distribution of costs and benefits, (2) fast and fair conflict resolution, and (3) authority to self-govern. The remaining five are also core principles of democracy.

To manage our resources sustainably, like volunteer time and energy, donor dollars, physical and digital infrastructure, we need to make decisions with the wisdom of crowds and manage our resources with Dr. Ostrom’s 8 Core Design Principle.

If we want to bring young people of all backgrounds, and progressives back into the Party, we need to reform our rules to be small-d democratic and we need to make sure the people we elect enforce them fairly. 

That’s how we gain back their trust.

There isn’t any other way forward for the Democratic Party.

Here are some broad concepts we should implement in all our rules:

Fairness

To the greatest extent mathematically and materially possible, ensure 1 person 1 vote democracy at every level of the Party, using both direct voting and proportional representation.

Inclusion

Restructure the elected positions to ensure minorities can win representation independent of the establishment. Ensure deliberate inclusion of young people, women, minorities, and marginalized groups and individuals.

Transparency

Use more plain language and less legalese where possible.

Create a user’s manual with step-by-step procedures and examples to illustrate the rules.

Democracy

Make all elected positions removable by the membership. Make decisions of all elected positions reversible by the membership. Ensure sub-committees maintain the proportionalities established at the last election, and similarly for all other committee/sub-committee relationships.

If we want to bring young progressives into the Party, reforming our rules to be fair, inclusive, transparent, and democratic is not an option. It’s as much a necessity as winning young people by 23-plus points.

My question to you: is this the way you want your Party to operate? 

If not, how do we go about changing it?