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.
“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.”
