Main Paineframe posted:

The job of the DNC chair is primarily strategy around election organization. To be specific, their main jobs are fundraising and soliciting donations, directing the usage of those resources to protect incumbent Dems and elect new ones, and so on. They have no real say over policy; at best, they can somewhat guide national-level messaging and ad buys. Their ability to change the party is fairly limited - they're not in any position to tell centrist Dems to gently caress off and back primary challengers against them, or anything like that.

And most importantly of all, the chair is not a dictator, and is very limited in their ability to do something that the DNC's 400-plus members disagree with. For example, the initial draft of the 2016 Democratic platform was composed by a committee of 15 DNC members, and was finalized by a committee of 187 DNC members. Even on executive decisions, the chair's power is nowhere near absolute - the DNC also has five vice-chairs and a National Finance Chair, all of whom are elected by the entire DNC membership. There's not much info out there on the day-by-day workings of the DNC, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't much matter who wins the chairman battle - both viable candidates have pretty much the same plan for the party anyway. It's mainly just a proxy battle being waged by various factions intent on getting a symbolic victory to demonstrate their power over the future of the party.

What matters far more for changing the direction of the party is changing the composition of the DNC as a whole, which mostly means putting new people in high positions in state-level DNCs - which we should be doing anyway as part of reversing Dems' heavy losses in state governments. Honestly, the focus on the national DNC chair might be damaging that effort - both because people are directing resources and attention at that rather than at the far-more-important state races, and also because progressives are directing their attention and resources toward a guy who's actively undermining state-level progressive efforts. The Sanders folks in Florida are not happy with Ellison, who endorsed an establishment megadonor against their preferred candidate in the race for Florida DNC chair, and I can say from personal experience that being a Florida progressive is discouraging enough already without being outrighr betrayed like that.