What does the DNC actually DO?
The answer is simple: we do a lot, but most of it is not what you’d expect.
I’m Ryan Rodgers, the DNC Development Lead, and I truly have the best job. I oversee our Leadership Circle development program: a dedicated group of supporters who contribute $1,000 a year to the DNC. These folks are the backbone of our grassroots efforts!
In my role, I spend most of my day on the phone, connecting with and listening to Democrats across the country. By far the question I encounter the most is, “What does the DNC actually DO?”
The answer is simple: we do a lot, but most of it is not what you’d expect.
To start, here is a list of things the DNC does not do — most of which are common misconceptions about our scope:
The DNC doesn’t recruit candidates to run for office. That work is best left up to our sister committees, the DSCC and DCCC.
The DNC doesn’t endorse Democrats during Democratic primaries: voters pick our Democratic candidates in each race. From there, we fight like hell to elect them!
The DNC doesn’t dictate messaging for ads: electoral campaign strategies are best left up to each Democratic candidate. They know which messages will persuade voters in their districts. The last thing they need is us breathing down their necks and giving them pointers from D.C.
The DNC doesn’t control or direct Democrats in Congress: We coordinate with these Democrats when it comes to campaigning, but the folks in office do the governing. Democrats in the House are led by Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Democrats in the Senate are led by Leader Chuck Schumer.
Now that we’ve gotten some of those misconceptions out of the way, let’s talk about the things the DNC does do.
Our number one priority is building and maintaining infrastructure to elect Democrats running for office, whether they’re running for school board or President of the United States. And that might sound unsexy, but it’s critically important.
Our mission here at the DNC is to ensure that Democrats have the data, tools, and resources needed to compete — and win — all across the country.
Protecting Free and Fair Elections
Donald Trump has tried repeatedly to undermine election rules for his own advantage. To counter this, the DNC’s in-house Legal and Voter Protection teams are hard at work to ensure voters are protected and elections remain free and fair. Here is some of what they are working on this election season:
Legal work: The DNC’s legal team is currently litigating to protect mail-in ballots, and defending voters that are under threat of being removed from voting rolls by the DOJ.
Voter Protection work: Our Voter Protection team is safeguarding free and fair elections by building rapid-response infrastructure to ensure every eligible voter can register, vote, and have their ballot counted. We fight unlawful barriers, intimidation, and roll purges, and strengthen long-term voting access through legislative advocacy.
Providing critical tech and data infrastructure to all Democrats running for office
The DNC Tech team develops solutions to the most pressing problems facing campaigns up and down the ballot. The team provides infrastructure that lasts beyond an election cycle, to be leveraged by Democratic campaigns.
Our mission is to equip the Democrats of today and tomorrow to run modern, data-driven campaigns by providing access to ever improving data, world-class technical expertise, and a scalable, stable, and secure data infrastructure — all in the name of getting Democrats elected across our country and across the ticket.
Who we serve
The DNC Tech team provides infrastructure, data, tools, and technical and cybersecurity expertise to organizations throughout the Democratic ecosystem. The team partners with analytics, technology, voter protection, security, research, and communications teams at:
Federal candidate campaigns
State parties
Down-ballot campaigns
Data analytics & data science
Enriched national voter file data: DNC Tech processes, standardizes, and enriches voter files for all 50 states and DC. Additionally, the DNC acquires critical data like phone numbers and geocodes that campaigns up and down ballot leverage to effectively reach voters.
Models to improve voter targeting: The DNC has unique access to decades of campaign data. Using this rich historical data, the data science team builds custom data science models like Democratic Support, Education, and Phone Contactability. These models help campaigns determine messaging, outreach channels, and targeting. Campaigns save time and money by leveraging the DNC models rather than each having to build their own.
Voting services
IWillVote & polling location lookup: The DNC is the source of truth for up-to-date voting information for voters via IWillVote.com. Campaigns leverage IWillVote & the IWillVote widget to help voters determine when, how, and where to vote.
The DNC Tech team partners with the DNC Voter Protection and Civic Engagement team to provide voter protection programs with software and data to manage volunteers, report & escalate incidents, and monitor voter purge trends.
Building Democratic Power in the States
Here are a few examples of the infrastructure the DNC is building to accomplish this:
Fueling State Parties: We are turbocharging investment in state parties, investing over $1 million every month. With the increases implemented by the DNC last year, each state gets a baseline of $17,500 monthly, with an extra $5,000 for Republican-controlled states through our Red State Fund, bringing their total to $22,500. These investments allow state parties to increase staffing, expand organizing programs, and prepare early for upcoming elections.
Voter Registration (When We Count): This year, the DNC launched a historic, new seven-figure partisan voter registration effort to close critical voter registration gaps in priority congressional districts. This April and May, we are putting boots on the ground in Arizona and Nevada to register 100,000+ new Democratic voters and welcome unregistered young voters who aren’t on college campuses to the Democratic Party. We are doing this by hiring young Democrats (18 to 29 years old) to serve as fellows with the mission of registering young voters who took a path other than college to welcome them to the Party. These fellows will be trained to become the next generation of organizers for the Party.
Reaching out to infrequent voters — especially Democrats who voted in 2020, but sat out the 2024 election: We launched the Local Listeners program to engage over 1 million infrequent voters in battleground districts. This is our most aggressive early midterm engagement effort to date, using a “listening first” approach and a seven-week volunteer training to have better political conversations. The Democratic Party isn’t waiting until the last minute to engage voters — we’re making sure conversations happen early and often to win back trust with voters.
Nominating a Presidential Candidate
The DNC is the administrative backbone for the presidential nominating process. For months, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws committee has been hard at work to establish how we’ll select our nominee. We will have more to share on this when the time comes, but right now we are all-hands-on-deck to win the 2026 midterms.
The DNC coordinates our National Convention every four years, during which our nominee for president will take the stage and accept their nomination in 2028. We recently announced the cities in contention to host the convention are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Philadelphia. If you have ideas about which city should win the bid, sound off in the comments below!
Maintaining the voter file that most candidates use, as well as the party’s core technology and data tools that support every Democratic campaign.
Ok, whew. I told you this would be a long email, but that was a lot to cover. If you’ve spoken to me before on the phone, you know I love to share as much information as possible so you have the facts straight from the source! And, like I said, most of these things might not seem glamorous: but all of these programs are core parts of the infrastructure that will enable Democrats to win in November and beyond.
Interested in learning more about our work? I’d love to chat. Feel free to reach out to me at ryan@dnc.org. Want to help support our efforts to build Democratic infrastructure by joining the Leadership Circle? Make an investment here.
Grassroots supporters like you help fuel the DNC’s work in a very real way, and that level of commitment deserves access, transparency, and a high-touch experience.
Thank you for being a partner in this work. Talk soon!
Ryan Rodgers
DNC Development Lead
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https://floydnease.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-ken-martin-and?r=1iyfat&utm_medium=ios
I would expect the DNC to reflect the desires of its voters and not just corporate donors. Unfortunately, I would be wrong.