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8 hours ago
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Fed up with the status quo, former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir launched an 11th-hour bid to become the next chair of the Democratic national committee and is pitching a message focused on the working class to help the party rebuild itself.
“I got into this race late in the game because I felt that a lot of candidates [for DNC chair] are now talking about the Democratic party wanting to be a working-class party, and I’ve been excited for this for the better part of a decade,” Shakir told the Guardian.
With his experience running Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and serving as the national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Shakir believes he is best suited to lead Democrats as they process their dismal performance in the November elections and brace for another four years of Donald Trump in the White House.
“The question to my mind now is that if there is consensus around the working class confronting oligarchy, then what new ideas are we bringing to the table in how we utilize the power and authority of the DNC?” Shakir said. “My election would send the strongest message that we’re doing something different.”
Shakir faces an uphill battle to capture the chair position. He only announced his candidacy earlier this month, while the frontrunners in the race – Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, and Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party – have been campaigning for two months. Ahead of the leadership elections on Saturday, Martin claims to have already secured the support of at least 200 DNC members, which would put him within striking distance of a winning majority, although his opponents have questioned that whip count.
Despite those challenges, Shakir chose to enter the chair race in part because of what he described as a “lack of ambition and a sense of powerlessness about what the DNC could potentially do” among the declared candidates. He is determined to re-envision the mechanics and the purpose of the DNC, which has in recent years served as an administrative body focused on fundraising, coordinating across state parties and setting ground rules for presidential primaries.
“When Democrats have a Democratic president in charge, it is often the case that [the DNC] is working at the behest of the president of the United States,” Shakir said. “But now when we don’t have the presidency, you take that structure and you say, ‘What is the most important thing that we have to do?’”
The answer to that question is two-pronged, in Shakir’s view. The first is to transform the DNC into a more inclusive, grassroots-driven organization with a mission to better the lives of average Americans.
“Can we open the doors and let people in? Can we start from the premise that this is a people-powered organization?” Shakir said. “That we could be and should be in service to others beyond ourselves, that is the core of what I would believe as a kind of organizing philosophy of the Democratic party right now to rebuild the brand.”
The other component of Shakir’s pitch involves a subject with which he is deeply familiar: media. In 2021, Shakir founded the progressive non-profit news outlet More Perfect Union with an explicit aim of “building power for the working class”. Since its founding, More Perfect Union has produced viral content on everything from fast fashion to the exploitation of Uber drivers. More Perfect Union’s YouTube channel now has more than 1.3 subscribers four years after its creation, while the DNC’s YouTube channel has roughly 77,000 subscribers despite launching 14 years earlier.
“They don’t value the channels as important properties of trying to talk to people because they aren’t a grassroots organization by nature,” Shakir said.
In the wake of Democrats’ losses in November, it has become conventional wisdom that the party has a “media problem”, but Shakir frames the issue as more of a platform and messaging problem. He accused the DNC of over relying on gimmicky language rather than presenting a concrete strategy to confront an unjust economy, and he pointed to More Perfect Union’s coverage of efforts to cancel medical debt and unionize Starbucks employees as a potential template for how the party can use content to send a pro-worker message to voters.
“Those kinds of things help build the case and the mandate for the direction of what the Democratic party would be if it came back into power and deliver us good content too,” Shakir said. “If you’re telling those stories, I tend to think those videos would do a hell of a lot better on YouTube than whatever [the DNC] is posting right now.”
Shakir presented a similar argument when asked about Democrats’ attacks on Trump during his first days back in office, as the party has publicly wrestled with the question of how much of its attention should be spent on condemning the new administration’s every move versus presenting a positive vision for the future of the country. Shakir implored Democrats to link their larger pitch for building a pro-worker economy with their criticism of Trump’s policy proposals.
Using Trump’s proposed tax cuts as an example, Shakir predicted that Republicans’ expected legislation may include some policies to improve workers’ lives “on the margins”, such as maintaining the increased child tax credit or eliminating taxes on tips. In Shakir’s view, that possibility makes it even more imperative for Democrats to show voters how Trump’s tax plan would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans at the expense of investing in critical services like healthcare, childcare and education. Shakir summarized the argument as: “For every penny you get, he thinks Elon Musk gets $20.
“Now we’re fighting on the terrain,that Democrats want to be fighting on, to say: ‘What are you doing for improving a middle-class life? How does that get any easier when the tax breaks that you’ve doled out have gone so disproportionately to the wealthy?’” Shakir said.
Before he can implement that vision, however, Shakir will need to win enough support to become DNC chair. He acknowledged he has encountered some challenges as he courts DNC members, many of whom have long working relationships with state party chairs like Martin and Wikler. As he tries to break through as a late entrant in a tough race, Shakir has asked members to consider the ramifications of their decision beyond the committee itself.
“The nation is calling upon the Democratic party to say, ‘Hey, we need you,’” Shakir said. “I’m trying to fight the notions of insularity among groups of people who understandably are focused on reforming structures within the DNC. But we’ve got to think beyond the DNC.”
