Cheri Bustos is a typical congressperson: arrogant and incompetent.
At a time of rising energy on the Democrats’ left flank, the DCCC is giving a crash course in how to alienate young progressives.
NORMAL, ILL.— On May 5, newly
elected Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair Cheri Bustos
faced a surprisingly chilly reception at this year’s College Democrats of
Illinois Convention, which is typically a chance for participants to hone
organizing skills and hobnob with elected officials. Bustos' appearance quickly
turned into an interrogation.
The College Democrats
questioned her about the DCCC's new policy of refusing to hire consultants and
vendors who work with any challenger to a Democratic incumbent. The policy is
widely perceived as a broadside against the party's insurgent progressive wing
and its enthusiastic younger voters.
“How does the DCCC intend to
win congressional seats while weakening youth support?” College Democrat
Victoria Koffsky asked Bustos.
“Wow, um, I would not say
we’re weakening youth support,” Bustos replied, saying that the policy exists
to protect current House members, who pay dues to the DCCC.
“We won on our message of
healthcare in 2018, and I’m wondering why the DCCC is trying to protect a
candidate who isn’t on board with that,” asked Hadiya Afzal, referencing
incumbent Daniel Lipinsky (D-Ill.), a conservative Democrat who opposed the
Affordable Care Act and now faces a primary challenge.
While waving away concerns
about Lipinsky (“you could look at any member of our caucus and there would be
something that we don’t all agree about”), Bustos emphasized again and again
that the DCCC’s “first priority” was to hang onto the “fragile majority” in the
House that Democrats achieved in 2018. “We are an incumbent-friendly
organization,” she stressed.
Bustos’ explanations, however,
did not convince her critics.
“That’s not an okay answer,
especially when that’s clearly not the case,” says Koffsky, 22, about Bustos’
denial that the DCCC is weakening youth support. Koffsky is the vice president
of the College Democrats of America, the Democratic National Committee’s
official youth outreach body.
Afzal, 19, the current
president of the College Democrats of Illinois, was even more blunt, calling
Bustos’ defense that the DCCC is incumbent-friendly “kind of a garbage answer.”
The DCCC blacklist inspires
particularly strong emotions in Illinois for a reason. It's here that
pro-choice challenger Marie Newman has seen consultants, pollsters, mail firms
and a communications group abandon
her bid to unseat Lipinski, an eight-term Congress member who vocally
opposes abortion.
It’s a situation that
threatens to become the norm for any insurgent challenger under the policy, as
wary vendors steer clear of challengers’ campaigns lest they lose out on the
DCCC’s business. “I interned at a small political consulting firm, and while
they don’t agree with the policy, they have no choice but to go with it,” says
Koffsky. “They need the income and to keep their employees employed.”
Lipinski, who inherited the
seat from his now-lobbyist father
Bill Lipinsky, regularly votes against the party—almost twice as often as the
average Democrat. Lipinski declined to endorse President Obama for re-election
in 2012 and has received dismal scores from groups advocating the rights of
immigrants and the LGBTQ community, as well as issues such as public education
and the environment. This is all in a district on the edge of Chicago that
Bernie Sanders won by nearly eight points in 2016, putting Lipinski far to the
right of his own district.
Outrage among College
Democrats about the blacklist is not limited to Illinois. On April 24, the
Harvard College Democrats announced that
a coalition of 26 chapters of College Democrats, Young Democrats and other
Democratic youth groups are calling for a boycott of donations to the DCCC
until the “regressive” blacklist policy is reversed. The boycott spans chapters
from Massachusetts to Michigan to Alabama to Arizona. Within three weeks, the
coalition tripled in size to 74 members, according to Harvard College Democrats
President Hank Sparks.
“The two languages the DCCC
speaks are money and media,” says Sparks, 20. To that end, the coalition has
not just shut off its donations to the DCCC and encouraged others to redirect
their DCCC gifts directly to candidates, but embarked on a media campaign
drumming up the kind of negative press the DCCC—already fighting off a reputation for
hostility to progressives—has been trying to shake.
Sparks says that, after
informing the Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution of the boycott, the
organization cited the embargo in an April 25 meeting about the blacklist with
Bustos in Chicago, in which Our Revolution presented Bustos with a letter
criticizing the blacklist. The letter was signed by more than a dozen local
Democratic officials and other progressive figures, including Phil Hare, a
former Congress member who previously represented Bustos’ district.
“We laid out our position, and
she laid out her position,” says Clem Balanoff, chair of Our Revolution
Chicago. “She said it wasn’t a blacklist, we believed that it was. And we
agreed to another meeting.”
That meeting was meant to
take place in late May in Washington, D.C. Balanoff says that a little more
than a week prior, a member of Bustos’ staff informed him the meeting was off,
owing to an Our Revolution press release about the event that led to bad
press for Bustos. Balanoff believes the complaint about press is a “red
herring,” and Our Revolution and the College Democrats are now deciding on next
steps.
The young Democrats rebelling
against the DCCC's policy aren’t radicals looking to take a sledgehammer to the
party. Sparks began his involvement in the party as a Fall Fellow for Hillary
Clinton's 2016 campaign, before phone-banking and door-knocking for Democrats
during the 2018 midterms. Koffsky worked her way up the College Democrats
hierarchy before becoming vice president and considers herself a “lifelong
Democrat.”
“I'm a Democrat because of
Democratic values,” she says. “There’s no reason why Democratic organizing
efforts should be going towards incumbents like Dan Lipinski that don't hold my
values.”
The young Democrats
interviewed by In These Times want primaries to serve as a “contest
of ideas.” They point to recent insurgents, most commonly Rep. Ayanna Pressley
(D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as bearers of the kind of
bold new ideas that will be squeezed out by this policy.
“If we stifle these
progressive, mostly people of color, people who aren’t establishment, then we
are not bringing these voices into the general election, which really hurts
us,” says Kyle Varellie, communications director for the Rutgers-Newark College
Democrats, a boycott signatory.
“We shouldn't be punishing
people for bringing new ideas to the forefront,” says Tim Ennis, communications
director for College Democrats of Massachusetts and incoming president of UMass
Amherst College Democrats, both signatories to the boycott.
These young party activists
view the DCCC blacklist as a slap in the face, as it is they who do the
unglamorous but crucial drudgery that helps win elections.
“We are the backbone of the
Democratic Party when it comes to canvassing hours and door-knocking,” says
Afzal, who in 2016 ran unsuccessfully for the DuPage County Board in Illinois
in 2016, and was endorsed by
Hillary Clinton.
Afzal sees it as hypocritical
for the party to lean on young Democrats’ electoral work but ignore their
policy preferences. And yet, she says, “They're always, 'Woe is me, why don't
we have more young people voting’.”
“Dissent is patriotic,” says
Ennis. “As people on the ground, we think it’s important for party leaders to
listen to young people and value our desires for a better party that doesn’t
just inherently and blindly protect incumbency.”
It remains to be seen whether
this youth revolt will lead the DCCC to drop the contentious policy. In
Illinois, the blacklist appears to have galvanized progressives: Endorsements and donations have
come pouring in for Marie Newman, including from Planned Parenthood, MoveOn and
EMILY’s List—groups not always quick to buck the Democratic establishment.
Despite the DCCC’s best efforts, the primary in Illinois’ 3rd district may end
up being a contest of ideas after all.
Bustos, for her part,
recently announced that
she will be hosting a fundraiser for Lipinski.
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