David Hogg, the young vice chair of the Democratic National Committee who divided the party over his plans to intervene in primary races against sitting Democratic lawmakers, said that he would step aside and not run again for his post after the party removed him on Wednesday.
Mr. Hogg, 25, became a lightning rod for criticism within the party after he told The New York Times two months ago that he planned to spend millions of dollars on primaries through a separate group, Leaders We Deserve, that he leads. He said he was raising as much as $20 million to help bring generational change to the Democratic Party.
On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee announced that its members had voted to force new elections for vice chair, removing Mr. Hogg and another vice chair, Malcolm Kenyatta.
In a letter provided to The Times, Mr. Hogg outlined his reasoning for quitting party leadership rather than running again for vice chair.
“I came into this role to play a positive role in creating the change our party needs,” he wrote. “It is clear that there is a fundamental disagreement about the role of a Vice Chair — and it’s OK to have disagreements. What isn’t OK is allowing this to remain our focus when there is so much more we need to be focused on.”
Mr. Hogg’s tenure as a party official was brief but filled with drama. It included a move by the party chairman, Ken Martin, to stop Mr. Hogg from engaging in primaries; Mr. Hogg’s being caught in a Project Veritas operation talking about party leaders; public backbiting; and the leak of audio from an internal meeting of party officers.
Multiple officials have blamed Mr. Hogg for the leak. After Politico published the audio, Mr. Hogg posted screenshots of texts he had ignored from the reporter who had written the article.
“I feel pretty violated, as does everybody on the call,” Mr. Kenyatta said in an interview. Of the tape’s origin, he said, “I don’t think we need to hire Matlock to figure out who and why.”
Speaking before Mr. Hogg announced his exit, Mr. Kenyatta said, “I don’t want to see David leave the D.N.C. I just want David to be the leader that we deserve.”
Mr. Hogg, an activist and outspoken survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., has continued to raise money for his outside group while serving as vice chair and used the fight with the party to stir up donations.
“I am doing this so that we have a stronger party,” he wrote in one fund-raising email this month, adding, “A few members of the old-school Democratic establishment are pissed at me for calling us weak.”
The move to redo the vice chair election came after a complaint that the party had not properly followed parliamentary rules in its initial February vote that elected both Mr. Hogg and Mr. Kenyatta. The complaint was lodged before Mr. Hogg had announced his primary plans, but the issues were quickly conflated, in particular by Mr. Hogg, who called the effort to redo the vote a “fast-track” to push him out.
The first ballot in the new race would have featured Mr. Kenyatta competing directly with Mr. Hogg, and whoever lost could have run in a contest for the second slot against other remaining candidates.
Mr. Martin publicly rebuked Mr. Hogg’s decision to intervene in primaries through Leaders We Deserve. Mr. Martin had pressed every officer to sign a pledge to remain neutral in primaries during a previous officers meeting — and everyone did so besides Mr. Hogg, who at the time did not bring up his plans to engage in primaries.
Mr. Martin had since pushed to change the national party’s bylaws to prevent its leaders, including Mr. Hogg, from intervening in such races. Mr. Martin and Mr. Hogg exchanged proposals about potential firewalls — inside both Mr. Hogg’s organization and the D.N.C. — but never came to an agreement.
This week, Mr. Hogg’s group announced an endorsement in a Democratic primary in a vacant congressional seat in Virginia. The group has yet to endorse against an incumbent Democrat.
The audio clip from the May 15 meeting that leaked to Politico had Mr. Martin complaining about the infighting and saying, “I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”
The D.N.C. issued statements from multiple officers afterward praising Mr. Martin. “Ken showed vulnerability in a private conversation,” said Shasti Conrad, an associate vice chair.
Some Democrats have described all the back-and-forth as a needless distraction as the party tries to regain its footing and hold the second Trump administration to account, and argued that the fighting over Mr. Hogg’s future has made Mr. Martin look as if he does not have firm control of his own organization.
Bob Mulholland, a California Democrat who spent nearly 30 years as a D.N.C. member but left the party committee a few years ago, sent an unsolicited message to Mr. Martin’s office this week, complaining about the audio and arguing that Mr. Martin had allowed the Hogg drama to drag on.
“Whining about the situation you find yourself in is like a teenage girl with a boyfriend crisis,” Mr. Mulholland wrote to Mr. Martin.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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