Can the Democrats recover from their last, lost election and regain the enthusiasm at the state level to mobilize their voters?  And, more importantly, what are they doing to allow more progressives to get a voice in statewide discussions and party reform at the state levels?

All these are important questions as the impeachment moves ahead and Trump uses the clearly negative event to re-explain it and propagandize it as a positive for his faux “populist” promise to reform Washington of the same corporate interests that dominate his government.

As explained in this Axios article, How Trump wins in 2020,  Trump may have come into the Republican Party as a definite outsider, but the bureaucrats who run the Republican Party saw him as something, as opposed to someone, they could work with and use for their own advantage.

As a result, this Axios article shows how they have re-shaped the Republican Party at the statewide level nationally and installed their own ideologues and political sympathizers while ousting the old-time Republicans who differed from Trump.

So while the Republicans are pushing their coup at the national level, it is already succeeding at the statewide level.

Now, the big question is whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democrats at the state level can even begin to do the same thing.  The current fight between Progressive and old-line corporate Dems who now continue to run the DNC, seem to still be focused on big fundraisers from big corporate and wealthy donors.

They don’t seem to understand that the enthusiasm factor is with the Progressive wing, not the more centrist candidates, such as Biden and Mayor Pete, who both still continue to take big corporate donations and seem like its a Back to the Future presidential campaign, with Biden’s strong ties to the old insider’s game that brought us the 2008 bank bailout and no criminal prosecutions for the bankers that caused the crash, and Mayor Pete’s open solicitation of big donations from hedge funds, private equity and the libertarian-Republican-types of SIlicon Valley.

With Friends Like the DNC, Who Needs Enemies

Dems should also remember that Obama had a role in the demise or weakness of the DNC during the last election.  As president, Obama was the head of the Democratic Party and the DNC, but he seemed to hand-off that responsibility to others who clearly let the DNC lose its ability to organize at the state levels.

Under the direction of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who from 2011 to 2016 was chairwoman of the DNC. She had to resign that position when emails showed she favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, and also cut

Sanders out of some public appearances that would have enhanced his national visibility.  Wasserman Schultz then went on to work with the Hillary Clinton campaign, so it looks like she never missed a paycheck.

This fight was so contentious that in June 2016, the Sanders campaign filed a  class action lawsuit against the DNC and former DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz for violating the DNC Charter by rigging the Democratic presidential primaries for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. The blatant bias by Clinton was so obvious that Harry Reid admitted in July 2016, “I knew—everybody knew—that this was not a fair deal.”  Reid said Wasserman Schultz should have resigned much sooner than she did, according to the article in The Observer.

This is the most recent iteration of the DNC the public remembers.  It is no wonder Sanders’ supporters hate the DNC for allowing his to happen, even as polls showed that Sanders had the edge in terms of likeability, populist policies, and reputation; all traits that Hillary Clinton lacked.

So what has the DNC learned since the 2018 election loss?  They made some changes as described in this CNBC article, but is there anyone strong to push against a political thug like Trump?  More importantly, what is happening at the state levels to mobilize and energize Democrat voters?  Is Tom Perez the guy to mobilize the Dems?  Not really. Is Biden the energizer, or is he a throwback to the old way of doing things?

My bet is that Biden could become a victim of the impeachment drama because he showed bad judgment by not knowing the Republicans certainly would use his son’s bad background to bring him down. 

So is the DNC tough enough for this street fight or will they keep pulling their punches as they look over their shoulders to see what the corporate donors want?  That remains to be seen, but any fighter will tell you they cannot win a fight if they keep looking into the audience.