Democratic National Committee Research Articles

When conspiracy theorists win

ABSTRACT ‘Generalists’ hold that conspiracy theories, as a class, have epistemic defects. Well confirmed theories that invoke conspiracies, such as the theory that the Nixon administration conspired to orchestrate the break in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex, on 17 June 1972, – the ‘Watergate theory’ – raise a problem for generalists as it’s hard to understand how such theories can have epistemic defects. The Watergate theory is often not considered a mere conspiracy theory, because it enjoys ‘official theory’ status and in folk usage that means it is not a conspiracy theory. However, most people concede that the Watergate theory was a conspiracy theory before obtaining official status. So, appealing to folk usage does not make the problem go away. Recently however, several generalist scholars including, Cassam, Mandik, Thalman and Butter, have argued that theories invoking conspiracies that enjoy official status were never conspiracy theories. I’ll consider their reasoning and show where they go wrong. I’ll work with the examples of the Watergate theory and the ‘false flag’ theory of the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, which has it that this massacre of over 100 people was led by white Utahn Mormons disguised as Native Americans.

Federal Judges, States Legislators, and State Voting Rights Rollback

Abstract This article claims that recent Supreme Court decisions have allowed state lawmakers to suppress and skew but not subvert the vote. The Court relaxed federal oversight of state election administration in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), and gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), while prohibiting independent state legislative election regulation in Moore v. Harper (2023). These decisions guided state lawmakers toward vote suppression and skewing, and away from election subversion. Consequently, Republican state legislatures have passed state constitutional amendments and statutes limiting ballot access and reforming state redistricting practices. While some Democratic state legislatures have protected ballot access and independent redistricting, these recent Supreme Court decisions help Republicans win a disproportionate share of state legislative seats. National courts thus help preserve the national party coalition by opening subnational jurisdictions to party entrenchment.

THE USE OF MODALITY IN BIDEN’S DNC SPEECH 2020: AN INTERPERSONAL METAFUNCTION ANALYSIS

This study is aimed to describe and analyze the interpersonal meaning of Biden’s DNC speech in 2020. From the perspective of interpersonal meaning, the users of language establish and maintain their position in the social relationship. This study focuses on the analysis of the usage of modality and the value of modality in expressing interpersonal meaning. This study was conducted by using qualitative. The theory applied in this study is Interpersonal meaning from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by M.A.K. Halliday and supported by other Systemic Functional Linguists’ theories. The results of this research showed that the high value of modality is applied in the texts in order to convince the listeners to vote for him, and to show status, power, relationship among them.
 Key words: interpersonal meaning, modality, SFL(Systemic Functional Linguistics), DNC (Democratic National Committee)

Molly Dewson, the women's division, and grassroots presidential campaigning during the New Deal

AbstractIn the 1930s, Molly Dewson built the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee into a central cog of FDR's presidential campaigns. She leveraged her personal friendship with the Roosevelts to develop a connected, national network of women who became the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. By designing structures that made women the eyes and ears of the New Deal at the local level, the tactics and organizations she established persisted after her retirement and were copied by Republicans. Dewson ushered in a 30‐year period when women were at the center of presidential campaigns

We Shall Overcome Some Day…but Not Today: Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and the 21st Century Version of Jim Crow

We Shall Overcome Some Day…but Not Today: Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and the 21st Century Version of Jim Crow

Undoing the Voting Rights Act

On July 1, 2021, in the case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court issued eighty-five pages of opinions concerning a new interpretation of a 1982 amendment to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Steve Suitts, who was involved in the Congressional hearings and debate that led to the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, provides this primer on what the majority opinion holds, its contradictions and shortcomings, and its dangerous implications for voting rights.

Visual Priming and Framing During the 2020 Democratic Presidential Debates: Electoral Status Predicts Favorable Camera Treatment

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates provide a unique opportunity to systematically evaluate network visual production choices in a multicandidate context. The joint decision of the Democratic National Committee and NBC to include an expansive field of twenty contenders through “prime-time” debates on consecutive nights (June 26 and 27, 2019) provided for a natural experiment with equal numbers of top- and second-tier candidates randomly assigned to each night. In this preregistered study, we evaluate whether candidates are treated differently in the amount of camera time they receive (visual priming) and types of camera shots they appear in (visual framing) based on electoral status. We replicate a study of the initial two Democratic and Republican 2016 presidential primary debates for each party and that found the top-two candidates received substantially better visual coverage than all others. We confirm and extend these findings by evaluating different operationalizations of electoral status (top-two, top-tier, stage position, and poll standing). Findings suggest that when visual priming is considered, stage position outperforms other electoral status indicators in terms of explaining variance for total camera and average fixation time. In terms of visual framing, head-and-shoulder “one-shots” are better predicted by top-tier status, whereas public opinion poll standing predicts increased time spent in multiple-candidate shots. Finally, appearances in “two-shots” (side-by-side and split-screen portrayals) were not significantly explained by electoral status, likely due to the paucity of these depictions.

Private-Sector Attribution of Cyber Incidents: Benefits and Risks to the U.S. Government

In a blog post in June 2016, the threat intelligence company CrowdStrike attributed the breach of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) networks to two groups of cyber actors closely linked t...

Direct Democracy Denied: The Right to Initiative in a Pandemic

Putting aside the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, the case over extending the date for receipt of absentee ballots in the April 2020 Wisconsin primary, courts so far have done a fairly good job protecting voting rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. From easing candidate and party signature requirements for ballot access, to temporarily eliminating witness or notarization requirements for casting an absentee ballot, to interpreting the excuse provisions in for-cause absentee ballot laws to cover voters without coronavirus immunity who fear voting in person, courts have recognized that election laws that ordinarily do not burden voters can become burdensome in a pandemic. Courts have interpreted such laws to avoid disenfranchisement, and sometimes temporarily suspended or altered them. That welcome thumb on the scale favoring voters, however, has not extended uniformly to claims for the easing of signature gathering rules by ballot measure proponents. In four cases I examine, courts have rejected the demands of initiative proponents to ease requirements to qualify a measure for the ballot, such as allowing electronic instead of “wet” (in person) signatures, and easing witness requirements, total number of signatures required, or geographic requirements for signature collection. In just one case, Thompson v. DeWine, a federal district court ordered Ohio to alter its procedures for qualifying proposed measures for the ballot, including allowing the acceptance of electronic signatures. The decision, however, was put on hold by the Sixth Circuit in a stay order that was very dismissive of the rights of direct democracy and that portends bad things to come. In this short analysis, I argue that some of the reasons courts and states have offered against easing ballot measure qualification requirements during a pandemic are weak, and that the district court in Thompson was right to see that normal ballot qualification rules can impose a severe First Amendment burden on direct democracy proponents under pandemic conditions. The problem, as illustrated by the Thompson case, is fashioning appropriate relief consistent with principles of federalism and separation of powers. It is difficult to craft a remedy would put the plaintiffs in the position they would have been in had there been no pandemic and that does not usurp the state’s general role in enforcing its election rules or undermine sound principles of election administration and fairness.

Revisiting McGovern-Fraser: Party Nationalization and the Rhetoric of Reform

Abstract:The Democratic Party faced a crisis of political legitimacy in the late 1960s as distrust and protest permeated its electoral base. In response, the Democratic National Committee established the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, tasked with restructuring the party’s presidential nomination process. Contrary to the conventional historical narrative of the McGovern-Fraser Commission that has focused on a supposed displacement of the party’s old guard by radical insurgents, this article instead argues that the main impetus for reform came from national party leaders seeking to build up the legitimacy and authority of the National Committee. Commission Chair George McGovern and the DNC used a particular reform rhetoric that charged state parties with the corruption of the political process, necessitating rescue by an empowered national party. This focus on the nationalizing impulses behind McGovern-Fraser serves to shift our attention away from ideological struggles and toward institutional motives.

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

Hack-and-leak operations: intrusion and influence in the Gulf

ABSTRACTEvents such as the leaking of hacked emails from the US Democratic National Committee before the 2016 presidential election sit between two paradigms of cybersecurity. The first paradigm focuses on intrusion (unauthorised access to networks), while the second concentrates on influence (the use of digital technologies to shift public debate). Analyses generally tackle one of these two aspects: cybersecurity specialists focus on intrusion, setting aside the complexities of the digital public sphere, while media scholars do the opposite, closely analysing flows of leaked information without considering how it was obtained. This article instead argues for conceptualising hack-and-leak operations (HLOs) as a distinct category, through a close analysis of a crucial HLO that has been overlooked by the cybersecurity literature: the release of documents from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the ‘Yemen Cyber Army’. It proposes a tripartite framework for understanding the impact of HLOs as mechanisms of delegitimization, based on their technical characteristics, social and political context and target audiences. The article suggests that the Yemen Cyber Army incident could have been an experiment for the same Russian actors who carried out the DNC operation, allowing them to hone their tactics prior to the US elections.

Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self by Mark Byers

Reviewed by: Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self by Mark Byers Steven Shoemaker Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self. Mark Byers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 224. $80.00 (cloth); $76.00 (eBook). This carefully researched, insightful, and provocative study of Charles Olson's development as an American modernist of the period following the Second World War seeks to place Olson in a new context and thereby grant us a fresh understanding of his work. Rather than concentrating his attention primarily on immediate poetic precursors (and still-living contemporaries) like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Mark Byers focuses on the New York scene that gave birth both to abstract expressionism and to radical experiments in new music. Further, Byers considers these aesthetic developments in relation to the postwar, and post-Marxist, soul-searching of thinkers on the Left who sought a way forward after the political and social upheavals wrought by worldwide conflict. Byers's innovative approach is to place Olson's work alongside the work of painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb, as well as composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman. At the same time, he attends to the critics and thinkers who were both critiquing the current state of art and culture and helping to imagine new artistic and [End Page 440] social possibilities, including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald, and Sidney Hook, as well as Frankfurt School émigrés like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. To this already full roster he adds twentieth-century scientists Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger—shapers of the "new physics" who shook the epistemological certitudes that had underpinned both scientific inquiry and the Marxist historical imagination. In Byers's reading, a widespread sense of skepticism and radical questioning ran through every aspect of postwar culture and led to a search for new forms of political agency, and, indeed, for a new "practice of the self" suitable to the times. During the war, Olson had worked for first the Office of War Information and then the Democratic National Committee, but by 1945 had begun to withdraw from political life (9). One of Byers's central areas of concern is the question of what political agency might look like after such a turn, or even "retreat," into private life. The question sparked intense debate not just for Olson, but for many artists and thinkers of the period. The technological rationality of Germany's National Socialism had come to seem like a perverse fulfillment of the dream of Enlightenment "reason" and "progress," thus calling into question the whole Enlightenment narrative that had been so central to the development of European culture. At the same time, the Marxist faith in the historical inevitability of socialist revolution seemed no less wrongheaded and useless in the face of the actual events of recent world history. Amid this loss of faith in the ideals of "civilization" and in grand narratives more generally came an upsurge of interest in the individual rather than the class or the tribe. Writers and artists turned away from the dream of collective political action, as well as from the sorts of aesthetic commitments with which that dream was associated. Subsequent critiques of abstract expressionism as "the official style of postwar American capitalism" have questioned the triumphalism, imperialism, and devotion to self-interest of this political, cultural, and artistic moment, but Byers wants to provide a corrective to such critiques, to show that they have often "drastically simplified the fate of 'I' in the United States in the years immediately following the Second World War" (11). Byers argues that beginning around 1945 "the first person subject was increasingly regarded as the site of radical political agency by the new independent left; a transitional formation cutting its ties with orthodox Marxism and the ambitions of the New Deal state" (11). In this reading, the Maximus of Olson's The Maximus Poems embodies a "radical 'practice of the self'" that "charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the immediate postwar period" (19). Further, Olson's construction of such a figure positions him...

The growth and challenges of cyber insurance

Cyberattacks have grown in frequency and cost over the past decade, with high-profile cases, such as the 2013 Target data breach, the 2017 Equifax data breach, and the leak of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election making national headlines. Ransomware attacks, intellectual property theft, and fraud cost companies billions in recovery expenses, fines, and lost revenues every year. More firms are purchasing cyber insurance as a way to cover losses and expenses resulting from cyber incidents.

The Roots of the United States’ Cyber (In)Security*

Three months after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in the 2016 election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report concluding Russia’s President Putin had ordered the theft of data from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign to mount an online influence campaign aimed at harming her electability and potential presidency. In response to this foreign intervention in the U.S. electoral process, members of Congress called for the formation of a bipartisan select committee to devise solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks. But this was not the first time a call had been raised to improve the security of America’s computer networks, and based upon the nation’s poor grasp of its own cyber history, will not the be the last. This paper explores the debates that surrounded the introduction of NSDD 145, the United States’ first cyber security directive, in 1984. The order, which sought to place the NSA at the heart of protecting America’s burgeoning computer networks in both the government and private sector from foreign penetration, became a lightning rod for dissent among Congress, private sector businesses, academics, and privacy campaigners alike. By exploring the motives of the directive’s architect, the cases put forward by its opponents, and the reasons for its eventual repudiation, this paper provides a better understanding of the enduring reasons behind America’s cyber insecurity. In doing so, it ensures historians are better informed in their efforts to place the current sense of vulnerability into a wider context, and that contemporary policymakers are better placed to approach the issue.

Labor rights are civil rights: inter-racial unionism and the struggle to unionize Nissan in Canton, Mississippi

On 4 August 2017, workers at Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, voted 2244 to 1307 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The organizing campaign in Canton – which began shortly after the plant opened in 2003 – was one of the most important in recent labor history, and it attracted national and international media coverage. It also mobilized some high-profile supporters, including actor Danny Glover, musician Common, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, and presidential contender Bernie Sanders. This article uses interviews with Nissan workers and UAW staffers, together with the records of the long organizing drive, to provide the first detailed examination of this landmark campaign, revealing problems that press accounts did not cover. While the UAW and its supporters blamed Nissan’s fierce opposition for the outcome, this article reveals that the reasons for the loss were more complex. Apart from corporate opposition, community hostility, the increasing number of temporary workers – who were unable to vote in the election – and racial divisions were all important factors. Most of the UAW’s supporters were African-American, and they were mobilized by a campaign that declared that, ‘Labor Rights are Civil Rights.’ This slogan alienated many whites, however, weakening the union. While the UAW pledged to fight on, the defeat was another blow to its long campaign to organize foreign-owned automakers in the U.S., an increasingly important sector.

Party Brands and the Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1952–1976

Political scientists have traditionally dismissed the Democratic and Republican National Committees as “service providers”—organizations that provide assistance to candidates in the form of campaign funding and expertise but otherwise lack political power. I argue this perspective has missed a crucial role national committees play in American politics, namely that national party organizations publicize their party's policy positions and, in doing so, attempt to create national party brands. These brands are important to party leaders—especially when the party is in the national minority—since they are fundamental to mobilizing voters in elections. In case studies covering the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) in the period 1952–1976, I show that minority party committees prioritize their branding role and invest considerably in their publicity divisions, inaugurate new publicity programs, and create new communication tools to reach out to voting groups. Additionally, I show that in cases where the party is out of the White House, the national committees have considerable leeway in deciding what party image to publicize. Rather than being mere powerless service providers, I show that party committees have played crucial roles in debates concerning questions of ideology and issue positioning in both parties.

Trust the Base

As progressives have renewed an active engagement with the Democratic Party, few things have infuriated them more than the party hierarchy picking candidates. While there was ample criticism of the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) performance in the 2016 presidential primary, far less attention has been paid to the role party leaders play in selecting down-ticket candidates. This process is a key mechanism by which the party fails—not only to uphold the values of its base and of the left, but at the ballot as well. If the Democratic Party doesn't change the way it chooses candidates, we could be left with a reformed party with strong ideals—and no elected officials to advance them.

For the Good of the Party: John Nance Garner, FDR, and New Deal Politics, 1933–1940

For the Good of the PartyJohn Nance Garner, FDR, and New Deal Politics, 1933–1940 Thomas T. Spencer (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner campaigning in Peekskill, New York, August 14, 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. Public domain image from Franklin: Access to the FDR Library's Digital Collections, <http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/franklin/> [Accessed Sept. 26, 2017]. [End Page 254] John Nance Garner is well known to scholars of the New Deal era. Born in 1868 in a log cabin in Lamar County, Texas, he became a lawyer and moved to Uvalde County, where he began a life in politics by serving as county judge (1893–1896) and as a member of the Texas state legislature (1898–1902). He was elected to the United States Congress in 1902 and remained there continuously for fifteen terms until March 4, 1933. During his last term he served as the Speaker of the House. In 1932, he began the first of two terms as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt. Surprisingly his career has received limited scholarly attention. In part this is due to a lack of personal papers, which he destroyed after leaving office. Much of what has been written on Garner, with a few exceptions, has come from journalists or contemporaries.1 Despite his critical role in passing legislation in the early New Deal and transforming, in the words of some scholars, the modern-day vice presidency, [End Page 255] many historians portray Garner negatively as a conservative Democrat who opposed much of the New Deal and Roosevelt's desire to forge a more liberal Democratic Party. They highlight his break with Roosevelt in the second term over budget issues, sit-down strikes, and the controversial "court-packing" plan. Journalist Joseph Lash, for example, noted that by 1939 Garner "had given way to a conservatism that placed him at the head of the anti-New Deal, anti-Roosevelt forces in Washington." Historian Otis Graham assessed Garner harshly as a "mediocre and unimaginative politician." The notion that Garner was an obstacle to Roosevelt may be a factor in why scholars have been less interested in studying his career. Lionel Patenaude, in his account of Texans and New Deal politics, stated, "Garner's role during the New Deal has been underplayed by most historians. Whether this results from a favorable bias to Roosevelt or a lack of standard types of evidence is debatable."2 A closer examination of Garner's role indicates that while his conservativism and commitment to party regularity were important, other issues were equally significant in bringing about his break with FDR. Differences in temperament and personality, differing perceptions about his role as a legislative leader, concerns about the direction of the Democratic Party, particularly the influence of organized labor, as well as personal ambition all contributed to his disenchantment with the president. These issues were intertwined. No one disagreement or issue caused the break, but collectively they were instrumental in shaping, at least from Garner's perspective, the notion that his advice, experience, and leadership were being ignored. Roosevelt's use of executive authority, his desire to broaden the base of the party, and the unprecedented scope of the New Deal, which expanded the role of the federal government in the economy, all challenged Garner's long-standing ideals about government and how politics worked. He would later state that his decision to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1940 was based on opposition to a president standing for a third term; yet, a case can be made that numerous personal and political differences were paramount in his decision. Of special importance in assessing Garner are his many letters to his friend and Democratic National Committee chairman James A. (Jim) [End Page 256] Farley, who served as Roosevelt's postmaster general from 1933 to 1940. Farley, like Garner, held similar beliefs about the party and its direction. Their candid letters, coupled with Farley's numerous personal memos, shed further light on the relationship between Garner and Roosevelt, the issues that divided them, and the many changes occurring within...

Cyber Attacks in International Law: From Atomic War to Computer War

There can be no doubt, computers and especially the Internet have developed the way we live our lives. Information is stored in vast databases, and through the Internet, is literally at our fingertips. Many essential services and structures are dependent on computers, and they also control physical objects such as electrical transformers, trains, pipeline pumps, chemical vats, radars and stock markets. The revolution of computers and Internet has also brought with it a potential for misuse, and cyber criminals can be a serious threat. They can do anything from breaking into protected networks, stealing anything from personal files to money, or vandalize the networks by deleting or altering information, to hijacking it and controlling the computers actions. Recognizing the potential for misuse, numerous states have issued statements on the need of regulating conduct on the Internet. The United Nations General Assembly has issued numerous statements on the possibilities of cyber abuse. For instance, fifty-third session the General Assembly recalled that technological developments could have both civilian and military application. They also stated that the use of information technologies could affect the interests of the whole international community, and disturb international stability and security. In its fifty-fifth session it called on states to criminalize cyber abuse and deny their territory from being used as a safe haven. There is also an international convention on Cybercrime which pursues a common criminal policy to protect society against cybercrime, by adopting appropriate legislation and development international co-operation. But as the U.N. General Assembly noted, the technological developments can have both civilian and military applications. In recent years numerous countries have established their own cyber branches/units within the military. To name a few examples, the USA has the US Cyber Command, China’s People’s Liberation Army has a cyber-division called Blue Team, Norway has Cyberforsvaret, and the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence has started recruiting personnel for a new cyber unit. The USA has declared that it reserves the right to use all necessary means, including military to defend against hostile acts in cyberspace. Cyber-attacks have the potential to cause a lot of damage. There have already been large scale cyber operations that have had a significant effect on countries, but so far the effects have not been devastating. The most notorious cyber-attacks in history are “Robert Tappan Morris and the Morris Worm (1988), MafiaBoy causes $1 billion dollars in damages (2000), Google China hit by cyber-attack (2009, Teen hacks NASA and US Defense Department 1999. Recently some cases “in June 2016 that Russian intelligence had hacked a Democratic National Committee (DNC) server in an attempt to steal opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in 2010 in Iran targeted through cyber-attack. In early 2007, Estonia was the recipient of repeated denial-of-service attacks.