Winehole23
01-10-2025, 09:34 AM
tl;dr
The DNC keeps its member list secret to make it harder for its members to organize among themselves.
According to the DNC (https://democrats.org/news/dnc-chair-jaime-harrison-sets-out-first-steps-in-process-for-electing-incoming-chair-dnc-officers/), there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 “at-large” members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Today, we’re going to open up the DNC’s black box.
The list we are publishing (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bQKIP3W1NWChRjSbsE0O5k5s7OdgXrJi5-CMfFECIBU/) was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
KNOWING WHO IS ON THE PARTY NATIONAL COMMITTEE matters for the members of the committee themselves. Members can request the official roster, but they must know where and how, and that information isn’t necessarily obvious. Kapp, who works in Los Angeles County government, is currently vice chair of the DNC’s Western States Caucus and the former chair of its Youth Council. “I have never received from the DNC, nor do I expect to receive, at least under this and the last administration, a list of contact information for all my members,” he said. To build email listservs for both groups, he told me he had to hunt down their information himself.
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”
The DNC member list also matters because of ongoing efforts to get Democrats to strengthen their internal ethics rules—some of these party insiders also make a cushy living as corporate lobbyists—and try to reduce the role of dark money (https://www.levernews.com/content/files/2022/09/DNC-Resolution-on-Dark-Money.pdf) in Democratic election battles. Two and a half years ago, during its summer meeting, the DNC’s Gang of 448 voted to give itself the power to overrule any amendments to its bylaws that a national party convention, a much broader body with greater public input, might vote to enact. As Akela Lacy reported (https://theintercept.com/2022/09/14/dnc-overrule-convention-bylaws/) for The Intercept at the time, paid DNC staff whipped votes to ensure passage of this change, leading voting member Jessica Chambers of Wyoming to call the DNC “the least democratic organization that I’m involved with.”
You can view the list sorted by title or by state. Both shed light on how power is concentrated and flows inside the national party as well as in many states.
If you view the list sorted by title, the first group that jumps out, both alphabetically and by its sheer size, are the “at-large” members. The 73 listed here were all whisked into their current positions on the DNC roster by Jaime Harrison in 2021. According to DNC bylaws, at-large members must by voted in by the rest of the membership, but the current class was put forward by Harrison as a single slate that was voted on up-or-down as a bloc.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-10-opening-dncs-black-box/
The DNC keeps its member list secret to make it harder for its members to organize among themselves.
According to the DNC (https://democrats.org/news/dnc-chair-jaime-harrison-sets-out-first-steps-in-process-for-electing-incoming-chair-dnc-officers/), there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 “at-large” members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Today, we’re going to open up the DNC’s black box.
The list we are publishing (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bQKIP3W1NWChRjSbsE0O5k5s7OdgXrJi5-CMfFECIBU/) was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
KNOWING WHO IS ON THE PARTY NATIONAL COMMITTEE matters for the members of the committee themselves. Members can request the official roster, but they must know where and how, and that information isn’t necessarily obvious. Kapp, who works in Los Angeles County government, is currently vice chair of the DNC’s Western States Caucus and the former chair of its Youth Council. “I have never received from the DNC, nor do I expect to receive, at least under this and the last administration, a list of contact information for all my members,” he said. To build email listservs for both groups, he told me he had to hunt down their information himself.
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”
The DNC member list also matters because of ongoing efforts to get Democrats to strengthen their internal ethics rules—some of these party insiders also make a cushy living as corporate lobbyists—and try to reduce the role of dark money (https://www.levernews.com/content/files/2022/09/DNC-Resolution-on-Dark-Money.pdf) in Democratic election battles. Two and a half years ago, during its summer meeting, the DNC’s Gang of 448 voted to give itself the power to overrule any amendments to its bylaws that a national party convention, a much broader body with greater public input, might vote to enact. As Akela Lacy reported (https://theintercept.com/2022/09/14/dnc-overrule-convention-bylaws/) for The Intercept at the time, paid DNC staff whipped votes to ensure passage of this change, leading voting member Jessica Chambers of Wyoming to call the DNC “the least democratic organization that I’m involved with.”
You can view the list sorted by title or by state. Both shed light on how power is concentrated and flows inside the national party as well as in many states.
If you view the list sorted by title, the first group that jumps out, both alphabetically and by its sheer size, are the “at-large” members. The 73 listed here were all whisked into their current positions on the DNC roster by Jaime Harrison in 2021. According to DNC bylaws, at-large members must by voted in by the rest of the membership, but the current class was put forward by Harrison as a single slate that was voted on up-or-down as a bloc.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-10-opening-dncs-black-box/