The Democratic Party’s Internal Machinery Is Breaking Its Brand

Reading the latest re: the Democratic Party 2024 autopsy coverage, one thing struck me immediately --

Large parts of DNC Chair Ken Martin, Run for Something Founder Amanda Litman, and Kamala Harris’ Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty’s differing responses to the DNC autopsy have a major similarity: they could have been written in — and about — 2016.

Ken’s response reads like the Democratic establishment is still trapped in the post-2016 mindset that the core problem is messaging: better language, better framing, better communication discipline. Amanda’s response swings hard in the opposite direction, arguing the lesson is leadership failure severe enough that Ken should resign. Both diagnoses miss the deeper issue. Rob’s account gets at so many helpful points around Brand but misses core institutional infrastructure flaws that have to be fixed for the Brand work he describes to actually produce results.

The Democratic Party’s problem is not primarily messaging. And it’s not primarily one person; it’s organizational design.

We keep treating every election loss like a communications failure or a leadership failure when the deeper reality is that the Democratic Party apparatus itself no longer functions coherently enough to sustain a strong national brand.

The “party brand” problem still deserves the #1 spot it held a decade ago. But branding isn’t just slogans and ads. A political brand is the external expression of an institution’s internal reality. And right now, the internal reality of the Democratic Party is fragmentation, bureaucracy, process obsession, and organizational incoherence.

I spent 16 years in Democratic politics, from volunteering for Obama in 2008 to serving as a state party executive director and later executive director of a national party-aligned organization that coordinated with 40+ state parties and 500+ local parties in 2024. Somewhere along that journey, I lost about 90% of my clarity around what the Democratic Party actually is, what it means, and what its purpose is supposed to be — and that’s a problem.

Branding a political party that’s trying to speak to more than half of America’s 262 million voting-age adults is obviously difficult. But it requires something the modern party apparatus increasingly lacks: real cultural immersion and sustained contact with “ordinary people” outside political spaces.

Ironically, the old party machine era understood this better than we do now. For all its flaws, politics was embedded in communities, neighborhoods, churches, unions, civic organizations, and daily life.

“The Message” all the Democrats are seeking to align on wasn’t something people primarily experienced through national messaging documents or consultant-tested language. It manifested organically in union halls, parish fish fries, VFWs, rotary clubs, volunteer fire departments, local taverns, and neighborhood associations. The party was less an abstract national identity and more a web of actual human relationships. Politics and social support work wasn’t categorized and organized separately from day-to-day life; it was woven into it.

The old patronage-machine era world had obvious problems: exclusion, corruption, insularity, favoritism. But also it contributed to creating durable social bonds and clear community presence in ways modern political organizations often struggle to replicate.

Today, much of Democratic politics exists inside professionalized systems populated by staff, consultants, donors, advocacy organizations, operatives, and internal governance structures that can become increasingly disconnected from ordinary social life. The result is that the party often talks at communities rather than existing organically within them. I plan to write more about this in the future, but in short — today, so much of the party’s energy is consumed organizing itself internally.

By design, the Democratic Party apparatus spends enormous amounts of time on process: committee meetings (literally - there are tens of thousands of these required to occur across the country every year), delegate selection fights, caucus procedures, bylaws, conventions, compliance systems, internal elections, and intra-party governance rituals that most normal people neither understand nor care about.

And after all that time and money, what do we often have to show for it? A botched caucus. Another procedural controversy. Another internal meltdown.

After 2024, it hit me that I had devoted basically an entire driver’s-license lifetime to Democratic politics because I wanted to help change the world. But too often, what I actually became expert at was building systems to make quarterly meetings run more efficiently so party leaders could spend less time herding committees and more time fundraising. That realization was sobering and led to a career change.

I still talk to party leaders almost every day. Many are retirees. Many are not wealthy. Some spend huge portions of their retirement income driving across rural counties trying to reconnect with “real people” after 2024 while simultaneously dealing with national party dysfunction that makes their volunteer jobs even harder. So yes — I’m glad Ken apologized.

But my real takeaway is this:

The DNC is never going to become the magical central-command brand institution many Democrats want it to be because the organization is structurally designed to prioritize process management over brand building.

And this autopsy itself almost proves the point. It became another broken-process story.

The comparison I keep thinking about is The New York Times. Fifteen years ago, it looked like a declining flagship institution struggling to adapt to a new era. What changed wasn’t just the outward-facing product. The internal organization changed first. Internal operations, team-design, and communications changed. Culture changed. Decision-making changed. The external brand transformation came after the internal transformation. Part of my background is in data and technology and what happened at the NYT was a shift to focusing on product over project.

The Democratic Party has the opposite instinct. We keep trying to fix messaging without fixing the machinery producing the messaging. And from what I’ve seen over nearly two decades, the machinery is not working. We need to be honest that the inside of the party is broken before we can realistically expect the outside brand to improve.

That means modernizing the actual organizational structure itself:

• electronic voting and streamlined governance systems and lasting “products,”

• fewer bureaucratic layers,

• fewer duplicative committee structures,

• better operational tools and support for county parties,

• a slew of boring changes to national, state, and local by-laws and party and campaign governance structures, and even state statutes where it can be done,

• and dramatically more time spent talking to voters instead of talking to ourselves.

Right now, we spend staggering amounts of time and money maintaining a sprawling internal ecosystem of precinct, ward, township, county, district, and state-level party structures that often exhaust the very volunteers trying to keep them alive. That sprawling internal ecosystem is the front door when people want to get involved in the Party.

Meanwhile, thousands of local party organizations are struggling just to find someone under 50 who knows how to manage a spreadsheet or file compliance paperwork.

No one wants to talk seriously about reforming the actual internal operating system of the Democratic Party — the giant alphabet-soup octopus of overlapping committees, entities, and jurisdictions. The processes to operate this octopus vary widely county to county and state to state and require in-depth (boring) knowledge of sprawling rules for re-organization and local elections.

But that’s the work.

Some of these structures made sense when politics was geographically slower, communication was harder, and organizations depended on in-person hierarchy to function. A lot of them no longer fit the modern world.

And every hour spent inside endless committee meetings is an hour not spent building trust, relationships, persuasion, or cultural relevance outside the political bubble.

The party keeps treating branding as a communications problem when it’s increasingly an organizational design problem.

If Democrats want a coherent, trusted, desirable brand again, the first step probably isn’t another messaging memo.

It’s redesigning the institution itself so it can spend less time managing process and more time participating in actual American life — more time in communities than in committee meetings.

I have more thoughts on some small sweet steps to redesign the institution, and some pipe-dream seeming ones, but those are for a later essay!