How Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager would rebuild the DNC

Donald Trump had a lot working against his 2024 candidacy. During his first presidency, he was impeached twice—the second time for inciting the violent mob that stormed the US Capitol. In the years since, he was found liable for sexual abuse and faced charges in four criminal cases. He was found guilty on 34 felony counts in one of those cases, though he has managed to escape trial in the other three.

That long list of scandals made Trump’s second White House win confounding to many progressives. But not Bernie Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” the independent, left-wing senator from Vermont wrote on Nov. 6.

Last year, voters without college degrees backed Trump over Kamala Harris by a 2-to-1 ratio, according to NBC News exit polls. Though Sanders lost the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, his campaign did pull in record-breaking financial support from grassroots donors. Now, Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, is trying to reclaim that magic with a bid to become chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Shakir, who also served in senior roles with the ACLU, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and the late Sen. Harry Reid, will face several opponents—most notably, state party chairs Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin—on Feb. 1. The candidate who earns a majority of votes from the DNC’s 448 members will win.

I recently spoke to Shakir about his vision for the future of the party. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In your statement announcing your plan to run for chair of the DNC, you said that you believe the central job of the chair is to change how Democrats are perceived by voters. How are Democrats perceived by voters right now?

I believe a lot of working-class people out there hold the Democratic Party to a different standard than the Republican Party, and quite frankly, it’s a higher standard. That means they feel like when there’s great wealth and income inequality in society, when billionaires are ruling, when there are major fights depriving them of economic freedom in all different kinds of places—whether it’s in the workplace, or as a consumer, or small businesses getting crunched by monopolists—when you have that going on in society, they’re expecting and wanting a fighter who sticks their neck out with us and for us.

I draw the metaphor to unions. When you get out there and you talk to some workers who are on a strike and they’re upset about contract negotiations, sometimes they’ll be angrier at their union head than they will be at the company. “The head of the company only cares about their bottom line. That’s the way they operate,” a worker might say. “My union head is supposed to stick up for me. That’s their job.” And in that way, they get angry. That’s what I sense is going on with a lot of working class people here as we’ve become a party spending less time prioritizing [the] economic justice message that is the historical lineage of our party, it has caused people to check out and stay at home. As a result, I think we have a very weak and struggling Democratic brand.

I grew up in a conservative area, and what I was hearing from folks back home was a feeling of being forgotten: like the Democrats were prioritizing lots of issues—trans rights, abortion, immigration—but not focusing on the issues most relevant to their lives. If elected DNC chair, how do you balance your own values on equity and diversity with the fact that highlighting some of those issues makes working class voters feel left behind?

I recognize everything that you’re saying, and I agree with it. How to solve for it is the primacy of your economic justice message. Are you really spending a lot of time and energy in the way you talk to people, and what you tell them is the core of our party?…Do you identify with the Boeing workers when they go on strike, when the auto workers go on strike? With Starbucks baristas? If you’re identifying with those [issues] frequently and telling people that’s a major top line issue—when [Jeff] Bezos tries to buy the government, or when Elon Musk tries to attempt the largest merger and acquisition in history by purchasing the federal government—that’s going to get us most agitated, you’re going to see our passion and our convictions in the Democratic party come out.

You have to move the primacy of economic justice right to the top of people’s minds. I believe strongly that Americans are all over the map on a lot of cultural [issues]—immigration, policing matters…You have to give people the allowance to speak with conviction about where you fall on any of these questions, allowing that people may feel differently in this party…You will say, “Hey, this is where I’m coming from. I appreciate if you have a different perspective. I want to tell you, this is where I’m at.” I think that [approach] would restore a lot, especially if we keep economic justice primacy right at the top.

But Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester did that in 2024 and still lost. Brown’s loss especially stands out; his opponent was a luxury car salesman who was sued by a bunch of his workers over allegations of discrimination and wage theft.

You’re absolutely right. My analysis of that election cycle is they over-performed over the Democratic brand. What hurt them? The Democratic brand. At some point, you’re trying to swim above water aggressively as much as you can, until that anchor is just pulling you down underneath.

Tester and Brown are the best examples of that in the last election cycle. Even look at Dan Osborne [an independent Senate candidate running in Nebraska with quiet support from Democrats], who lost his race. He didn’t run under the Democratic banner, but you can look at his over-performance. Don’t just look at the W’s and L’s. The major takeaway was that these guys were way over-performing [the national Democratic ticket].

In an interview with the New York Times, Vice President-elect JD Vance said that the people on the left whose politics he’s most open to are the “Bernie Bros.” Pundits have compared potential alliances between the far-right and the far-left to something resembling a horseshoe. What do you make of that?

Is it possible that we could be losing more and more working-class union people who are now being competed over by the Republican Party? Yes, it’s dangerous and it’s real…The most frustrating part of this in the last few years is that if you look at a lot of the actions of the Biden administration in the regulatory realm— the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the IRS, etc…—actions [by these agencies] were bringing a degree of accountability to corporate America. And corporate America reacted with anger and fought back. But a lot of that fight was behind the scenes.

You have a policy apparatus that chooses to pick [a fight] that would be very popular to people, and then it isn’t accompanied by a political apparatus that sees the value of defending and sticking your necks out for those folks who are doing the hard corporate accountability work. What you had on the policy domain is this effort to try to say: “Well, we’re gonna go do the hard work here, and then we complain a few years later that no one knew what’s going on.” That’s because nobody was even talking about it. Even when Joe Biden went to the picket line during that UAW strike, it was as if Joe Biden was doing Joe Biden; it wasn’t that the DNC that had rallied around the cause of the UAW workers.

Imagine if you rewound the clock and did that differently. If you had the DNC more engaged, recruiting people to go to the picket [line] in solidarity, then your list of people is going to grow. Your relationships with people on the ground are going to grow because they saw you, in that moment, stick your neck out…People may say, “Well I don’t love Democrats, but I saw them do something there that really mattered to me.” There was no lean-in on so many of these major policy endeavors by the Biden administration on the political side.

Instead of focusing on priorities like getting rid of junk fees or going after monopolies, the Democratic apparatus was so focused on Trump being a threat to democracy, a criminal, a racist, etc. What impact do you think it had that Democrats kept talking about Trump’s morality?

The “threat to democracy” [theme] came through everywhere and and I think it ended up hurting our persuasion with working-class people to lean in on that, because, they felt, “Well, you’re in charge. You have power. What are you doing with that? That’s what I wanted to know.”

Number two, they felt, “Trump kept saying that this is a political charade, and then I saw the [Democratic] politics people affirm that…” The whole thing just had a very strongly misplaced prioritization of what people wanted to hear about.

The hard part about this is that they’re not dumb people at the DNC making malicious decisions. They’re, in that moment, trying to raise money off of the anger and frustration around Donald Trump being on trial. In lieu of that—of just trying to ride that emotional wave of anger—think instead about building the brand of a Democratic Party. Instead of just being opposition to Donald Trump, the opportunity right now is being somebody that better expresses what you stand for. Not just what you stand against.

Should you win the chair, what do you make of Trump appointing so many millionaires and billionaires to senior government positions? Does that give you a lot of material to work with in winning back the working class?

What they’re doing on AI, what they’re doing on crypto, what they’re doing to displace and fight labor in America—those things are going to be powerful for us, if we can spend the time and energy and be disciplined about going deep into the understanding of what it is that they want and unpacking that for people as a choice: “What they’re trying to do hurts you in your life, and we could be doing something different instead.” I suspect that if we do that right, there will also be opportunities to educate folks who didn’t know anything about what Biden was actually doing—all of this enforcement agency stuff.

Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to convey about your candidacy?

At the end of the day, the DNC has to be a vehicle to help win elections. I care deeply about building up a small-dollar donor base. It has to be a top priority. It was [a priority] for me with Bernie’s campaign; and at the ACLU, we had a huge amount of small-dollar donations that fueled us at that time. If you do that right, the opportunities to rebuild state parties is strong. Anytime you have [races] where people are giving out of passion, intensity, and desire—it means you have a better chance to structurally rethink the opportunities of what’s possible.

There’s also a role that the DNC itself could fill as a media apparatus…You could tell the stories directly, not only of when workers are going on strike, but also [show] people like [Reps.] Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden in these purple and red districts [having] conversations with their members. It would be informative and interesting content. You would then have a more informed and interested base.

I’ve also spent a lot of time with More Perfect Union (a progressive nonprofit media group Shakir founded that covers labor issues) trying to build up that active, vibrant grassroots list. Now you’ve got money coming in…Now you have an opportunity to rebuild a strong, grassroots, small-dollar fundraising network. You can raise that baseline and hopefully even have additional money to give state [democratic parties] more purpose and mission: “Dear states, go figure out compelling and interesting working-class campaigns that would be worth funding,” and having them compete to pitch ideas. That’s what I would envision.

Editor’s note: The author of this post and other Mother Jones workers are represented by UAW Local 2103.