WASHINGTON, D.C. (NewsNation) — After a devastating loss in the 2024 election during which the Democratic party lost control of both the White House and the U.S. Senate, giving Republicans a supermajority in Washington, D.C., the Democratic National Committee will need a leader to set the agenda and lead the party forward.
NewsNation has interviewed all the candidates up for the job. Below is a Q&A conducted with James Skoufis, a New York state senator who is vying for the job. Read Q&As with the other candidates here.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
NewsNation: What went into your decision to run for DNC chair?
Skoufis: This is as unexpected for me as it is for a lot of people to see me doing. But I, like most Democrats, left election night with an extremely visceral feeling about where the Democratic Party needs to go from here.
I’m situated in a district that Donald Trump just won by 12 percentage points. Well, I won reelection by 14.
We’ve tried many times over the operative approach. We’ve tried many times over the approach whereby party leadership comes from sort of machine politics or the D.C. beltway. I’m none of those things.
And to the extent that DNC members want to do that again, I’m not your guy. But if they want an outsider who just simply knows how to win and how to get back to the basics of communicating with people in a normal way and bringing back people under our once big tent, then let’s have the conversation, and I want to earn those DNC members’ support over the next couple of months.
NewsNation: What is your message as a candidate for DNC chair?
Skoufis: We have to just prioritize one thing and one thing only, and that is getting back to winning. And that starts with showing up everywhere. I just saw a map whereby Donald Trump had rallies in 49 out of 50 states over the past several years. Obviously, there are about seven battleground states that were highly focused by both sides, but we have to become a national party again.
We have to start showing up in all 3244 counties in the United States. And I’ll tell you when I go to rural parts of my district, I not only deliver for them, but I show up time and time again.
We’ve got to go to every, at times, hostile media outlet and meet people where they are. I’m committed to going not just on MSNBC, because not every American tunes into MSNBC, or all due respect, NewsNation. A lot of them tune into Fox News, tune into even, you know, some far-right outlets like Newsmax.
And, you know, we have to have a presence on all of those outlets. Joe Rogan’s podcast. You know, one of the big mistakes that I think our party made was not speaking to voters where they are.
We’ve got to stop talking in this elitist academic language and start talking to people in real, normal terms, and importantly, listening to them. Stop pushing talking points that the economy is doing wonderfully when, in fact, whenever people go to the supermarket, bread and meat and milk cost double what it did from just several years ago. We’ve got to start doing a lot more listening and responding to people’s concerns.
NewsNation: What are your top three priorities if elected DNC chair?
Skoufis: I’m the outsider in this race, and I wear that as a badge. That does require, though, that I do a lot of listening. There are a lot of people in the DNC who have contributed much, if not all, of their adult lives to the Democratic party and making our party and our country a better place.
And so I intend to do a lot of listening to those individuals. I’m already doing that, by the way, but that’s certainly a priority.
Second is we need to completely reorient our spending. I’ve spoken with a number of large DNC donors who have told me they are not donating another red cent to the DNC unless there is wholesale change within the organization.
What we oftentimes do after losses like we just endured a couple weeks ago is we tinker around the edges. We make reforms on the margins. I am well situated as the outsider here to make wholesale changes to the DNC, rebuild it from the ground up.
I will owe nothing to the consultant class. I will owe nothing to the D.C. cocktail circuit and the green room circuit. And so I’m very well positioned to tell people “no” who have not been told no in a very long time and send that money again to boots on the ground, state parties, county parties, new partnerships with our allies.
And then third, as I mentioned before, I will be, and we’ve got to be, showing up everywhere. Not just those places where we’ve traditionally been comfortable. Every meeting room, every county, every media outlet, every podcast, every YouTube channel.
NewsNation: All of the candidates are talking about a 50-state strategy or 57-territory-and-state strategy. What does your version of that strategy look like?
Skoufis: I think right now, the DNC’s 50-state strategy is limited to a very small investment in the 50 state parties and the seven territories within the DNC’s purview.
I don’t think that any state chair is grabbing their pom poms and shouting from the rooftops how thrilled they are to receive $12,500 a month from the DNC. We need to double, if not triple, that investment into the state parties.
We need to make sure that every one of these state parties has a rapid response communications team that whenever there’s a red state governor doing something harmful to their constituents, the Democratic Party, within an hour, is out there explaining to Americans, to those state’s residents, that their red state government is either taking away their rights or making it more difficult for them to earn a paycheck or to live in their state.
We have to start building a bench. You know, I’ve spoken with some red state chairs, and they’re just completely beyond exhausted and frustrated that they’ve been left to their own devices. Yes, they get a little check in the mail, but they need a lot more support from the DNC than just that.
NewsNation: Are there any specific tactics that you’ll use in your role as chair to help Democrats win?
Skoufis: Certainly as DNC chair, you’re one of the chief messengers and faces of the Democratic Party, and we need to, in terms of tactics, repair the very frayed edges of our once big tent.
The fraying is happening on both sides of the tent, not just one side. And so, as the next DNC chair, I would immediately empower the DNC’s Youth Council and other arms of the DNC — the Young Democrats of America, College Democrats of America — and send them to our college campuses and peer to peer, begin rebuilding those bridges with activists who feel the Democratic Party has been disrespecting them over the past in particular year and a half.
Some of my first meetings are going to be with the IAFF [International Association of Fire Fighters] who, for the first time, and as long as people can remember, didn’t endorse the Democratic nominee for president and bring them back as much as I can under our big tent.
Some of my first meetings are going to be with Arab American leaders in places like Michigan. Some of you know the biggest shifts from four years ago happened in Muslim-dominant communities, especially in and around Detroit. I represent a very large Orthodox Jewish population in the Hudson Valley. They’ve lost trust, in large part, with the Democratic Party.
We’ve got to rebuild that trust. And that’s certainly going to be a top priority.
NewsNation: How do you plan on appealing to men of color, particularly Latino men who shifted quite dramatically, as well as Black men who shifted a little bit?
Skoufis: There were some counties that are almost exclusively Latino that just eight years ago voted for Secretary Clinton by a 40 percentage point margin that [this year], in some cases, Trump actually won. That’s how massive the shift has been in just a few election cycles.
It begins by showing up everywhere. I assure you that there are a lot of especially younger Latino men and African Americans who listen to podcasts like Joe Rogan. And we have to start showing up where people are.
But equally, if not more importantly, is how the DNC deploys its resources. Day 1, when I step into the DNC, one of the first things that I do is I direct that every vendor contract associated with the DNC be allowed to expire.
Because for a very, very long time, the DNC has been getting ripped off. These are friends of friends of congressmen who own a company, and they’ve got a sweetheart deal with the DNC to do paid communications for the national party. That type of stuff has to end.
And yes, let’s rebid and get better deals where we can on services that are needed. But most importantly, we need to shift an enormous amount of those resources to places where we can move the needle in a far more significant way.
State parties, county parties, new partnerships with organized labor, new partnerships with civic organizations, especially those in minority communities, where we’ve lost ground.
So one of the most important responsibilities of the DNC is, yes, to fundraise. And I think it’s fair to say I’m one of the strongest fundraisers in New York state politics.