| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker and Jesse Naranjo | What up, Recast fam! A programming note: Due to the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday next week, our next issue will be Wednesday, Jan. 22. Here’s today’s agenda:
- Candidates for DNC chair didn’t really address a specific vision for immigration and winning back voters of color.
- Did Joe Biden fulfill his key campaign promises? We take a look.
- Controversial Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth gets grilled by Senate Dems.
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The race is on to replace DNC boss Jaime Harrison. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | Democrats, who by this time next week will be completely shut out of power in Washington, are still grappling with a key question: Who will lead them into the future? The search for a new party boss following their devastating electoral defeat to Donald Trump officially kicked off over the weekend, with the first of four DNC-sanctioned candidate forums to be held in January. But the top contenders, for all their talk on how the party needs to win back working-class voters, barely addressed their losses with Black and Latino voters — or the need to course correct Democrats’ messaging on immigration. Many insiders consider the race for DNC chair to be a two-person contest between Ben Wikler, the head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and Ken Martin, the longtime leader of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Both are white guys from Upper Midwestern states with little daylight between them on their ideas to reshape Democrats’ electoral strategy. At the Saturday forum, neither Martin nor Wikler delivered specifics for how they would bring voters of color back into the fold. Martin acknowledged that “we lost a lot of ground with voters in 2024 from Black and brown voters, rural voters, Latino voters, Southern voters and working-class voters, young voters.” And Wikler vowed to appoint racial minorities and other marginalized groups to top DNC posts to “make sure we have a full leadership team that lifts up our whole coalition.”
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Only candidate Nate Synder, a former Department of Homeland Security official and a Latino, went deeper on the need to better engage with Latino men — nearly half of whom broke for Trump in 2024 — on issues they care about, from the economy to the border.
When asked whether Democrats should adopt GOP practices and microtarget communities of color, Snyder responded: “Specifically talking about the Latino community and where the other side made investments and headway is because they showed up. ... They led with working family issues about putting food on the table, access to affordable health care, loan forgiveness and things that the Latino community cares about.” Another challenge splitting the Democratic Party that was notably absent from the discussion? Immigration policy.
|  Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin is considered one of the leading candidates for the top DNC post. | Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP | “[The party] failed to talk about this proactively,” longtime DNC official Maria Cardona told The Recast. “It's going to be one of the biggest challenges for the chair moving forward: positioning the party in the right way for the coalition that we need ... on an issue like immigration, because we've lost so much ground on it already.” Trump and the Republican Party, who have repeatedly slammed their rivals for being “weak” on the border, claim their electoral win now gives them a broad mandate to carry out tough measures, like mass deportations. They’ve already put Capitol Hill Democrats on defense, forcing a vote last week on the Laken Riley Act — a bill that would require the detention of any undocumented immigrant charged, but not convicted, of theft or burglary. That ended up clearing the Senate with the help of nearly three-dozen lawmakers who caucus with Democrats. Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Alicia Andrews, who’s supporting Martin for DNC chair, told The Recast she expects the remaining candidate forums to focus on how to better the party rather than on political battles in Washington. Once the vote for chair is settled on Feb. 1, Andrews said, that’s when the new party boss will “be talking about the dumb Laken Riley bill. And I do think it's knee jerk. … Don’t even get me started.”
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Longtime Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler is another leading candidate for the post. | Andy Manis/AP | Outgoing Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes, who has endorsed Wikler, said the next chair also needs to boost the morale of Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc: the Black women who took Kamala Harris’ defeat especially hard. “They're going to have to make sure that they are open to conversations that might be uncomfortable and tough with Black women about where this party has been and where this party needs to go,” Barnes said. The next officially sanctioned DNC candidate forum takes place this Thursday, Jan. 16, in Detroit. POLITICO is hosting, and yours truly will be one of the event moderators. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | A LOOK BACK AT BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY
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President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. | Ben Curtis/AP | President Joe Biden ran on a vast array of promises to address issues ranging from criminal and racial justice to voting rights and immigration reform. We looked at a handful of those promises — and whether or not he kept them. Biden pledged to abolish the death penalty. While the federal government didn't carry out any executions during his tenure and Biden did commute the sentences of nearly every prisoner on federal death row, the death penalty was never abolished. Trump, who oversaw a spree of federal executions during his first term, can resume executions once more upon taking office. Biden promised a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the country illegally, among other immigration reforms. His opening proposal was ambitious, calling for a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, an expansion of refugee resettlement and a deployment of new resources to the border. He left it to Congress to handle the details of the legislation, but to date, no major immigration reforms have been signed into law. Biden threw his backing behind legislation to beef up border infrastructure last year — but that bill didn't include a citizenship pathway. And in recent days, he has taken unilateral action to protect immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela ahead of the incoming administration's promised deportations. Biden pledged to pursue cannabis decriminalization and address the criminal justice implications of the war on drugs for people convicted of possession and other simple consumption-related charges. On this issue, the president made more progress than any of his predecessors — which is notable given his crusade against drugs in the Senate — but cannabis is still not decriminalized federally. In 2022, he issued sweeping pardons to thousands of Americans with marijuana possession convictions. Last year, he pushed to have cannabis reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act — but that change is still pending. Biden promised to improve racial justice and advance voting rights for communities of color. He wanted to sign into law an extension of the Voting Rights Act and continuously urged Congress to send the legislation to his desk. Democrats argued the extension was necessary after the Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the original 1965 law. But Congress never made substantial progress on the bill, which was named after the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis — and Biden was hamstrung by the limits of executive power.
| | | IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
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Steve Bannon speaks from video call with White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns at POLITICO Live's "Playbook: The First 100 Days" on Jan. 14, 2025, in Washington. | Rod Lamkey Jr. for POLITICO | ICY RECEPTION — Democratic senators sharply criticized Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth for his views on women in the military during his Tuesday confirmation hearing, bringing up his past public comments on women being unsuited for combat, our Paul McLeary reports. (BTW: Here’s the full schedule of hearings this week, via CBS.) And more:
| | | TODAY’S CULTURE RECS THE BEST SUBWAY SURPRISE: International sensation Bad Bunny joined “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon to perform — in disguise — for unsuspecting subway riders. A must watch. SPEAKING OF MUSIC ... former pro hooper LiAngelo Ball (brother to current NBA stars LaMelo and Lonzo Ball) got signed to the Def Jam record label after his surprise hit “Tweaker” went viral this month. GOTTA WAIT A BIT LONGER: Beyoncé was supposed to drop some news today (A new tour? A new project?? A new album???) but she’s postponing the announcement due to the L.A. wildfires. OH RIGHT, THE TIKTOK BAN ... Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called for a delay of the TikTok ban, saying it was a matter of “profound economic, social and political importance.”
Edited by Rishika Dugyala and Teresa Wiltz
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