People who are new to working in US politics often assume, wrongly, that US political parties are, like, some European parties, highly centralized, top-down entities. They are the exact opposite.
First, there is no one national party organization. In addition to the DNC, the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D-trip) and the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee play a role in Senate and House elections.
Second the national Democratic Party is a federation of fifty state parties that are largely independent of the national party. The members of the DNC are elected by those state parties. Those state parties are run by a committee that in most states are elected by the voters. But in a some cases—fewer than in the past—local party organizations influence those elections. In any case, local party organizations are usually independent of the state parties and vary a great deal in type, strength, and efficacy. In most cases, they are not terribly influential.
Third the most important task of any political party is to nominate candidates and in the United States most of those decisions are made by primaries or, in the case of the presidential nominee, by a series of primaries and caucuses. National and state parties have very little influence on the voters in caucuses and primaries. Very few local party organizations have much influence on them either.
Here is what the DNC does:
- It sets the general rules for the electing members of the committee that state party committees must follow.
- It creates the rules for the Democratic National Convention and the overall process by which delegates are elected to it.
- It determines based on a formula based on population and democratic vote how many delegates each state gets.
- It creates the rules that require an equal number of men and women to be elected as delegtes.
- It creates an overall schedule for primaries and caucuses, determines how early the earliest primaries and caucuses may take place and how late the latest ones may take place.
- It determines whether there will be any super-delegates, and if so, who they will be.
- It proposes rules for the Democratic convention, although the convention may overturn them. (E.g., early in the 20th century a 2/3rds vote was necessary to nominate a Democratic candidate and the “unit rule” required that each state cast it’s votes as one, as determined by the majority of each state.)
- It forms joint fundraising agreements with any candidate for president that agrees to do so, which enables the candidate to raise more money and also provides some funding for the party.
All of these rules are set long before the presidential nominating process begins.
Here is what the DNC does not do:
- It does not determine whether each state has a primary or caucus to elect delegates. That is set by the legislatures of the state in the case of a primary and, I believe, by the state party in the case of a caucus.
- It does not set the exact dates of primaries or caucuses. They are set by state legislatures and state parties. The rules it sets—see above—set limits one those dates because states that don’t follow the rules may see their delegates not be allowed to vote. But those limits are quite broad.
- It does endorse primary candidates for any office.
- It does not fundraise for primary candidates for any office.
- It does not run television advertisements for any primary candidates for any office.
Thus the DNC does not engage in any major activity that is likely to help one or another candidate for president.
That’s not to say that the DNC chair or executive director do not have opinions about which candidate for president they prefer. They do. And, especially when one candidate early in the raise, as Hillary Clinton was in both 2008 and 2016 is heavily favored by most state party leaders and most elected Democrats, the DNC may make some decisions that are going to help the heavily favored candidate because it is widely, if probably falsely, believed that a quick end to the conflict over the presidential nomination helps the party nominee win in November. Thus the DNC provided some marginal help to Hillary in both 2008 and 2016. In 2016, for example, it scheduled relatively few debates and held them early.
But as we saw in both 2008 and 2016, the DNC’s minor steps to help the front running candidate did not prevent that candidate from being challenged, and in 2008, losing. And those minor steps are often challenged effectively by the supporters of other candidates.
Thus, for example, after Bernie supporters challenged the limited number of debates, a large number were added to the schedule.Barack Obama ran a very strong campaign in the 2008 nominating process and decisively defeated Hillary Clinton even though the DNC provided some marginal help to Hillary. Bernie ran a strong but not as strong campaign in the 2016 nominating process and was decisively defeated by Hillary.
The DNC have very little influence on that result. Given how it is structured and what it does it could not have had much influence. Anyone who has read the emails stolen from the DNC by the Russians and released by wikileaks will see that DNC officials did prefer Hillary to Bernie. They will also see no evidence that the DNC did anything that had much influence on let alone determined the Democratic nomination in 2016.