Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, has announced a proposal requiring party officials to remain neutral in primary elections, challenging activist David Hogg to choose between his vice-chair post and his pledge to unseat “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents.
As Democrats scramble to rebuild their tarnished brand after a devastating loss to Donald Trump in 2024, party officials are escalating a confrontation with the 25-year-old progressive activist who was elected to serve as a vice-chair in February.
“If you want to challenge incumbents, you’re more than free to do that, but just not as an officer of the DNC, because our job is to be neutral arbiters,” Martin said on a call with reporters on Thursday. “We can’t be both the referee and also the player at the same time. You have to make a decision.”
Martin officially presented the neutrality pledge on Thursday, days after Hogg announced plans to spend $20m to primary “out-of-touch” and “ineffective” Democratic incumbents through his grassroots organization Leaders We Deserve – an unprecedented move for a high-ranking party official.
The effort has put Hogg on a collision course with his own party, which has traditionally not opposed incumbents, preferring instead to use its resources against Republicans.
Martin emphasized that he had “great respect” for Hogg, who became an outspoken gun safety advocate after surviving the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “But it’s important for us to maintain the trust that we have built with Democratic voters and to keep our thumb off the scale as party officers,” he added.
“We hope that he realizes that he got elected to be an officer of the DNC, which means that we remain neutral,” Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic party chair and president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said on the call. She said many state parties already forbid officials from “putting our thumb on the scale” in Democratic primaries.
“Voters get to decide who our candidates are, not party officials,” she said.
If approved by DNC members at the party’s August meeting, the resolution would in effect force Hogg to choose between remaining a national party vice-chair or step aside from Leaders We Deserve, which he co-founded.
The standoff comes as Democrats’ popularity has fallen dramatically, even as approval of the president drops. Since Trump’s return to power, liberal voters have swarmed town halls, rallies and protests to vent their disapproval of the Trump administration – but also a pent-up desire for generational change in Democratic leadership.
“Anybody who believes our country is in an existential moment, and who sees the sole opposition party at a record low approval with the public, should want to both change the face of our party in primaries and fix the party from the inside,” Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement after the DNC call, calling Hogg one of the few national party leaders who are “meeting this important moment with boldness”.
On Thursday’s call, Martin outlined a plan to ramp up its financial contributions to state parties, especially in traditionally Republican corners of the electoral map. He said all state parties would receive a baseline rate of $17,500 a month, a $5,000-a-month increase over the current DNC contribution. Parties in red states would receive an additional investment of $5,000 a month through the DNC’s Red State Fund, he said.
“I’m done with Democrats myopically focusing on just a few battleground states every few years,” Martin said. “We are not simply a presidential campaign committee, the DNC is now the primary hub for building out a permanent political organizing movement across every part of the country.”
