Mitch Landrieu, A Harris Campaign Leader, Rules Out DNC Chair Run
Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor and co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, is not running for chair of the Democratic National Committee, he told HuffPost on Monday.
“I never really thought about it much, to be honest with you,” he said, attributing his inclusion on short lists of potential candidates to Democrats who appreciate his work. “It’s nice to be thought of as somebody that can help, and evidently, a couple of people thought that.”
Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Landrieu worked in the White House to oversee the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly known as the bipartisan infrastructure law.
Asked whether he plans to seek a different role in public life in the coming four years, Landrieu replied, “I haven’t made that decision yet.”
Other candidates considering a run to lead the Democratic National Committee include Ben Wikler, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair; Ken Martin, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair; and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, officially announced his run for the leadership post on Monday.
Landrieu, who is also a former lieutenant governor of Louisiana and brother to former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), attributed Harris’ election loss to the salience of inflation and border security.
“You can’t pick the environment that you’re running in,” Landrieu said. “Although we don’t have all the data yet … it is looking as though the public was really keyed into inflation and immigration, and they did a better job of communicating those than we did.”
Landrieu invited some kind of party-wide analysis of what went wrong for Democrats this cycle, but he declined to say whether it should be a centralized effort of the kind Republicans undertook in 2012.
He also refused to second-guess Harris campaign decisions or single out areas where he believes Democrats writ large are out of sync with voters.
When pressed, however, on whether there needed to be a place in the party for people like former Louisiana Gov. Jon Bel Edwards (D), an abortion rights opponent, or Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who has taken flak since the election for coming out against letting transgender girls and women compete in women’s sports, Landrieu was emphatic that there needed to be.
“We should be an open-minded, big-shoulder party,” he said. “You don’t have to be ideologically bent. You can be very practical. You have to win elections and you have to solve problems. It’s not just about winning arguments.”
As for what would bind together a more ideologically accommodating Democratic Party, Landrieu said, “We believe that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. We believe in a pluralistic, multiracial society. We believe in democracy, not autocracy. We believe in lifting people up from the bottom up, not the top down. We don’t believe that giving tax breaks to billionaires is going to help trickle down in a way that can build generational wealth.”
In addition, Landrieu predicted that President-elect Donald Trump would overinterpret his mandate and pursue major changes that anger voters, such as the massive, across-the-board cuts to federal government services and personnel that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, leaders of the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” have suggested are in the offing.
“I know a lot about cutting and how you cut,” Landrieu said, citing 20% budget cuts he enacted as mayor of New Orleans during a period of fiscal austerity following the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession. “The thing that you don’t do is put a bomb under the building and blow it up.”
