To activist and organizer David Hogg, the future of the Democratic party is pretty clear: Establishment candidates and leaders are “going to get the message or they’re going to get voted out.”
Speaking to WIRED senior politics editor Leah Feiger at The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday, Hogg said that he doesn’t “think the Chuck Schumers of the world understand” how dire things could be for middle-of-the-road, corporate-backed Democrats when 2026 and 2028 roll around.
The Big InterviewWIRED’s iconic series returned to San Francisco with a series of unforgettable, in-depth live conversations. Check out more highlights here.
“They think that there’s going to be some kind of democratic Tea Party and it’s going to be a bunch of progressive lefties that are younger and super pissed off and we’ll vote all these people out,but I don’t actually think that’s the whole picture.” Hogg said.
Boomers, Hogg said, are likely the group most out of touch with their generation in Washington, DC. “You know why I say that?” Hogg said. “It’s because the people that are marching by the millions right now in the No Kings Day protests are not young people. They are people of Chuck Schumer’s generation that are extremely pissed off with him.”
Hogg’s Schumer slams weren’t the only anti-boomer jabs he threw during his talk, likening the current makeup of Congress to the “end of the Soviet Union” when he said “leaders were dying over and over because they were so old,” and complaining about the establishment leadership in the Democratic National Committee, where Hogg was vice chair until a recent shake-up. While Hogg did concede that “there are plenty of great boomers out there,” he said part of what he’s working on as the cofounder of the group Leaders We Deserve is a shift in elected officials’ age and political focus.
“What we want to do with Leaders We Deserve is not just elect younger versions of who’s already there,” said Hogg. “We want to elect younger people that have the chance to actually have integrity, support them with millions of dollars, ensure that they don’t take money from corporations, for example, [and ask] that they support gun safety laws and that they’re able to actually represent their constituents and not special interests.”
As the largest backers of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Hogg said he’s become acutely aware of how young people want a candidate that they see as an outsider, and that’s not seemingly more of the same. Voters, Hogg said, want a Democratic Party where the message isn’t “vote for us because we aren’t as bad as” Republicans, but rather “vote for us because of what we’re here to do for you.”
Hogg said he’s also been taken aback by how unwilling establishment Democratic candidates are to be challenged in primaries, saying that when Leaders We Deserve decided to back liberal candidate Justin Pearson to run against moderate Steve Cohen in a safely blue district in Tennessee, Cohen was so offended that he compared the move to Pearl Harbor.
“When people think that way, I think it says a lot more about their sense of entitlement to their positions, which is bullshit, frankly,” Hogg said. “My message to people like Steve Cohen is, ‘This is not your seat. It is your voter’s seat, and if voters choose somebody else, that’s their decision to make, not yours.’”
Hogg hopes the next Democratic candidate for president comes out of that same kind of fervent primary challenge, saying that while he’d love to see someone like US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) nab the nomination in 2028, all he really requires is a “ruthlessly competitive” process, especially compared to what happened in 2024, where he said the DNC essentially told voters, “don’t believe your eyeballs or wallets” in regards to both President Biden and rising inflation.
Given that he’s clearly no stranger to spicy takes and hot-button issues, Hogg says he’s also acutely aware of his detractors, both on the left and the right. He paused for a beat when Feiger asked about his current “safety calculus” before acknowledging that his family was driven out of their Florida home after being swatted and that he’s received “thousands of death threats” throughout his relatively short career.
“I just want to make sure that no matter what happens to me, even if I am killed doing this, these candidates are still out there doing the work and our generation has a chance at least of getting elected and not just being younger versions of the screwed up people that are currently in power,” Hogg said.
The post David Hogg to Democratic Establishment: Get the Message or Get Voted Out appeared first on Wired.
