My name is Jason Paul, and I live in Newton, Massachusetts where I am an attorney and political strategist. I am running for DNC chair because I believe I have the strongest, most comprehensive approach to how we must remake our Party apparatus to empower us to win elections. Too often our Party focuses entirely on crafting the message we send, our song, so to speak. I seek your support to refocus our efforts on what we can do to ensure that more people hear what we are singing.
About Me
I am an older millennial who has dedicated his life to the Democratic Party since 2002 when I was a freshman in high school volunteering for Bill Curry’s gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut. Since then, I have done it all. I ran for state representative; managed a statewide campaign; ran a paid canvass operation; and served as a member of Force Multiplier’s political research committee, one of the most successful giving circles in the country. I also have served on my local city committee for the last eight years.
I was a senior advisor to one of the most successful local parties in the country, in Lewiston Maine, where we raised a stunning amount of money as well as elected a ton of Democrats, and modeled a college turnout program that needs to be emulated across the country. I have also written a book explaining the political period from 2000 through 2020. (All chapters are available on my Substack, where all the proposals described below will be laid out.)
I was also one of the first people to protest in person at a Donald Trump presidential campaign event in 2015, as well as sparring with Jeb Bush later that year, when I got him to admit the danger of white supremacy. This cycle I focused on why Trump nostalgia was a lie.
I am obviously not a conventional choice to be DNC chair, but the sad reality of our situation is that conventional choices will find us continuing most of what we already do, while hoping to make slight improvements to get a slightly better result. If we are serious about regaining the support of the country, modest reform cannot be our path.
Instead, we need to reimagine our party so that it can cut through the staggering amounts of noise that society now produces, noise that renders most of what we do simply feeding the din. Cutting through is our key challenge now. I provide twenty key action steps to get that done. Rather than drown you with a massive tome, I am sending along details for the first three today. Between now and the end of the year, I will publish the remainder of my proposals, which I briefly summarize below.
The truth is that much more is needed than these twenty ideas. The bottom line is this: we must innovate, experiment, and question everything. It is only with this mindset that we can achieve the results we need for our country. That change mindset cannot apply merely toward what the DNC is, but also to the entire ecosystem of the party. This includes a large number of non-party actors who are still functioning like the party, such as moveon.org, Swing Left, and other similar organizations. Only when we look at the whole can we make it better. I would also implore everyone in this race to think more deeply about how we do things. It is easy to say what you might want to do but more difficult to identify the next steps of how. When you focus on how things are done, the need for change becomes obvious.
My Plans
The First Three
1. Change the fundraising model from emotional to sustainable, including gaining control over ActBlue
Although we have learned the hard way that resources alone are not sufficient, we cannot compete without robust fundraising. Right now, however, a lot of the energy that goes into fundraising is spent on competition between Democratic campaigns for the limited attention of donors rather than a coordinated effort to send money where it is most needed. Turning every candidate and every group loose to bombard donors with endless appeals is not serving our interests. Instead, we should seek to adopt a Netflix model in which our core supporters make recurring donations, and we should ensure that ActBlue is part of the larger Democratic team.
Details outlined here.
2. Create Nominee Funds
Our candidates in competitive districts can’t afford to drain their coffers in primaries and then begin the general election from square one. Nor can we afford to choose candidates based largely on their ability to raise large sums. We should be raising money for nominee funds waiting for the winning candidate to grab hold of the moment the gun sounds for the general election. As we contemplate 2026 in the House, this means at least a $2 million nominee fund in each of the 25 seats that Democrats lost by 11% or less in 2024. As time goes by, we may wish to expand the target list, but this is the bare minimum we need.
3. Limit the Roaming Staffers
This might be the hardest change but also one of the most necessary. American politics is a place-based endeavor: people vote based on where they live. We have a core problem in that our staffers are plunked from their homes and dropped into places they have never been before. Staffers spend at most a year there and often much less. Then they get a new job and off they go to a new city in a new state.
I do not mean to knock the heroic work these staffers do, but transience is simply not a recipe for success. Staffers and voters alike will be more accountable when they know they are going to have to look the other person in the eye if they let them down, and this is doubly true if they will see each other come November and December. Since the vast majority of hired help will be somewhere else come the next election, the people in the party who might not want to change things will simply wait them out. Frequent moving is also very tough for the staffers, who after a cycle or two decide they would rather go into government, or lobbying, or find their forever career. We lose significant amounts of talent to this moving merry go round.
Another downside of the roving staffers is that campaigns rather than hiring locally end up hiring from the staffers' networks more than the candidate's circle. Employing local people spreads good will through their networks, which are often also local, and makes them feel more appreciated. And most tasks political staffers execute, besides for some tech skills which are learnable, are not so daunting that they can't be readily performed or picked up. Demystifying what it means to work on campaigns is another upside to shifting where staffers are found because the bottom line is that almost anyone can work on a political campaign. More people should do so, but that is harder to do when leadership would rather hire someone with experience who isn’t local over someone local with less to no experience. Our current reliance on the roving cadre can't end instantly, but at a minimum, at least half of every campaign should be staffed by locals.
Summaries of What’s to Come
4. Dig in on Strategies for Every County
We need to compete in every county, with a strategy that is designed by people from each county. Where Democrats are weakest, we will need to find leaders in unlikely places.
5. Shut down the noise, starting with text messages
The party is too pestering, often in large part because of how many groups/entities seek money. The bombardment needs to stop, starting with the text messaging.
6. Embrace College Organizing on a permanent, rather than cycle by cycle, basis
Building what is needed to turnout a college campus successfully takes a minimum of 14 months, starting in the September of the year preceding the election you wish to influence. It takes that amount of time to get deep into the electorate. Since most campaigns barely exist at that point, the Party needs to take on this work. For complete success one staffer is probably needed per 1,000 students.
7. Provide Services and Buy Voter Attention
Attention is at a premium now, as anyone can escape listening to something they don’t wish to by just looking at their phones. To break through we need to directly offer people, particularly young people, things that they want in exchange for listening to us. It is the only way to get them to listen.
8. Shark Tank-like Contest
The hit show Shark Tank uses the offer of investment to generate pitches for an astonishing array of ideas for business. The Democrats should do the same thing for ideas to strengthen the party. We often offer the appearance of seeking input, but I can say from experience that outsiders find it almost impossible to believe their input will be truly heard. If an investment in new ideas were on the table, innovations would come out of the woodwork.
9. Always be communicating directly with voters
We should be communicating our message constantly and the messaging should be aimed at the voters, not, as is often the case now, at the press. We can’t simply hope that journalists will then communicate to the voters. We need to communicate directly the information we want people to know, without being distracted by the latest intrigue or scandal dominating Beltway discussion. What percentage of people could name five Biden accomplishments, or three? Partisan communication must be relentless.
10. Embrace the precinct as the key organizing level
Precincts provide us a natural unit of organization, and some of our party organizations are built around it, but not enough of them. The precinct allows you to meet your neighbors, and we should encourage that. We should promote a target vote goal per precinct, and, depending on the precinct’s size, have the names of between ten and a hundred people working to turnout out the locals. These relationships can be built in the time when no one is paying attention; the best time to build is when the noise is less.
11. Having Independent Expenditures do only things that only I.E. can do
This will require a fuller explanation but consider a simple example. House Majority PAC and the DCCC chase the same small donors as the candidate campaigns they are aiding. Using small donors to fund operations of these organizations is a sucker’s game, and having two separate organizations is suckered squared. The ideal place for a small donor to give is the party itself or a candidate of the party, period. Until we stop competing and steer things properly, we will be wasting donors’ money and attention. This is a disaster.
12. A plan specifically for counties where we are being blown out
In the counties we are losing more than two to one, nothing we are doing is working. In these areas we need to completely reinvent ourselves, in part by making sure that everyone knows at least one Democrat they like personally. We also need to be a bit stealthy in how we operate so that we can have conversations without being shouted down. There is more to come but the basic truth is that we need to acknowledge how far we are from a workable plan in these counties.
13. Use super voters as our partners not as our ATMs
Roughly 20 million people care enough about our Party either to vote in low turnout primaries or to give to our candidates or both. We need to enlist these 20 million to help us reach the roughly 120 million people whom we hope will vote for us. We need about half of this group of 20 million people to speak to those 120 million for us, so that the voice of our party comes from someone they know, not just from random noise. Moreover, our super voters can be available to help neighbors and friends not just with a political problem, but potentially any problem. Trust built over something non-political will be more stable than trust built over politics.
14. Embracing Keith Ellison’s organizing model in MN-05 for all members of Congress
Every congressional campaign from a member of Congress must be the robust engine that drives turnout in their district. Each member could relatively easily be spending at least a million dollars on the GOTV programs, which can be built more long term because the member of Congress knows they will likely run again. For at least 150 members, they also know for certain they will be re-elected if they so choose. Yet they can make a big difference if they drive turnout. Congressman Ellison did this in the MN 5th, and his efforts have helped keep Minnesota Blue to this day and allowed Democrats to win the 2010 Minnesota gubernatorial race. Almost every state has had a relatively close race we could have won if we had slightly better turnout. It is a challenge to get this done, but it will work.
15. An aggressive crackdown on scammers
While the goal should be dramatically to limit all damaging communication, there is a type of communication spreading like a virus, which is pervasive and should be our first target. We must do all we can to inhibit groups with “Democrat” in their title who are asking for money while making wild promises about what can be accomplished in terms of laws. These people make the whole party look terrible and make our target voters and donors want to tune out. Apparently, these groups are succeeding in getting just enough money to make their farcical appeals worth it to them. But if they are kicked off Act Blue, and the people behind them become unemployable in our world, then we might make a dent in this con game, which leeches at our vitality.
16. An Uber-like organizing app
There is a nearly endless amount of work that the Democratic Party needs done. If someone would like to earn some money by doing it, we should make it easy to do that by designing an app that enables those who want to work for the Party to do so easily and on their own schedule. The app could also become an additional communication tool, and the workers using it might become more enthusiastic supporters.
17. Pay less attention to focus groups
This is more a caution than a plan, but it’s crucial to forging the path ahead. Democratic strategists too often seem to take at face value what voters say is troubling them rather than what might be their deeper motivation. It’s crucial to listen and learn from voters, but when they speak in public you can’t always count on their expressing or even being aware of what’s driving their views. For instance, prices are too high for many, but wages were also up, so that the country’s overall economic standing was for many only a tiny bit worse. We know high prices can’t be the whole story because some voting trends moved in the same direction from 2012 to 2016 to 2020 to 2024. The people lost from 2012-2016, resemble those lost between 2020-2024, and those lost between 2016 and 2020 also look like those lost between 2020-2024. There are deep trends going on, and to understand them we need to not just listen to what people tell us but watch what they do as that reveals a bit more. If you are crying poverty but taking more vacations, perhaps it’s not really poverty that has you upset. These are difficult forces to untangle, but we need to separate wheat from chaff.
18. Practice Empathy
So much of what we do on campaigns is geared toward what we are able to measure: how many doors we can knock, how many ads we can run, how many dollars we can raise. A core problem is that focusing on these things risks ignoring how our metrics land on those at the other end of our efforts. There is no doubt that ads matter, but there is also no doubt that seeing the same ad 100 or 200 times does not actually change much about the process. Likewise, while knocking on a door to have a conversation with a voter seems like the right thing to do, if you have the ability to knock that door too often, then soon the door knocker becomes someone else to be avoided and the gains are limited. If your mailbox gets 10 pieces of political mail in a day, it is the same as none. A story I will never forget is when I was helping on the special election in the House in 2011 for Kathy Hochul, the staffers who came in from D.C. were laughing about how annoyed the voters were getting with all the calls because that was proof it was working. That is simply the wrong attitude. While flooding people with calls might work at accomplishing one specific thing, if people are expressing dislike of something, it means you are doing something wrong.
19. Research and Development department
Simply put there needs to be a part of the DNC that is concerned almost entirely with only how to do new things and test new things. This research arm must be protected from cannibalization or any other repurposing. The reason is simple: if we don’t develop new things we simply cannot compete, and it is too likely we will just adapt new tools or technologies to fit old patterns rather than use them effectively in the way they were designed.
20. High School Organizing at the Highest level
High schools are often in a very real sense the heart of communities. They are also where, for better or worse (I would say worse), many of the decisions that you make determine a great deal about the rest of your life. Whether you graduate or not: huge impact. Whether you have the grades and scores to get into college at all: huge impact. Whether you decide or can afford to go to college: huge impact. Where you go and how much debt you will assume: huge impact. When people are deciding what to make of their lives, they need to find a way to make democracy a part of it, because if they build their lives without making democracy a part of it, later will be too late for many of them. There are so many ways in which any organization can be helpful to a high school student trying to make their way in the world, and our Party should do that. Also, the high school community is the best place-based system that a lot of people have. Too many Democratic-leaning young people excel, go to a quality college away from home, and simply never live in their hometown again. This leaves these places more right-leaning by default. Getting people to believe in the good they can do in the place where they are from has to start with them diving in before they leave. As importantly, the friends you might make in high school can now follow you through life based on social media connections, and people you know are more likely to influence you then anyone else.
Conclusion
I am available at this email or by phone at 860-836-2745. I expect to reach out to you all personally over the coming days, but those who wish to begin conversation first should not hesitate. Even if you are supporting another candidate, I hope you will sign my nominating statement to allow a robust discussion about how to improve this Party. I am doing this because we must be more successful for the sake of our collective future. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Jason Paul
