Two candidates — Ben Wikler and Ken Martin — have dominated the race to chair the Democratic National Committee. Now weeks from the election, a late entrant, albeit no stranger to party politics, says they’ve been campaigning for the job all wrong.
Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager and veteran of Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s offices, said he is running to disrupt the “constrained, status quo style of thinking” he argues is dominating the party.
“I sense that there’s too much focus on the internal bureaucracy — which you have to figure out, certainly — but you’re missing the forest for the trees,” Shakir told NOTUS.
Shakir’s bid serves as a stark reminder that the Democratic Party is in the midst of a reckoning at every level — from how Democrats should respond to the Republican agenda, to what the job of the DNC chair should even be.
Shakir entered the race on Wednesday, gaining enough signatures to get on the ballot, but he was too late to participate in the party’s first candidate forums — both virtual and in person. He also missed the deadline by hours to participate in the upcoming DNC-hosted forum next Thursday.
He remains an adviser to Sanders and also heads up the labor-movement-focused progressive media nonprofit More Perfect Union, which tells many of the stories Shakir says the DNC should focus on.
NOTUS caught up with Shakir to discuss his last-minute bid and what he thinks the DNC is completely missing ahead of its upcoming Feb. 1 elections. We also asked him the one question almost every other candidate for chair was unwilling to answer during the DNC’s Thursday night forum: Should Joe Biden have stepped down from his reelection bid earlier?
“That’s a no-brainer,” Shakir said. “He should’ve dropped out sooner. … People get into their sense of, ‘Am I disrespecting Joe Biden by suggesting he should have dropped out?’ Like, no, you’re not. He made a decision. He dropped out himself.”
This interview has been edited for style and clarity.
NOTUS: You said in your letter to DNC members that people wrongly perceived powerlessness about the role of the chair. What is it from the other candidates’ pitches that you think is being left out or mistaken in regards to the role?
Faiz Shakir: It’s not to suggest that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a different vision of how we perceive the power of the Democratic National Committee chair right now and the mandate of what they need to focus on as a first-order priority.
It’s uniquely different to run the DNC at this moment than in other circumstances where we might have the presidency or the House or the Senate. The first and foremost thing is repairing this tarnished brand of DNC by getting out there and being a public messenger of what it is that we fight for.
That’s where the difference in vision is. I sense that there’s too much focus on the internal bureaucracy — which you have to figure out, certainly — but you’re missing the forest for the trees if you’re not thinking about how you retool an apparatus that has $100-plus million, 50-plus state parties, all the potential for a volunteer base and opportunities to educate people around the purchase of our government by a billionaire class. … You have to tell me that there’s a really great new plan and idea of how to get people associated with the Democratic Party now more than ever before.
What can a DNC chair realistically achieve this next term for the party, practically speaking?
I believe we could rebuild the small-dollar-donor base that is evaporating, and it does often tend to in off cycles. What’s really critical is to turn the organization into a grassroots organization in which small-dollar donations fuel it. If we do that successfully, it gives us the resources and the connection with the community that we’re going to need to reestablish trust that we are better positioned to hold power and fight for working-class people than your current ruling class that runs this government.
You’ve got to couple that with a powerful, robust visual media operation. If you’re sharing news from the DNC about a strike or some economic justice issues … you’re going to have an opportunity to speak to people across the country who are wondering if anyone knows what’s going on in their lives.
What did the DNC and Harris campaign get wrong in this last cycle? How might you have approached it differently?
I felt a lot of shortcomings from the DNC during the Biden era, of using its power to tell people about the really critical economic justice fights that Joe Biden was waging and to lean in the same moments when the president was leaning in to tell people about them.
A good example of this would be when Joe Biden visited the picket line in the midst of the UAW strike in Detroit. He was the first president of the United States to ever do that. And in that moment, you did not have the DNC organizing its list to bring people out in solidarity with those striking workers, to tell people about the striking workers, to send any degree of resources to help those striking workers. It was almost as if the president himself went there, but the political apparatus was living a completely different operation.
The same opportunities were missed in the Harris campaign. For a third of the Harris campaign, the Boeing workers were out on strike. There was nothing. No indications of support, no mentions of anything around it. Instead, you got billionaire Mark Cuban who’s out there speaking on behalf of us. You’ve got Liz Cheney and other people, but you didn’t see a focus on working-class spokespersons or champions trying to tell you about the efforts that we’re going to undergo to go after corporate greed.
What do you think the relationship between the DNC and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee — or the Democrat actually in the White House — should be? Jaime Harrison was obviously closely tied to Biden and his team in the White House. Do you think that was effective?
When you’re president of the United States, a Democratic president, you should have the DNC operate to help you in your agenda. That’s critical. You need a DNC to help keep and maintain a vibrant base of support for you.
But there was not a vibrant base of support. As I mentioned before, I think that there were a lot of missed opportunities — the UAW strike, things the administration was doing to take on Amazon, Facebook and Google — that could have told people a story that they just didn’t know about. I don’t know how or why decisions were not made not to tell those stories through the DNC, but that’s where I feel like we let the administration down.
How should Democrats compete with big dollar and corporate funders on the right, especially as we have seen so many of these big Silicon Valley names also move to the right?
In taking action against it, you really have to stick your neck out and show people that it’s not about taking money from corporations. It’s showing that they don’t have power over this organization. We have been weakest when there’s hints and intonations to people that behind closed doors, there are wealthy people executing decisions and judgments about what we should emphasize and what we shouldn’t emphasize.
A lot of people are operating with healthy skepticism that it’s not actually regular rank-and-file grassroots people making judgments or determinations about how the DNC spends its money. I think one of the most transparent measures you could do is build up a small-dollar network list and share it with each state party. Allow them to operate and run emails to that list, to raise their own money. That’s one of the ways you can start to counter the idea that we are corporatized.
Most candidates in the forum you missed didn’t answer the question of whether Biden should’ve stepped down earlier. What’s your position? What do you make of the other candidates’ hesitancy to speak on it?
That’s a no-brainer. He did drop out. Of course, he should’ve dropped out sooner. In retrospect, I’m sure the president himself would have said that. As soon as the 2022 midterms were over, we should have started a competitive Democratic primary.
People get into their sense of, “Am I disrespecting Joe Biden by suggesting he should have dropped out?” Like, no, you’re not. He made a decision. He dropped out himself.
Are you running to win?
You bet I am. I spend all my time calling delegates and trying to reach them. A lot of people thought that I wouldn’t be able to get the necessary signatures to even get into the race. I got them in a day. The reason that happened is because I’m going out and talking to people. I’m going to put in the work here.
I came in about frustration about the state of this race, but here I am now, and I look up at the scoreboard and I see there’s 10 minutes on the clock in the fourth quarter. No votes have been cast yet though. So hey, there’s still time.
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.