Dorothy

In the weeks after the Democrats’ disastrous performance in the 2024 elections, which bestowed the GOP with a trifecta of power under President Donald Trump, London released a blueprint, to much media fanfare, for rebuilding the party. At the time, Democratic circles were debating whether the Harris campaign floundered because the party had become too left-wing — or too beholden to corporate power.

It is, in the words of the Lever’s reporters Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk, a “new dark-money-backed enterprise of unparalleled scale and complexity” — the kind that some top Democratic officials seemed to advocate for right after the 2024 election.

Now, the Lever has proven what that reflection and adjustment birthed: an oligarch-funded machine of overlapping super PACs and fee-reaping consultants circumnavigating campaign finance laws, looking to recreate the old Democratic Leadership Council and aiming to deflate the nascent populism bubbling up inside the party.

But . . . I do not think the solution for Democrats is to just be as corrupt as Republicans or build as shady a machine as the GOP (particularly because there are plenty of ways to run well-financed campaigns inside America’s minimal campaign finance strictures). Clearly, that’s what the corporate faction is trying to do — and with the first and foremost goal of not necessarily winning general elections, but in maintaining billionaire control of Democratic primaries and by extension the Democratic Party.