I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, and said so, after the 2016 election astonished and traumatized my party. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised when more than one acquaintance in politics called after that election to ask if it had crossed my mind to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee.
It had not. From the moment I had become mayor, and then even in the toughest weeks, it was easy to see why Governor Kernan had told me it was the best job he ever had. Every day was different, and everything mattered. Among elected roles the job is uniquely stimulating, compelling you not just to form opinions about issues but actually to craft—and implement—solutions. You are held accountable for results, and rarely have to deal with “alternative facts” because the good, the bad, and the ugly are plainly visible to everyone who lives in the city.
I was in no hurry to be anything but mayor of my hometown—and even in moments of reflection about what might come next when my time as mayor inevitably ends, being a political party chair had never been on the list. It’s a thankless job in the best of times, balancing tough customers, big egos, political jostling, and constant fundraising in order to hold the party together and meet its mission of supporting candidates. By definition, the chairmanship also represents an extremely partisan existence—the opposite of a mayor’s typical experience, in which working across the aisle is a critical and often gratifying means of delivering results for residents.
But, looking at the landscape of the party as it now stood, I also recognized a moment in which I could make myself useful. Like South Bend in 2011, the Democratic Party in 2016 was in need of a fresh start. And many of the party’s greatest weaknesses were in areas where it seemed I was uniquely able to help. The party was struggling to engage young people, it was out of step with areas like the industrial Midwest, and it was failing to prioritize the hard work of government and party-building at the state and local levels. Who better than a millennial, Midwestern mayor to try to guide the party in a better direction?
RUNNING FOR CHAIR MADE SENSE from a generational, regional, and structural perspective. And because I belonged to no faction, it seemed that I could help the party transcend an emerging internal struggle between its establishment wing and its new left. As I contemplated entering the race, the main candidates were increasingly coming to be seen as representing the two sides of the party. On one side was Keith Ellison, a Minnesota congressman who had the support of Bernie Sanders and some labor groups, cheered by many progressives but viewed skeptically by those who saw our party’s coalition resonating only in coastal states and big cities, our base shrinking at the moment when it most needed to grow. The other major contender was Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, who entered the race in December. Rumor had it that President Obama himself had persuaded him to seek the post, and as NBC News put it, once he got into the race he immediately became “the de facto candidate of the party’s establishment.”
Though each of them entered the race with heavy-duty backing from major figures in the party, neither candidate managed to quickly assemble a commanding majority. Perez was weighed down by the fact that many Democrats who revered Obama as a president were nevertheless resistant to him as a party leader, perhaps because he had shown less interest in traditional party-building and fundraising than other Democratic presidents. Ellison, meanwhile, struggled to gain supporters beyond the most progressive precincts of the party’s leadership. And by refusing to defer to the forces in the party most aligned with Obama (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) he contributed to the sense that the race for chair would turn into a proxy fight.
In my view, reliving the 2016 presidential primary was the last thing our party needed to do. Yes, we needed to debate some of the questions at stake in that race, like how to cement our core progressive values and still connect with independent voters. But a factional fight in which the party focused on its own inside baseball would be missing the point. From developing better infrastructure to navigating the toughest issues around race and policing, experience at home had taught me that the best policy and political solutions were emerging far from presidential politics, and far from Washington in general. Both leading contenders were impressive figures, but if the race were left to a member of Congress and a Cabinet Secretary, no one would be seen as speaking for the dynamic, hopeful communities whose stories could be distilled into an antidote to the prevailing cynicism about Washington-driven politics.
To gather my thoughts, I wrote an essay on the future of the party, called “A Letter from Flyover Country,” and published it online. Seeking to offer a Midwestern, millennial mayor’s perspective on where our party had gone wrong and how we could do better, the essay suggested a values-oriented approach and a much greater concentration on the stories and lived experience of Americans getting through life in our hometowns. I also believed that this kind of approach could move us beyond a superficial political strategy based on capturing constituency groups individually, with no unifying theme. I wrote:
The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives—not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us.
The article circulated quickly, and the response was tremendously encouraging, enough that I felt it was time to look at a run. But the vote was just weeks away, and I would have to decide quickly.
To gauge if the idea was crazy or not, I needed to talk to someone who had actually done the job. Howard Dean was among the most effective and well-regarded former DNC chairs, and someone passed me his number so that I could reach out to him. Dean had briefly gotten into the race for chair himself, but then made clear he was mostly just interested in making sure of a break in the business-as-usual pattern of the party, preferably in favor of a newer generation of leadership. (An established elder who nonetheless craved change, he made me think of some of my earliest supporters for mayor of South Bend.)
“It’s a long shot,” Dean told me. “But it’s not a ridiculous long shot.”
A CONTESTED RACE FOR NATIONAL party chair is unique in American politics. Highly personal and idiosyncratic, it in some ways has less in common with other contemporary elections than with the bygone era of brokered political conventions we read about in histories of the 1960s—or 1860s. In a sense, vying for the votes of committee members is a consummate insider’s game that calls to mind the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of old-school politics. But in 2017, this setup collided with the transparency created by social media and Internet organizing, giving party activists across the country an unprecedented level of visibility in a race that would come down to the votes of just a few hundred people.