Meet the Democrats

August 1, 2026
Savannah, Georgia

The breeze is heavy, humid, and seasoned with musk as dawn breaks on a brand new August in Georgia. I am surrounded by liberals. 

The Democratic Party has descended upon Savannah’s haunted coast. We’ve come to vote on party business, and to acknowledge what primary voters already decided in June: the nominees for the 2026 election. We’ve come in a rolling tide of blue, pouring into the Savannah Convention Center; as little old ladies with impressive church hats and as young activists with assorted pride flags appended to lapels or painted on nails. We’ve come as bonafide Southern pastors with voices like honey and thunder, and as democratic socialists strutting to the heartbeat of a new century. This convention is just one among many happening this summer, put on by the parties of their respective states, all doing, more or less, the same thing. From sea to shining, you’ll find us gathering in our small hundreds and thousands—the true, blue Democratic Party.

People have big feelings about the Democrats, but too often those feelings are more like suspicions and too seldom grounded in facts. The American party system is unique. The parties are ubiquitous, heavy in the American mind, but decentralized. We know them well in the abstract. As brands they’re everywhere. We see the (D) and (R) trailing the names of people on TV, we’ve read political cartoons with donkeys and elephants all our lives, we’ve sorted the landscape by red and blue. But even after a decade of interminable factional pinball and teeth-grinding about “the establishment,” even after we’ve watched a generational shift transform the party, the actual functions of the Democratic Party are seldom laid out plain. This creates a serious problem. Politics is the art of structuring power, and it’s very hard to do politics if you can’t see the structure. Few understand how the Democratic Party works in practice. We will correct that here.

From the way people speak about it online, you could be forgiven for imagining that Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have a brunch fortress somewhere from which they order drone strikes on anyone with a plan to win an election. Members of Congress and New York Times columnists can regularly be heard demanding Democrats “do” something about their base, that they “run” one kind of candidate or another, or tie themselves to the whipping post and endure the arrows from some fresh conservative freakout. But from the perspective of someone who knows—has learned—how the party works, they’re talking to shadows on the wall. All they have is a sock puppet named "The Democrats" which, they are constantly lamenting, doesn’t listen.

That’s because the party is in Savannah. The sock is just a sock.

“Convention” is a great term for this sort of thing. There’s a real air of fandom. A lot of hugging, hurried whispers to the side, and bleary-eyed hangovers from reunions the night before. Genuinely, a lot of blue. Almost everyone who works for the party is a volunteer, something I've been doing at the county level for a little over a year. I’m only here because my county committee elected me as a delegate and it’s no small thing to be trusted by such people—by those willing to lay out their nights and weekends for years in the hope of making things a little bit better. People who know joy is a thing to be taken rather than merely longed for, and for whom hope remains an active verb. I’m greeted by a lazy sunrise in Georgia’s garden of good and evil and Savannah is running over with a zealous joy, focused and hopeful.

There’s libbing out of all kinds here. Moderates who’ve been at it for forty years and progressives who’ve been pushing party boundaries for ten. There are tables hawking campaign merch, staffers who look like they didn’t sleep last night, and consultants who definitely haven’t slept in a week. There are state legislators like Ruwa Romman and Sam Park alongside a parade of local electeds, retired judges, and media. Every federal and statewide candidate except Jon Ossoff made their way down, along with a bevy of state legislative, mayoral, and judicial office-seekers. Maybe even some dogcatcher hopefuls, for all I know. Many take a turn at the podium before Keisha Lance Bottoms, having recently overtaken her Republican opponent for governor in the polls, tears it down from the lectern just before we break for lunch. They all came looking to tap the energy for a boost as we barrel into election season. I hope they all got what they needed. But most of the attendees are like me: regular people who crossed some imperceptible threshold at some point, who decided to stop just talking and start trying.

I started with a Google search, which turned up my state party, which then led me to my county committee—a unit for measuring Democrats I didn’t know existed. I went to the next monthly business meeting where, this being Georgia, I expected a small knot of older church ladies. I figured maybe they’d need someone to help move things around or knock doors, that there might be something practical I could do to help. I also have to cop to some skepticism. I came with many of the priors you’d expect from a progressive millennial who watched Occupy Wall Street, the Panama Papers, Bernie Sanders, and Black Lives Matter seemingly fade into the rearview alongside women’s autonomy, and possibly, the republic itself. I came at a low point, with accordingly low expectations. I found a room full of people of all ages, who care a lot, work hard, develop relationships, and who have accumulated expertise in things you wouldn’t imagine someone might know. Like how long it takes to get a demonstration permit from the local police and who you can call if it takes too long. Like the monthly cost of a water cooler refill, the optimal placement of yard signs, and how to respond when a conservative-majority school board uses procedural tricks to bypass an election. Things you can only learn with experience, hard work, and whatever it is that leads people to volunteer for it.

There are hundreds of these folks in Savannah today. Over a thousand, I’d guess. I’m sure some other state conventions are larger. Georgia, for all our work, isn’t fully organized yet. There are still counties without a committee. I hope next time there’ll be fewer of those and dozens more cadre Democrats here, but for now, Georgia’s corner of the Big Tent ain’t bad. A delegate near my seat speaks in tongues as the first openly gay legislator in Georgia history speaks about the state of democracy in Georgia. Again, I must emphasize all the blue.

This is the Democratic Party as I have come to know it. These folks, and the thousands more like them all across the country. We serve the cause of electing Democrats, which in the American party system, is the electoral proxy for making the world a better place. In a different party system, like a parliamentary democracy, there might be more options for this, but in our system, Democrats are the only viable ballot option to the left of Caligula.

That fact results from a web of state and federal laws built over the last century—sometimes with noble intentions, sometimes somewhat less so—which has resulted in a system where party organizations have no control over their own ballot line. Anyone can run as a Democrat; anyone can run as a Republican. Primaries determine who wins in each. In true American fashion, these laws vary somewhat from state to state, but the general thrust is largely the same.

In Georgia, if a candidate wants to run as a Democrat, they will go to a designated location (either the local board of elections, or the capitol in Atlanta), enter their name, pay their qualifying fee or file a pauper’s affidavit. For state and federal offices, the fee will be split between the state of Georgia and the Democratic Party of Georgia. For local seats, fees are split between the local board of elections and the Democratic county committee. At the local level, these fees are a major source of funding for party expenses which, often enough, include qualifying fees for other candidates who can’t afford them, but couldn’t qualify for a pauper’s affidavit.

The county committees are certified by the state party, which is certified by the Democratic National Committee. Like any democracy, the composition and leadership of these bodies are determined by whomever shows up. I was elected to Post Seat Holder by a voice vote of everyone in the room at my third business meeting. This grants me the ability to serve on the county executive committee, vote for members of the state committee, and makes me responsible for organizing Democratic volunteers in my district. The state committee votes on matters of the state party semi-annually, including bylaws, expenditures, and party leadership. It also votes for members of the DNC, who then perform similar duties at the national level. There are other roles, elected and appointed, and other committees and subcommittees. There are also regular agendas set by the party’s elected leadership (which, under Ken Martin, has been rebuilding the state parties). There is some nuance here. Again, like any democracy. But this is the structure and function of the formal Democratic Party in a nutshell. 

There are other organs outside of this system that merit an accounting, though. I’ve described the formal party, but there are also the PACs. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) serve as fundraising organs for Democrats in their respective chambers. State legislatures have similar operations. These PACs fall outside the formal Democratic Party, and neither the DNC nor any state party can dictate their business to them. They are controlled by the elected leadership of whichever elected body they’re designed to win, and operate independently. But I do think it’s fair to think of them as part of the Democratic Party in a more informal sense. Part of being the Big Tent is accepting that no one has control of everything inside the coalition.

When primary season rolls around, one candidate may get help from one of those PACs against the others. Incumbents always do, no questions asked. For primaries with no Democratic incumbent, they may choose a preferred candidate—usually one they recruited, as we saw in the Maine Senate primary earlier this year. As they’re independent of the party, that is their prerogative. For those of us inside the formal party organization, taking sides in a primary is rare, and can only be done after a vote. This is generally reserved for situations where one candidate is demonstrably unfit. Usually we simply canvass for the entire field, informing voters that the primary is ongoing without telling them how to vote.

No matter what, the winner of the primary is the party’s candidate. They have our full support. They may never get that last endorsement from Kristen Gillibrand, John Fetterman, or James Carville, but in the party itself, Vote Blue No Matter Who is the golden rule. They’ll get every drop of the party’s support we can spare, just like everyone else on the ticket.

The final piece that bears mentioning is the candidates. Whether incumbents or not, each candidate runs a campaign that constitutes an organization unto itself. If they so choose, they may never even speak to the party or the PACs. Many make that choice. I think that’s a mistake, but not always a fatal one. Despite this total independence, I think they merit consideration here because the voters themselves put them there. Most of them do coordinate with the party, though. Free money and volunteers are free money and volunteers, after all. 

Those are the basics. There are nuances and variations between states, but as a general picture to keep in your head, this is a decent one. As I said, it’s very decentralized, internally variable, and at times, a frustrating thing to be part of. But it’s what we have, and what we have is what we and our voters have created together.

This is not perfect. A lot has gone wrong in American politics. I worry about my party a lot. Will we do well enough to win? If we do, do we have the vision to see how badly we need to blaze a new trail for American democracy, rather than retreating to the ruins of a house already destroyed by the Republicans? If we have the vision, do we have the horses? I don’t know. I’ll never forget the sinking feeling I felt in 2009 when, after being asked about investigating the Bush administration for torture, Barack Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” We are well beyond the (considerable) damage of the Bush era here, something most Democratic electeds seem to realize. But I can’t get it out of my head. My biggest fear as a human being in 2026 is that all this corruption and authoritarianism is a fair sight beyond fleeting. That we, as a people, have locked in a cultural rejection of human dignity, good governance, science, and of true, justified belief. Decency. I lie awake at night and wonder if our age of expanding democracy is collapsing.

But at the convention, I’m thinking of my friend Jesse. I think of him primarily in terms of my bottomless bag of sports metaphors. He never turns down an opportunity to move the ball. He doesn’t know what “quit” means. There’s a certain canine in residence somewhere behind his ribcage. He couldn’t make it to Savannah because he’s managing volunteers and training for three counties across Middle Georgia. I’m thinking of Miss Evelyn, who is here, and who drives turnout like her hand’s on a plow and always makes sure the cussin’ at the business meetings is kept to a respectable minimum. I’m thinking of Kristen, my county chair, who has built her entire life around leaning on walls until they fall over, and teaching others how to do the same.

The sun is setting now. The politicians have mostly moved on for the day and the state committee is debating a bylaw change. I’m remembering the coordinated campaign office in East Point, on the south side of Atlanta. Jesse and I met Governor Wes Moore there, next to a gas station, in a storefront office that could’ve easily been a vape shop. The most anonymous place in the world. But it was full of saints with their hands in the dirt and their eyes on the horizon and I feel blessed to have met them.

In Dodge County, Democrats meet in the old schoolhouse where many of their mothers and grandmothers learned to read during Jim Crow. The Black community of Eastman saved it from the oblivion of a maliciously disinterested Republican municipal government, and turned it into a community center, a museum, and a meeting hall so full of the hard love of our country’s history that the red brick walls could just about kneel down and tell you about it. It seems like a temple. It feels something like holy. I find this sacred sense often now.

It’s in the folks who turn up at the office in Warner Robins too shy to knock doors, but happy to help, who don’t know how much it matters that someone is willing to address envelopes or run a vacuum in that graciously shared space. It’s in the woman who provided it to us. It’s in the pastors who share their pulpits, congregations, wisdom. It’s in the farmers and the law students and the careworkers.

It’s in the volunteers. The convention ended weeks ago now. The blue tide receded from Savannah’s shores, leaving the bars somewhat drier and the air somewhat lighter. I’m back home, back to work, back to my part in the midterm campaign. But if I can leave you with nothing else, understand this: volunteers build our party, drive it, and make democracy happen. If we can build a better 21st century, it will be because of these people—the unpaid, unsung soldiers of the republic. Among them you will find that rarest kind of creature: those who work for others and know they’ll never get anything in return. May the incense of their labors sweeten the breath of history.

Featured image credit author.