Meet the Gen Z Democrat funding an insurgent takeover

Times

4 days ago

When Zohran Mamdani triumphed in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, the political establishment was in shock. Senior Democrats and donors had rallied behind Andrew Cuomo, the former governor and the favourite in early polling.
For some in the party, however, a left-wing outsider becoming the presumptive mayor of America's biggest city did not come as a surprise. Instead it fit into a wider insurgency movement that, if successful, could change the Democrats for decades to come.
Its leader is David Hogg, a 25-year-old gun control activist and former vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). On seeing Mamdani's victory, Hogg tweeted: 'It's going to be a fun next couple years.'
The reason? 'We're going to shake things up,' he tells The Times, predicting a generational shift in the party.
To make that happen, Hogg's grassroots outfit, Leaders We Deserve, is putting money behind select candidates, including Mamdani. 'We spent $300,000 to support him. I believe we were his biggest contributor,' Hogg says. 'We knew that he was being outspent pretty massively by his opponents and we wanted to do everything we could to get behind him when the political establishment was writing him off.'
Hogg is hoping to use Mamdani's success as a blueprint to propel younger candidates into seats occupied by the old guard.
• Hot Girls for Mamdani: 'What makes you hot is the fact you're voting for him'
This month Barack Obama urged the Democratic Party to 'toughen up … stop looking for the quick fix … stop looking for the messiah' and back the 'great candidates running races right now'. However, newly free from his role on the DNC, Hogg is imagining something a little more transformative.
He sees parallels between the end of the Soviet Union and the Democratic Party in its present form. 'If you look at the end of the Soviet Union you have leader after leader after leader dying because they all just kept waiting for that next person to move on.
'So it's obviously not as extreme as that but there is some element of that because the boomer population [Americans born from 1946 to 1964] is so big that they have been waiting to come into power for a long time and they stayed there for a long time.
'A lot of them are either about to retire or may not, unfortunately, live much longer.'
This year Hogg announced a plan to use $20 million of funding for Leaders We Deserve to back primary challenges against Democratic candidates who are 'asleep at the wheel'. This led to a backlash. Hillary Scholten, a congresswoman from a swing district in Michigan, said: 'I can think of a million better things to do with $20 million right now.'
Hogg has since left his role on the committee. While he left on a technicality — fresh elections were called on the grounds it needed more women in senior positions — he says he was given an ultimatum that he could stay only if he agreed to drop his activities with Leaders We Deserve.
He chose freedom. Having entered activism initially on gun crime as a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in 2018, he is looking to fund insurgent candidates that will shake up the status quo.
Not every candidate backed by the group has been as successful as Mamdani. Hogg backed Irene Shin in the special Democratic primary for Virginia's 11th congressional district and the Generation Z influencer Deja Foxx in Arizona's 7th.
Neither made it, though Foxx won more than 20 per cent of the vote after coming essentially from nowhere.
'With our organisation we want to have a very select number of people that we invest in that we believe are truly the best of our generation and that we massively invest in spending several hundred of thousands of dollars, sometimes a million-plus dollars, to support them and get them across the finish line,' he says.
How will they find the leaders of tomorrow? It comes down to a 'combination of methods', Hogg says. 'Sometimes people will go to our website and fill out our run for office form to let us know that they're running for office. Other times it's our recruitment director who directly reaches out to people and says, 'hey, there's this seat that's opening up' or 'there's a race that we think you'd be good to run in, would you be interested?'
'Sometimes they're already running for office, like Deja, like Zohran, and we see a really great campaign with real movement in the polls where we feel like we could make a difference.'
The support includes day-to-day help on polling, their field campaign and securing local endorsements.
There is also an intangible factor tying all of his group's candidates together. 'Charisma cannot be bought. Giving a shit cannot be bought. There is no amount of money that can force that,' he says. 'I think with Zohran what we saw was the use of a new platform to express what was already there and just highlight that … It's not enough just to post a clip if you're boring or you don't really believe in what you're saying because people can tell.'
Is he ready for the backlash from old-school Democrats who see his group's work as a destructive path that could harm the party's reputation in the long term? 'Ultimately I am more than happy to take that fight on because the reality is people in DC — for the most part, their biggest weakness is the one that they don't even realise is a weakness, because they've been so brainwashed by this town. Their philosophy has become what raises them the most money and what pisses off the fewest people in the political establishment.
'If you're running for office or your incumbency is being challenged because you don't really stand for anything, it's going to be really easy to shine a light on how you flip-flop on everything by running a younger candidate who has the values that they stick to and don't compromise on.'
If Hogg gets his way, Mamdani is only the beginning.