the Democratic National Committee will begin a multi-round election to choose its new chair. Former President Joe Biden’s appointee, Jamie Harrison, is on his way out, and an array of party insiders and outsiders are competing to replace him.

The DNC’s 448 voting members include hundreds of Democrats elected and selected through state parties, along with smaller numbers of appointees, elected officials, and representatives from party groups like the Young Democrats of America. They will cast ballots for a new chair at a time when the Democratic Party itself is adrift, with no clear leader and no strategy for fighting the Trump agenda or regaining power. As one DNC member told me, “The DNC is not really talking about what went wrong and what we did wrong.”

In writing this piece, I reached out to 427 of the DNC’s 448 voting members and interviewed 19 of them. Those who spoke with me came from ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse backgrounds. They included Democrats from rural and urban communities, grassroots party members, elected officials, and party insiders and critics alike. Most agreed to speak on the condition their names wouldn’t be used.

What emerged from these conversations is a picture of a DNC that is built to be an undemocratic, top-down institution, unable to truly leverage the wisdom and guidance of the DNC members who hail from local and state networks across the country. This is especially true when those local and state members disagree with the DNC’s posture or strategic choices

Members said their meetings don’t feel like a place for participation or governance. They described these gatherings as a combination of party presentations and social time, as opposed to real debates or discussions. During Covid, for instance, one member said that meetings were held via web conference, with the chat function turned off. And while the potential for real decision-making can occur at the DNC committee level, “committees are completely rigged, with the chair appointing whoever they want,” one DNC member told me.

In some ways, the race for DNC chair has itself become a microcosm of this tension between money, transparency, and winning elections. Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party Chair Ken Martin and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler are considered the front-runners based on their declared, though likely inflated, DNC vote counts. But neither has disclosed how much money they have raised for their campaigns, who their donors are, or how much they have spent.