Keith Ellison, who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, was an enthusiastic supporter of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for president, and Sanders in turn supported Ellison after the election in his bid to chair the Democratic National Committee. However, Ellison lost to former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who was supported by Hillary Clinton. In an attempt to bring the party together, Ellison was appointed the party’s deputy chairman. Over the past year, both men have been crisscrossing the country trying to rebuild a divided Democratic Party.
Ellison appeared at an event in New Haven, Connecticut in mid-January, speaking to a full house at a local sanctuary church, which is currently hosting an Ecuadorian immigrant fighting to remain in the U.S. after being ordered deported.
In what Ellison called a “community conversation,” he addressed both those in the audience he knew were “lifelong Democratic activists” as well as those who don’t identify with that label, but were interested in hearing what a progressive Democrat has to say about the state of the nation and the party. His talk focused on the Democrat’s new organizing model and reforming the party’s primary election rules. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus attended Ellison’s talk and brings us the following excerpts.
KEITH ELLISON: I’m Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. And we’re here to talk about not just how to win an election, but how to win the argument for working people across the country. And there is a big difference, because you can win an election by simply getting a bunch of money and running ads tearing down your opponent. People have done it in the past; maybe they’ll do it in the future. But you cannot build a sustainable economy and society unless you win the argument that we ought to have health care for everybody, that college should be affordable, that you got to be able to drink the water and breathe the air, that you got to be able to deal with new science in order to deal with the problems of our world like climate change, that you should have a union and a voice on the job.
How did we get to where we are now? You know we have lost over 1,000 seats across the country in terms of state legislative seats, governorships and things like that? The answer, in just a few words, is that we failed to do community organizing and grassroots engagement. And so, what I’m here to ask you to do as the leaders, as the folks who are the most motivated, the folks who attend meetings, the focus who volunteer and organize, we’re asking you to help us revamp, revitalize and re-establish the Democratic Party as an instrument for social and economic uplift for working people. That’s the invitation.
Some of you are lifelong Dems, and you’ve been working hard forever. There’s never been a moment when you weren’t fighting for the people under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. But there might be others of you, though, who believe in all the values we talk about, but you might think, I’m going to spend my time working in this other group, or working in my union, or working with Our Revolution or working with Indivisible. And I’m here to tell you, this is awesome. It’s not so much a matter of what party or what group you work with – it’s that you are working engaging neighbors all over New Haven and Connecticut, to make sure they know they are a part of our democratic – small d – family.
This is a project the DNC has – it’s called Winning with Partners. What do we mean by that? What we mean is that we have got to all come together. You go ahead and volunteer with Indivisible; we’re glad you’re working with your union. But at the end of the day we’ve all got to take our part of knocking the doors, of making the calls, of having the meetings in the churches and the mosques and synagogues, of working with the VFW halls, and we’ve got to organize our people all over this country.
The DNC has changed its mission. You know, up until February we had one kind of mission, which we have shifted. Our mission used to be to re-elect a Democratic president. If we only re-elect a Democratic president, then you see us get busy when? Around the presidential election, which happens when? Every four years. What happens to the city council, to the state legislative races? What happens to the county commission, what happens to the judges? Well, we just weren’t in that fight over the last decade. We have changed the model, we have shifted the model, but change sometimes is perceived as a lagging indicator. Sometimes you decide to change something, but it takes awhile before people see it.
So I’m telling you that this is the new spirit of the DNC, which is, 1, to focus on grassroots engagement; 2, focus on not just television, but putting money on the ground through training, through engagement of all kinds; to not just work on the presidential, but on every single level of government. We fight for every one up and down the ballot, not just the top of the ballot. That we understand that for many people the election’s not the most important thing, but it’s what happens between the elections, because it’s between the elections that we pass the ordinance for zero waste; that we protect the right to organize in a labor union and fight off these “right to work for less” statutes. It’s between the elections that students figure out, can I afford to go to school or not. It’s between the elections where the action happens and that’s what most people care about.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Ellison was and is a big supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He noted that in 2016 the Clinton wing of the party had “put its thumb on the scale” in the primaries to get an unfair advantage at the convention.
KEITH ELLISON: There is a memorandum executed in August 2015 where one candidate got to choose the communications and other staff and others didn’t. That’s not fair. And so my thing, having acknowledged that fact, is what do we do now? So Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders agreed to have a unity commission. That commission has met several times. Dec. 5 they had some major meetings and came out with recommendations to cut the number of super-delegates by about 66 percent. [Applause] They pushed state parties to have more open primaries. It ought to be a very short timeline. In New York, you gotta be registered to vote for the primary like six months ahead of time. That’s too long. It’s too long. We need to make it a lot easier to participate. And there are a number of other reforms, including budgetary openness. And so we are on the reform trail. We know that part of the reform of the Democratic Party is transparency, accountability and integrity.
For information, visit Keith Ellison’s profile at democrats.org/person/keith-ellison; Democratic National Committee at democrats.org.
