Democratic National Committee (DNC) Vice Chair David Hogg is aiming to unseat certain incumbent Democratic members of Congress in the 2026 primary elections.
Leaders We Deserve, a political organization which Hogg, 25, co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in an effort to help elect younger Democratic leaders, including primary challengers to incumbent House Democrats, The New York Times first reported. While the group did not say which incumbents it plans to challenge, it told the Washington Post it will focus its efforts on targeting members in reliably blue districts and will not challenge Democrats facing tough reelection battles against GOP opponents.
“Everyone in our party says they want to start winning again, and they do—but that simply will not be possible with our current set of leaders, too many of which are asleep at the wheel, out-of-touch, and ineffective,” Hogg wrote Tuesday in a post to X.
Hogg rose to prominence for co-founding gun control advocacy group March for Our Lives with classmates after surviving the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. He was elected as the DNC’s vice chair in February and is notably the youngest person ever to serve in the role.
Leaders We Deserve describes itself as “a grassroots organization dedicated to electing young progressives to Congress and State Legislatures across the country to help defeat the far-right agenda and advance a progressive vision for the future.”
When asked by Politico in an interview published Tuesday if DNC Chair Ken Martin supports his plan, Hogg admitted that Martin “certainly has different views” on challenging Democratic incumbents.
“There are disagreements in our party about the right way to approach this moment. There are certainly disagreements we have,” Hogg told Politico. “What I will say about Chair Martin, even if we do have disagreements, he’s doing an excellent job of building and reforming our party.”
“We have a culture of seniority politics that has created a litmus test of who deserves to be here,” Hogg told the outlet. “We need people, regardless of their age, that are here to fight.”
Hogg’s decision comes amid a growing number of reports of the Democratic Party struggling with effectively communicating a message that resonates with voters in the aftermath of the party’s brutal losses in the 2024 election cycle. The party has also recently been grappling with plummeting approval ratings.
Hogg claimed in December during an appearance on “MSNBC Reports” that he received pushback for suggesting that Democrats needed to reach out more to young men ahead of the November 2024 presidential election.
“Throughout the campaign, there were multiple times where I brought up publicly my concerns about young voters, and I was shut down by consultants and messaged by them saying, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about. This is not an issue. This is dumb of you to say,’ and a whole lot of other things that I can’t tell you on TV,” Hogg told MSNBC.
The DNC and Leaders We Deserve did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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