David Hogg plans to fire consultants who helped lead the Democratic Party down their “path of failure” if he wins his recently announced bid to become Democratic National Committee vice chairperson.
Hogg, a 24-year-old gun control advocate who survived the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, joined MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Tuesday after announcing his candidacy for a leadership position in the DNC. The activist revealed that part of his motivation was frustration with the Democratic Party, especially after he was shut down repeatedly during the 2024 presidential election for voicing concerns about the party’s outreach to young people, specifically men.
“We need to build a party that tells people what it needs to hear and not what its consultants are paid just to say whatever people want to hear over and over again where we continue losing,” Hogg said.
He added that during Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, he was “shut down” by party consultants when he would bring up concerns about the party and young voters, including hearing some things he claimed weren’t appropriate to share on TV.
“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,” he said.
Hogg admitted he’s an “underdog” in his race, but he believes the party needs drastic change in appealing to people in the “ideological middle.”
“At the DNC, I raised the concern about what are we going to do about young men, and I heard back from people an enormous amount of vitriol. Why would I ask that question?” he said. “Why would we focus on that? I think that one thing we need to change in the party is that empathy is not a zero-sum game. We can care about young men and care about young women.”
If Hogg is successful, firing a few people is at the top of his to-do list.
“I would make sure we fire a lot of consultants and do as much as I can to do that possible and make sure we didn’t hire the same people that led us on the path of failure,” he said.
Watch above via MSNBC.
