RULES FOR RADICALS
LAST MAY, AS Donald Trump was locking up the Republican nomination, a prophetic clip began circulating among portions of the left. It was a nearly one-year-old segment of ABC’s Sunday show This Week, featuring Rep. Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat then on the verge of winning a sixth term. “Anybody from the Democratic side of the fence who’s terrified of the possibility of a President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved,” Ellison warned, “because this man has got some momentum and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.”
Ellison made his prediction in July 2015, shortly after Trump had launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” His fellow panelists laughed along with moderator George Stephanopoulos, who offered Ellison a lifeline. “I know you don’t believe that,” he said. But Ellison insisted, “Stranger things have happened.”
Now, Trump is president, and Ellison, who saw it coming, is after a new job: running the Democratic Party. He announced his candidacy for Democratic National Committee chair in mid-November, and he and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez are the front-runners for the position, which the nearly 450 members of the DNC will vote on in late February. Ellison, an early and vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders who campaigned hard for Hillary Clinton last fall, is running to unify a fragmented party. Sanders backs him. So do Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader. So does the AFL-CIO. Win or lose, the 53-year-old Ellison, a Muslim, African American co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is poised to hold a position of influence in the party during one of the darkest moments in its history. Democrats are out of the White House and in the minority in Congress, and they’ve lost their window to reshape the Supreme Court. They control both the governor’s mansion and legislature in just six states; with another round of redistricting looming, the electoral map is only poised to get worse.
The role of the DNC chairman is to run a political machine that helps to elect Democrats throughout the country, not to dictate the party’s policy priorities. But Ellison’s blueprint for defeating Trumpism is nonetheless rooted in the anti-establishment politics of Sanders. The DNC has become the “Democratic Presidential Committee,” he argues; short-sighted focus on big-dollar fundraising and swing states has weakened the party on a county-by-county level. Change starts with shifting the party apparatus toward assembling a multicultural army of organizers, focused on the communities likely to bear the full brunt of the new president’s policies. Ellison says the proof that this can work is in his district. Emphasizing door-to-door engagement over TV advertising, Ellison boasts he’s juiced turnout in his safe Democratic seat to some of the highest levels in the country. Even as the Upper Midwest goes red, Minnesota Democrats have scored victories at the state level, bolstered by Ellison’s Minneapolis machine.
Republicans are eager to take him on, because in many ways, the story of Keith Ellison is the story conservatives wanted to believe about another cerebral African American community organizer from the Midwest—Barack Obama. Raised Catholic in Detroit, Ellison converted to Islam, dabbled in black nationalism, and marched with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan—all before his first bid for Congress in 2006.
