In February, David Hogg, a 25-year-old survivor of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and a cofounder of March For Our Lives, was elected to one of the DNC’s open vice chair roles. In doing so, he became the first member of Gen Z to step into a national leadership position in the Democratic National Committee. By June, however, he was gone.
Due to a procedural error that occurred during the election, in which a measure to equal gender representation on the party’s executive committee was bypassed, Hogg’s position was subjected to a do-over. In the end, he decided not to run again, in part because of strong party backlash to his plan to support primary challenges against “ineffective” incumbents in safe Democratic congressional districts. His organization, Leaders We Deserve, supports the campaigns of young progressives across the country in an attempt to reshape the Democratic Party.
While the vote to hold a new election for his position did not come as a result of this anti-incumbent controversy, it comes at a time when the Democratic Party is already facing a reckoning over sharp generational divides, the neglect of young progressives within the party, and the white-knuckling of aging incumbents.
On June 24, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani beat former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. Despite the energy that Mamdani’s victory generated among progressives and young people inside and outside of New York, elected Democrats have been divided in their response. Some have endorsed him ahead of the general election, while others have spread Islamophobic conspiracy theories or been hesitant to condemn them. This comes as Donald Trump continues to advance lies regarding Mamdani’s citizenship status and threatens to have him arrested for his opposition to surging ICE deportations.
Recent CNN polling shows that the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has reached a record low since 1992, when CNN’s polling began, with just 29% of Americans approving of the party. Still reeling from their loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 election, tensions among Democrats have grown as incumbents, candidates, and other officials struggle to mount a satisfying response to the onslaught of racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-democratic attacks coming from the Trump administration.
Hogg doesn’t plan on letting his departure from the DNC or the controversy around anti-incumbent primary bids stop him. Instead, he’s doubling down on his role as president of Leaders We Deserve. He sees this work as urgent and views the malleability of the Democratic Party in this moment as an opportunity. “We are at rock bottom here,” Hogg told Teen Vogue. “We need to fully embrace every strategy that we can to show voters that we are dramatically changing things.”
In this July interview, Hogg spoke to Teen Vogue about Mamdani’s win, primarying incumbents, and the future of the Democratic Party.
This conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
David Hogg: I think a great example of the challenges that are here is the reaction to what happened in New York with the election of Zohran Mamdani. It is the people who are often saying that we need to have a “Big Tent” who are the most against his win, and some have congratulated him but not endorsed him as the Democratic nominee. A lot of the people who are saying, “Always vote blue, no matter who,” are [seemingly] now saying, “actually, no, we don't mean that,” because [they] actually mean to vote blue so long as it is somebody that wants to protect the oligarchy, or somebody that wants to protect the status quo in our party, and who fights only for the most incremental changes.
There's been a lot of hypocrisy from the ones that are always yelling at the left side of the party that they need to shut up and vote blue, no matter who, who are now saying we can't support Zohran.
DH: Honestly, what it's going to take for them to learn is we're going to need to continue beating them, over and over and over again, in these primaries. And, of course, most importantly, winning in these general elections, to prove that we are electorally viable.
[When] the candidate truly believes in what they're saying, and doesn't change their values under political pressure, other people are inspired by that. They think, Well, maybe if he's doing that, then I can be part of that change. Then they become part of that change, and they volunteer, and they knock on doors, and they make phone calls, they talk about it on social media because they believe in the message, and then other people [join in].
Conservatives usually work on a framework of fear, and that is how they win. It's always a fear of, “They're going to take this from you. They're going to take that from you.” When we are at our best, we inspire people to believe in this vision of what we could be, and framing that vision as the thing that could be taken from you.
DH: Honestly, a healthy and competitive primary process. One where we can have our disagreements on these issues, within this big tent, and fight it out in our primaries. That includes challenging incumbents. There are far too many people who justify being in their position based on how long they've been there rather than on what they've done while they've been there.
We have two major problems in our party: We have a courage problem and we have a competition problem. Because we don't challenge the status quo or people who are in safer blue seats nearly enough, we [end up with certain] candidates who get really comfortable. And if there's anything that I've learned from activism and organizing, it's that comfortable people — especially politicians — do not change.
They will tell you nice things. They will say that they care about your issue or whatever you're fighting for. They will give you as much lip service as possible, but ultimately, they are not necessarily going to fight for it. One of the only things across the board that will make a politician do the right thing, regardless of whether or not they support you, is by threatening the one thing all of them [seem to] care about, which is their job.
Everybody in our party wants to do two things at the same time that are incompatible: They want to win and gain majorities, but they also want to do that with the same cast of characters that brought us here. The reason they talk so much about focusing on our messaging is because you can change the messaging without changing the messenger. But the reality is, given the fact that we've talked for about 15 years about how we have a messaging problem, it's gone beyond a messaging problem. It is a messenger problem.
DH: One of the things that I know really bothered me and many of the cofounders of March For Our Lives after the Parkland shooting was the number of adults who would come up to us when we were 18 or 17 years old and say, "Thank God you kids are here to save us. My generation really, really screwed things up, but you guys are going to save us, and we could not be more glad for that.”
That mentality is really dangerous. It puts way too much pressure on young people to address problems that we did not create in the first place, and it usually absolves the people who actually did create them of any responsibility to fix them.
Last election, voters of all ages, including young voters, told us two things more than anything in the polling and in the focus groups. We heard that prices were too high and Joe Biden was too old. Regardless of their age, if you tell [voters] not to believe their eyes or their wallets, you're going to lose them. And I think people just felt really unheard across the board. It wasn't just the economy. It was also Israel and Palestine that a lot of young people felt, understandably, like we were failing to meet the moment head-on.
I also think that we need to be more comfortable using our power as Democrats. I think Minnesota offers a really good example of this. And, unfortunately, one of the leaders of a lot of those efforts, who made [so much progress in] Minnesota, was recently killed. Representative Melissa Hortman was an example of the type of leadership that I think we need. It's not like [Minnesota is] a super blue state. Democrats have a very slim majority, where they still use their power as progressives to get things done, and didn't pay much of [an electoral] price for it, and still improved many people's lives.
DH: I would say the best way to address that desensitization (that I feel as well at times) is to do something. You can't fix everything, obviously, but together, all of us can, as a collective. And it doesn't take the entire country. It really just takes less than 3.5% of the country to actually mobilize and fix this.
I think that's part of the reason why this New York City [mayoral] race felt so big for so many young people. It was one of the first times in a long time that they felt like there was a candidate who actually represented them, who listened to them, who was genuine and authentic and not changing his values under political pressure, and who built a winning coalition to bring people together. The way that you deal with that desensitization is that you do something. Go and work on a campaign that you truly believe in. If it's knocking on doors or making phone calls for Zohran, or going out and knocking on doors or making calls for [another progressive challenger], get involved in some way and understand it's not all on you.
One of the most important things that I ever got as a piece of advice was from Dolores Huerta, when I was at a protest with her a few years ago. I asked her, "What, in your opinion, is the most important thing that young people can know or do to make change?" And she said, "The most important thing that you need to be able to do is to make people believe that change is actually possible." Because far more often than not, the biggest obstacle to us creating change isn't whether or not it's possible, it's that people don't even think it is. If people get just a little bit louder, we can win. But we have to believe that it's possible in the first place.
