We’ve Got 11 Months, So Are We Going to Change the Democratic Party or Watch the Right Keep Winning?

The clock is ticking, and cynicism isn’t a strategy. Here’s the concrete, local, Tea Party-style roadmap to rebuild Democrats into a fighting progressive party…

Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay

You don’t change a party from the outside lookin’ in
You don’t win a war just complainin’ again
They took the house by the keys and the locks
While we were shoutin’, they were claimin’ the blocks
If you wanna turn the tide, if you wanna redeem it
It’s precinct by precinct
Or you don’t mean it
— from Louise’s Daily Song “Precinct by Precinct”

Yesterday, I published an article about how Republicans have spent millions funding the Green Party since 2016 to bleed votes away from Democrats, and how useful idiots on the left have enthusiastically participated because they don’t understand the difference between a first-past-the-post versus a parliamentary electoral system.

The responses, both here, on Facebook, and on Daily Kos have been enlightening: there are still progressives who think the solution is to complain about the DNC, trash people who point out these simple political realities, and promote Green and Working Families Party candidates even more aggressively to “scare” Democrats.

As if any of that would work.

The simple reality is that progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the hard right that’s captured the GOP: we should be learning from them. They had this come-to-Jesus moment back in 2008 when, to their shock and horror, America elected our first Black president.

Instead of complaining, though, they got active and in just one short decade “conservative” activists completely took over the RNC, purged it of its “moderates,” and now are transforming America into something entirely new based on the models of Russia and Hungary.

I’m not suggesting that we should be learning from the GOP’s bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest men and women.

But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party in the wake of that 2008 election and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at transforming today’s Democratic Party, kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party successfully did a decade and a half ago to take power within the GOP and then nationally.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, in 2009, was in charge of the Tea Party taking over the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and hard right conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:

“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?

“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with local Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power. (Typically they’re voluntary, but in some states or cities they even carry a small salary.)

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees who then go on to hold elected office, and who draft a party's platform.

They’re also generally the first people elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say. As a result, they’re massively more influential than average citizens.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the Republican Party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.

Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.

This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:

“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.

“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”

Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that November’s elections.

In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.

But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: they’d filled up the Republican Party and there were no empty GOP precinct committee-person seats anywhere in the country.

And we saw the results of that Precinct Committee takeover first with big Republican victories in 2012 and most recently in the 2024 election: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by hard-core rightwing activists who’ve taken over the party and are also seizing control of school boards and other local offices.

In 2012, just three years after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the inner workings of the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and Tea Partiers picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and 9 new seats in the Senate.

And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.

Progressives need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.

The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.

Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:

“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”

If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate/neoliberal “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to moving back to its FDR roots by adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.

And as we see right now in Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.

We’ve been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, No Kings marches, or even voting, although those are all important.

But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in three short years, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.

If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.

So, in response to the skeptics and cynics who responded to my article yesterday, I’d add the favorite line of my dear friend the late talkshow host Joe Madison. Whenever people would call into his SiriusXM show to complain about Democrats, he’d always say: “So, what are you going to do about it?”

We have 11 months before the next national elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.

Good luck and get started!

Louise’s Daily Song “Precinct by Precinct”:

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social