With Election Losses And Infighting, Can Democrats Rebuild?

Feb. 28--Since Donald Trump swept past Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win the electoral college and ushered in a wave of objectionable appointments and orders -- the Democratic Party has struggled to unite its newly energized progressive wing and its established membership, a feat that has proved difficult. Some members of the establishment haven't seemed to fully fathom the insistence among some progressives that the party must change. And some progressives aim for an ideological purity that's unrealistic when applied to the the real-world business of winning elections and crafting viable policy.

On both sides of the divide, some Dems are working diligently to bridge that gap, to translate the energy of protests and new activism into results at the ballot box.

But it's complicated.

The race for chair of the Democratic National Committee, decided last weekend in Atlanta, quickly became a proxy fight between the "establishment" candidate, former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, backed by former President Barack Obama, and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota. Ellison is the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, and his candidacy was favored by one-time presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat of Vermont.

And he lost. Perez won the day in a 235-200 vote; Ellison was immediately named deputy chair by Perez.

This should be a win-win for the party: Ellison made a strong showing; his subsequent elevation is a recognition of the significance of the coalition that backed him. Perez is, by any measure, progressive. The child of immigrants, he served as late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy's special counsel for civil rights; during his turn in in the Obama administration, he held the line on a host of labor protections.

Perez's victory was a win for the establishment, says Michelle Deatrick, a newly elected member of the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners and the Democratic National Committee, and a co-founder of Michigan To Believe In, one of two statewide progressive activist groups that emerged from Sanders' campaign. But Deatrick says she hopes progressives don't see it as a loss.

"I think the DNC made a big mistake and missed a huge opportunity to signal and to act ... to say, we get it, this is the candidate who makes sense to a heck of a lot of people in the party," Deatrick says.

Deatrick wants to get big money out of Democratic politics, and make the party more transparent and easily accessible, among other progressive goals. But, like Sanders, she says she's also a pragmatist.

"I think we need to unpack that term, 'establishment,'" Deatrick says. "We have some amazing, very, very progressive leaders who have been around for decades, who were part of the civil rights movement ... Not only do we want to work with people who know the ropes, so we don't make some of the mistakes new people can make, we want to make sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater."

But for some progressives, Perez's win is a sign that the month and a half since the inauguration -- a buzz of unprecedented activity, from the Women's March on Washington to local Indivisible groups organizing protests, letter-writing campaigns and in-person visits to congressional district offices -- were a waste of time and effort. The Democratic National Committee isn't going to change, some reason, so why bother?

"I feel, and I've heard many other people from my organization, that this was the establishment wing of the party saying, 'We're still in control and still want to be in control, and we have the power to do that,'" said Liano Sharon, an organizer with Michigan for Revolution. That's the state's other large progressive group.

Sharon will allow that most DNC members who voted for Perez thought he was the best person for the job -- the votes weren't likely, he acknowledges, to have been made simply to put the progressive groups in their place -- but, he says, those members are wrong.

"I don't think they thought Ellison was bad, I think they thought he was not far enough with them. So we'll add in some rhetoric about the grassroots," he said. "It's like when your dad sits you down and tells you you need to be a doctor or a lawyer because this is the way the world works and you don't understand the way the world works. But we have a disagreement over how the world works, and unfortunately they're behind the times on the way the world works."

In Sharon's view, the party needs to look to its progressive wing for guidance.

"The point I'm making about the party is that from our perspective, they've been losing for decades," he said.

Even more troubling, he says, is the defeat of a DNC proposal to ban corporate money.

Both Deatrick and Sharon believe the Democratic Party can retain or take seats at all levels of government without big donors.

"I think that defeating the ban on corporate money and electing Perez are pieces of the same block," Sharon said. "They're hanging on to a particular way of doing things, a particular model of how the Democratic Party raises money and how the Democratic Party functions. Unfortunately, that makes the Democratic Party more susceptible to the influence of businesses and corporations, and less susceptible to the influence of people at the grass roots."

How does any of this work? How does the party consolidate the activism of the progressive wing into engaged energy that sustains through the 2018 midterm elections and beyond? That remains unclear.

"There is a real disconnect between some members of the DNC who don't understand urgency of this and that party's future is at stake," Deatrick says. "Given what we're facing, we cannot afford to let former Hillary supporters, former Bernie supporters ... We cannot let those divisions cause us not to be effective."

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