'We Must Be Bolder': Faiz Shakir Enters Race for DNC Chair
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Longtime progressive strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, announced his late entry into the race for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this week, expressing frustration with what he described as the current crop of candidates' apparent "lack of vision and conviction for what to do to restore a deeply damaged Democratic brand."
"As I have listened to our candidates, I sense a constrained, status-quo style of thinking," Shakir wrote in a Medium post. "We cannot expect working-class audiences to see us any differently if we are not offering anything new or substantive to attract their support."
Shakir's decision to join the race comes two weeks before DNC's hundreds of members are set to vote on who will lead the organization in the wake of the disastrous 2024 elections, which saw Republicans win a trifecta at the federal level and Democrats continue to hemorrhage working-class support.
Shakir, the founder of More Perfect Union—a progressive media organization whose mission is to help build working-class power—said he's come away from recent DNC candidate forums and conversations with the view that "we wrongly perceive a powerlessness about the role of chair, confining it merely to being some kind of pass-through financial vehicle to distribute funds to various other entities."
"The grandest reforms I've heard so far revolve around procedural, internal changes to budgeting and consultant work, and we offer pablum around national war rooms and permanent campaigns that have no substance guiding them, deferring critical judgment about what to actually say and do to some other place and time or persons," Shakir wrote in his Medium post. "We must be bolder than that!"
"If we learned anything from our last four years, it should be that we must break some norms and get more compelling, interesting, and dynamic to win," he added. "We can't continue to defer critical political judgments to a donor class or some other outside actors. To be a multiracial working-class party, we must prove we are on their side in the fight against corporate greed."
Shakir, who previously served as a senior adviser to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, said he envisions a DNC that is "an organizing army" that backs workers in their fight against corporate abuses; "its own powerful media outlet" that features "working-class heroes taking on corporate greed" and airs "educational pieces about the aims and ambitions of the Silicon swamp surrounding [President-elect Donald] Trump; and a body that "actively involves the grassroots in surfacing interesting policy ideas and building civic organization around community service, faith, sports, culture, and entertainment."
"Most importantly," he wrote, "we have to strategically pick big fights with the elite and selfish oligarchs now entering government 'service' not just to decry their looting but to paint the picture of how we would wield power in a very different way."
Shakir joins a field in which two candidates—Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler and Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin—are widely seen as the frontrunners. But the race has so far lacked the kind of enthusiasm that Shakir argues is badly needed.
As Politico reported Sunday, there has been "little daylight" between the DNC chair candidates and the contest has had "all the excitement of watching a euchre tournament, full of Midwestern niceness befitting its two frontrunners but short on big ideas or disagreements over how to salvage their fortunes."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Shakir said that it is "almost like we've moved on and not even deliberated or grasped what were the challenges."
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years," he warned, "if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Shakir's candidacy quickly received the backing of Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
"I am proud to endorse Faiz Shakir as chair of the Democratic National Committee," Nelson wrote in a social media post. "Faiz not only has the right working-class credibility, vision, and insight for this moment, but he also has the vast experience needed to operate and rebuild the DNC."
"The party is at a critical moment, and we need to embrace changing [the] status quo," Nelson added. "Faiz's vision and conviction is clear: use the authority and resources of the DNC to build power for working people—the promise of America. He is the leader the party needs at this moment."
Unionists demonstrate in Renton, Washington on September 26, 2024. (Photo: Taylor Garland)
