A week after Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg unveiled a controversial plan to back primary challenges to longtime party incumbents, anger at the activist-turned-Democratic leader is only intensifying among party officials.
These Democratic critics say their fury at Hogg has grown amid what they see as his ill-conceived and insufficient efforts to make amends for his planned primary campaign — a campaign that, they say, threatens the DNC’s neutrality and its capacity to fight back against President Donald Trump.
Some Democrats have even said the DNC should consider changing its rules to force Hogg to either abandon the campaign or resign as vice chair.
The tension is expected to spill over during a regularly scheduled Thursday call for DNC members — a meeting that, some Democratic officials suggest, might turn into a forum for airing grievances about Hogg’s anti-incumbent pledge.
During that call, the DNC’s chair, Ken Martin, is also expected to unveil a multipoint agenda that would include a proposal mandating all DNC officers stay neutral in all primaries, according to a senior DNC official. The proposal would expand on the current neutrality pledge, which now only includes the presidential race.
If adopted, the proposal would effectively force Hogg to choose between staying in his role at the DNC and backing primary challenges against incumbent Democratic lawmakers.
Martin and DNC officers hammered out the change to the neutrality pledge and the rest of the plan at their retreat at the end of last month. Hogg, the senior DNC official said, actively participated in the meeting and chimed in on many of the reforms. But Hogg said nothing in response to the other officers when it came to the neutrality agreement, this official said.
Three weeks after the retreat, Hogg went public with his plan to challenge primary candidates.
The DNC official emphasized that Martin’s plan to expand the DNC leaders’ neutrality came well before they knew of Hogg’s plans. But it would address the festering anger toward the vice chair.
Some Democrats clearly want Hogg gone.
“You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Can we trust him?’” said Clay Middleton, a DNC committee member and senior adviser to the DNC’s former chair, Jaime Harrison.
“When you’re a national party officer and you are talking with people within the party, especially if you’re strategizing and planning and talking about sensitive information, what information do you share with someone that hasn’t signed the pledge to be neutral? Are they sharing that information with people to go against an incumbent Democrat?” Middleton said.
Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Party, said Hogg’s move is not just misguided but a conflict of interest with the vice chair role.
“You cannot at the same time be a vice chair that is there to support the party and support Democratic elected officials and be part of an effort to unseat those very same Democratic elected officials,” Jacobs said.
Privately, Democrats offer even more scathing assessments, saying Hogg either must back down from his effort or step down from the DNC.
“We’ve got a lot of fucking problems right now,” said one senior Democratic official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “And now an elected office of the DNC is creating new ones. And at the end of the day, DNC leadership should be building trust, not threatening or eroding it.”
The official — who likened Hogg’s anti-incumbent campaign to a “middle finger” to everyone who helped rebuild trust in the DNC following the controversial 2016 Democratic presidential primary — said he expects party officials and DNC members eventually move to push Hogg out of his role as vice chair, though this person acknowledged they didn’t know of any concrete effort to do so.
“I don’t think he’s yet realized how few supporters he has and how painful it’s going to be for him,” the official added.
The ongoing frustration with Hogg is indicative of just how much anger he provoked when he announced his anti-incumbent plan last week. Hogg said he would back a $20 million campaign through his PAC, Leaders We Deserve, targeting longtime Democratic incumbents. That declaration appeared at odds with his role as vice chair of the DNC, an organization dedicated to helping Democrats win general elections against Republicans that’s expected to remain neutral in party primaries.
Asked for a response to the continuing criticism, Martin reiterated a statement he issued last week, calling Hogg a “passionate advocate” but restating that it is the DNC’s longstanding position that primary voters, not the national party, determine their Democratic candidates for the general election.
Martin has not called for any action against Hogg.
Hogg tried to mollify criticism last week when he said his group would donate $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the political entity responsible for electing House Democrats in battleground districts.
But that peace offering failed to mollify his critics. As one former DNC official put it, the DCCC might have to spend $100,000 or more defending incumbents from just one of Hogg’s challenges.
“Of course that’s not going to be enough,” said the former DNC official, who suggested that if Hogg didn’t back down from his position, party officials would be forced to pressure him to resign.
Other Democratic leaders agreed that Hogg should face an ultimatum.
“David Hogg has to decide whether he wants to be in the tent or outside the tent,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If he wants to be inside the tent, there are responsibilities and limitations.”
What Hogg is doing, some DNC members argue, goes beyond an endorsement or a contribution to a candidate like others have done in the past.
Even members who support Hogg’s actions said he shouldn’t take part in them while serving the DNC in an official capacity.
“My position annoys everybody. I agree with what he’s doing, I don’t agree with his usage of his vice chair title while he’s funding primary challenges. I don’t believe that that’s the role of the DNC,” said Michael Kapp, a DNC member and former chair of the DNC Youth Council.
Kapp was first elected to the DNC in 2016, in the middle of the fallout around DNC officials putting their thumbs on the scale for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. That scandal eventually led to the DNC’s then-chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign.
“Anything we can do to avoid a repeat of 2016, I’m in favor of. I supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and I’m still scarred by what happened in that cycle,” Kapp said.
Hogg rose to prominence as a high school student in 2018 after surviving the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and becoming a nationally recognized advocate for gun control.
In 2024, with $12 million, Leaders We Deserve backed one House candidate: now-Rep. Sarah McBride. Of the 11 state legislature candidates they supported, three won.
Hogg, in an interview with NOTUS earlier this month, said his group would use “a combination of factors” to determine what sitting House members should be primaried. A memo announcing the initiative, obtained by NOTUS, said the group would primary “out-of-touch, ineffective House Democrats in solid blue seats (not frontline districts) who are failing to meet the moment.”
“We’re not going to look at somebody and just be like, ‘Well, this person is above a certain age, they shouldn’t be there’ — that is not what we are doing,” Hogg said. “What we are doing is, is this person truly fighting, and if they’ve been there for decades, do they deserve to continue to be there?”
As for the challengers, they must be under 35 and have, as Hogg said, “the ferocity, the energy, passion and the grit” to push the party forward.
“The division in our party isn’t so much between the center and the left,” Hogg said. “It’s ‘do you you want to fight,’ or ‘do you want to roll over and die?’”
There are 56 Democrats in the House ages 70 or older. There are only 30 Republicans in that same age group.
That gap became even more apparent earlier this month when House Republicans were narrowly able to move forward on their budget bill with two Republican defections, which was only possible because three Democrats elected in November weren’t present for the vote.
Two Democratic seats are currently empty — former Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner both died earlier this year — and Rep. Donald Norcross was also absent following a medical incident, which his office said will require “extended recovery.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS.