Politico has an interesting story up today about the current chaos taking place in the Nevada Democratic Party. The party was upended in 2021 when Bernie Sanders supporters took it over. That was considered a big win by socialists around the country but, shockingly, it hasn’t worked out so well.
Judith Whitmer, the insurgent party chair who wrested control of the party from mainstream Democrats, is facing a challenge in her reelection campaign next month amid doubts from her own former supporters and accusations that she abandoned her progressive principles. And even key figures in Bernie world — including Sanders himself — say they are unhappy and embittered by what’s transpired.
“The senator is pretty disappointed in Judith’s chairmanship, specifically around her failure to build a strong grassroots movement in the state,” said a person familiar with Sanders’ thinking. “A lot of us feel sad about what could have been. It was a big opportunity for Bernie-aligned folks in the state to prove some of the folks in the establishment wrong. And that hasn’t happened.”…
“There just has been a complete lack of competence or ability to accomplish anything significant,” said Peter Koltak, a Democratic strategist and former Nevada senior adviser for Sanders’ 2020 campaign, of the current state party leadership. “Look, there’s a lot of well-meaning activists involved there, but they don’t understand the ins and outs of how you build modern campaigns.”
Naturally, Whitmer claims to be surprised by all of this and is still running to continue leading the state party. But she’s been abandoned by moderate elected officials and the Las Vegas DSA.
The state’s Democratic senators, House members and other statewide officials have endorsed Whitmer’s opponent, Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, who is challenging her for the state chair post.
But it’s not just establishment types who have gripes. Kara Hall, a leader in the Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, said Whitmer also hasn’t kept up relationships on the left. “She never once after she was elected spoke out and talked to the chapter,” Hall said.
The DSA’s non-endorsement of Judith Whitmer is really a brief history of the failure of socialists to achieve anything in the past two years along with an effort to claim the DSA itself isn’t to blame except maybe in trusting their elected leaders to tell them what to do.
Ready to be mobilized, we awaited instructions. The instructions never came. Nor, indeed, did any real communication. We openly acknowledge our part in allowing the relationship to fall flat. We deferred to the people who’d actually won these offices, naively expecting them to think of us as partners in organization and mobilization. After the election, Left Caucus also fell off in attendance and capacity; as is so often the case when a big campaign ends, all but a few major players scattered when a new project didn’t present itself…
As the term went on, we saw the ostensibly-progressive coalition move more and more to the center, making administrative and political choices that were more in line with the corporatists that we pledged to beat than the grassroots organizers who pushed the initial victory…
This is our lesson, and we hope socialists everywhere will pay close attention: the Democratic Party is a dead end. It is a “party” in name only; truly, it is simply a tangled web of dark money and mega-donors, cynical consultants, and lapdog politicians. The establishment is Lucy with the football: no matter how effectively socialists organize for power, the establishment will simply pull the football away, using dirtier and dirtier tricks. Enough falling for the tricks and even the most dedicated socialist can’t help but give up and play the ugly game. We don’t want milquetoast progressive reformist-reforms; we want socialism.
The DSA is a bunch of bickering utopians so no wonder they’ve achieved nothing and that they refuse to take any responsibility for achieving nothing. This is what socialists do, talk endlessly and accomplish nothing much for anyone.
But none of this even goes into one of the most dramatic recent events taking place in Nevada Democratic politics. Two weeks ago 40 members of the Nevada State Democratic Central Committee sent a letter to Chair Whitmer accusing her of purging 230 voting members in advance of the March state party officer election:
On Wednesday, February 8th – the day that the filing period for NSDP officer candidates ended – the NSDP published a document titled “2022-2024 State Central Committee (As of 12/4/2022).” This document omitted the names of hundreds of individuals who were members in good standing of the State Central Committee as of the end of 2022. Without transparent access to SCC meeting attendance records, there is no way for independent verification of whether members in good standing were improperly removed. Without any NSDP communication even attempting to provide notices of warning or removal to SCC members, this raises even more questions…
The failure to provide this information despite our previous request raises serious concerns, given that more than 230 members of the State Central Committee have suddenly been removed from the membership roster just as the candidate filing period ended. This purge of roughly 40 percent of the State Central Committee membership as of the end of last year – following repeated failures to properly deliver meeting registration information to members, and just a few weeks before the NDSP officer elections are scheduled to take place – is deeply alarming and raises serious doubts about the integrity of the upcoming election.
Whitmer claims this is a normal clearing of the rolls of non-active members that happens every two years but as the letter explains, the party refuses to show their work by presenting evidence that those removed had missed two previous meetings. So maybe this is just smoke or maybe it’s really shady behavior. Who can tell?
The officer election takes place in one week so we won’t have long to see if the socialists win or lose. Given the state of the party after two years of their leadership, I’m sort of hoping they win.
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