Dear Fellow DNC Member,
A year ago this weekend, when you elected me as your new chair, President Trump responded the way he always does: on Twitter, mocking our party. In response, deputy DNC chair Keith Ellison and I made a promise: we would unite Democrats across the country to become his worst nightmare. And we did — by winning some of the biggest races in 2017.
It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. In less than a year, we got back to basics and started organizing. We invested in our state parties almost immediately through our Resistance Summer program and hired organizers in over 40 states. We made unprecedented investments in our state parties through our Every ZIP Code Counts program; now each state party gets $10,000 per month, which is a 33% increase from base funding levels in 2016 and a 100% increase from 2015.
We didn’t just focus on the sexy races at the top of the ticket. We lifted up Democrats across the board. And by investing early, organizing everywhere, and working together with all of you, we won more than 100 elections and flipped 37 state legislative seats from red to blue. Please take a moment to read my latest piece in USA Today about all of the progress we’ve made over the last year.
One of those red-to-blue flips came this week in Kentucky, where Democrat Linda Belcher won a seat by a whopping 36 points in a district that Trump won by 49 points in 2016.
The DNC is proud to stand with Linda and the Kentucky Democratic Party as they work to build a brighter future for hardworking families across Kentucky.
Democrats are winning again because of the strong grassroots support of Democratic donors across the country. This week, the DNC announced it raised nearly $7 million, including nearly $1 million from the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, in January. The total represents a 40% increase over last January’s total and is the DNC’s best January since Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.
Not only is last month’s haul more than the DNC raised in the past five Januaries, it’s more than the organization raised in January 2006 and January 2008, both of which were major Democratic wave election years. The DNC also finished the month of January with more cash on hand than it had at the same point in 2016 and 2014.
This week, we also continued to see the inspiring activism and resilience of the students at Stoneman Douglas. They have channeled their pain and passion into progress and challenged our lawmakers to finally take meaningful action that will reduce gun violence.
Our digital team put together this video highlighting the stories and voices of these courageous students. Deputy Chair Keith Ellison also spoke to Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting, and Sarah Clements, the daughter of a second grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, about these issues on this week’s episode of Democrats Live. You can watch their discussion here.
The Democratic Party is committed to fighting for sensible gun laws. We will not accept that we are too powerless to make progress, or that the NRA is too powerful to defeat. In a country as great as ours, no child should be afraid to go to school or walk around their neighborhood. No spouse should be afraid to come home at night. No American should be afraid to go to work or their place of worship. No human being should be afraid to go to a shopping mall or baseball field, nightclub or movie theater, concert or college campus.
I joined DNC Member Yasmine Taeb, a graduate of Stoneman Douglas High School, in penning an open letter to the students in Florida about how our party is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them as we work to make progress on these issues. You can read our letter in Daily Kos here.
Finally, as we head into the weekend, all of us should remember the incredible campaign led by Memphis sanitation workers, who began marching 50 years ago this month for higher wages, safer working conditions, the right to be part of a union and the recognition of the dignity of their work. Their cause drew Dr. King to Memphis for what proved to be his final campaign.
While we’ve made incredible progress since then, we still have a lot of work to do. We know that when unions succeed, America succeeds. And with the Supreme Court beginning oral arguments in the Janus v. AFSCME case next week, it’s critically important that we unite to protect workers’ rights.
This Saturday, working people across America will join hands to protect our freedoms and fight back against those trying to rig the economy for corporations and the 1%. You can join an event near you here.
Yours,
Tom
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Tom Perez
Chair
Democratic National Committee