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David Hogg first rose to prominence as a leader in the March for Our Lives movement. He survived the 2018 Parkland shooting. But these days, politics is his full-time job. And as a Democrat, his main worry is how his party’s brand seems to be in free fall. One poll has put the Democratic Party’s approval rating at just 27 percent.
Hogg is currently vice chair of the Democratic Party. Last month, he announced his plan to fight off what he sees as an existential threat. He says his PAC, Leaders We Deserve, will commit $20 million to funding the candidacies of younger, more progressive congressional candidates—including those looking to unseat safe Democratic incumbents. This was a real throwing down of the gauntlet for a party insider, but it’s something Hogg believes is crucial to fix the problem within the party.
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Hogg about his plans for the Democratic Party, and why politicians should be afraid. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: Did you always want to be in politics?
David Hogg: Not necessarily. Honestly, I still wish I didn’t have to be. I’m begrudgingly involved because I feel like I have to in order to accomplish what I feel our generation really needs on gun control, which is not going to come from just sitting on the sidelines and complaining about stuff.
It’s going to come from challenging people in power to do better on all the issues that we’re dealing with. When I was younger, I wanted to be a journalist, and I just wanted to scare the shit out of politicians constantly, and ask them really hard questions. But I realized after the shooting that wasn’t going to be enough for me to get the outcome that I wanted, because I didn’t just want to say what was wrong with our society. I wanted to talk about what we are going to do to actually address it. That hard part is looking at what we are going to do to actually change that corrupt and broken system.
You talk about really putting forward younger candidates, probably more progressive candidates. Is there anyone you would not primary as a Democrat?
I mean, look, we’re not looking to primary Jamie Raskin, or Rosa DeLauro in Connecticut, for example. These are really prolific progressive fighters. And it’s not as simple as saying, “If you’re above a certain age, you shouldn’t be in office.” Unfortunately, there are young people who suck and there are old people who are great, and vice versa.
So what’s your litmus test?
It looks different in different districts, and part of what we’re looking at here is trying to make sure that the party knows it’s going to be held accountable to its own values. And frankly, if there’s a member of Congress who has anxiety because they hear this, they should ask themselves why that is.
Is part of your mission scaring certain incumbents into changing philosophically?
Frankly, the only thing I’ve learned from activism is that the only good politician is a scared politician. They will give you all the lip service that they want. They’ll try to make you feel good and feel like they care. And they probably do care to some extent. But ultimately, what really shows that they care is if they actually change to address the issues of their constituents.
A lot of people compare what you’re doing right now with what happened with the Tea Party. The party rose to prominence in 2008, when Barack Obama had just been elected. The Republican Party was in the wilderness. And then here comes the Tea Party, which over years built a lot of power and morphed. Do you see the Tea Party as an analogue for what you’re doing?
It’s funny you bring that up because I was at a National Finance Committee retreat as part of the Democratic National Convention. They were talking about our approval ratings in the party right now. I said to the data person who was presenting, “What did this graph look like for Republicans before the Tea Party happened?” and they said it looked identical.
My fear is that if we do not show our country—if we don’t show the voters who are Democrats out there—that we’re trying to handle this in a constructive way, we have one of two options here. We can either try to have a constructive place to have these conversations around these primaries in our safer seats to show how our party is doing its own soul-searching in a very healthy and productive way to also hold itself accountable. Or we could do nothing and probably have a wildfire that burns everything down.
It’s a controlled burn. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Because I don’t want it to be extremely destructive in the way that many elements of the Tea Party were. I want our party to use democracy to the fullest extent to make sure that we are holding ourselves accountable and giving voters the option. An important thing to remember here is that the leaders we deserve are not deciding these elections. Ultimately, nobody is entitled to their position of power in this country. Somebody’s seat who’s been there for 20 or 30 years, they might feel like that’s their seat, but it’s not. It’s their constituents’ seat.
This comparison to the Tea Party is apt because it really did take that movement a couple of evolutions and many years to wind up where we are today with a Republican trifecta. Do you see this effort as something that’s like a 15- or 20-year-long push?
I do. I hope that our democracy still exists by that point, to be honest with you. But I do. My long-term goal with Leaders We Deserve has always been to help bring the generation that has gone through school shooter drills and so much gun violence into office.
Former President Joe Biden’s generation didn’t go through school shooter drills, but they did go through nuclear bomb drills. And they went on to pass some of the largest nuclear arms reduction treaties in human history. And part of the reason for that is they understood the anxiety of being told by your government that the best it can do to protect you from a weapon of mass destruction is to teach you how to hide under your desk differently. Whereas for our generation, we’re still going through drills. The difference is that the bomb is going off multiple times a year for us in the form of these school shootings. So in some senses, I would argue it’s even more real.
The beauty of running for office is, unless you’re a Republican, you can’t just talk about what’s wrong. You actually have to talk about what you’re going to do to fix it. And the job of Democrats, it is always going to be harder than Republicans because, unlike them, we don’t run on the idea that government sucks. It is always going to be harder to try to make something work than it is to make it fail. But that is what we do here as Democrats. And what we’re trying to do is bring in that generation that understands the anxiety of the climate crisis, the gun violence epidemic, the student debt crisis, the housing crisis, and so much more. Hopefully, we can lay the groundwork for generations of incredible Democratic leadership to come.
