Nathan Daschle, left, is convinced of the power of the technology. Son of Dem royalty creates a Ruck.us

He no longer has a corner office on K Street or even a secretary. Producers don’t clamor to book him on cable shows anymore. Nobody speculates these days whether he might run for office.

Nathan Daschle is running all right — in the other direction. The former Democratic Governors Association executive director is sprinting as far as he can from the life he seemed born to lead, a path that seemed almost predictable for the charismatic and edgily dashing son of a former Senate majority leader.


Less than two years removed from his days at the DGA, Daschle, 38, has gone from prominent party hack to registered nonpartisan and from reciting rigid talking points to talkin’ about an Internet political revolution. Nowadays he toils in a shoebox office in Logan Circle equipped with a lonely MacBook and adorned with drawings by his sons showing him asking people for startup money.

Daschle knows it’s no original thought that America’s two-party system is broken and increasingly unpopular, but he speaks with the zealotry of the converted about the power of the technology — perhaps via his own Web startup Ruck.us — to upend it. And this from a guy who didn’t think of himself as a techie until he discovered Twitter.

“History is littered with failed attempts to reform the system, but never before have we had the connectivity that we have now, and I felt there was something really powerful there,” said Daschle, having shucked power suits for tight Alexander McQueen T-shirts that show off tattoo-scribbled biceps.

“We can now replicate core political party functions online,” Daschle adds. “Political parties basically do three things: They bring together like-minded people. They share ideas and information. And then they take collective action. You don’t need political parties to do those things anymore. You can do all those things with social media.”

From an outsider, such talk might be easy to dismiss. But Daschle was the ultimate insider, named only 20 months ago by Time magazine as one of 40 politicos under 40 to watch. His father, Tom, was elected to Congress when Nathan was 5 and became Senate minority leader when Nathan was in college. His mother is President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Denmark, his stepmother is a prominent lobbyist and his sister is a top aide to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Before his DGA stint, Nathan worked on campaigns, openly contemplated running for office himself and even encouraged his father to run for president in 2004. (Daschle didn’t and lost his Senate reelection bid that year.)

Yet having flown so close to the sun, Nathan Daschle has now disavowed the Democratic domination of his family’s business. The fastest-growing voter bloc, he frequently mentions, is made up of independents, and that’s because people like him have turned political discourse into a self-defeating, uncompromising endeavor.

As DGA head, “I had to go attack all the Republicans and defend all the Democrats,” he said. “You couldn’t answer a question and say, ‘Oh, that’s a good point.’ It’s, ‘Here’s why they’re right, and here’s why you’re wrong. And all the governors are wrong on the other side, and all the governors are right on our side.’”

Daschle did it but didn’t enjoy it. “The whole idea that some of these governors, with whom I had nothing in common but a party name, that’s who I had to support over some Republican governors with whom I probably had a lot more in common, it just seemed weird to me,” he said. “I just said, ‘If I don’t believe in the party structure, there’s no reason for me to be in the party.’”

The DGA gig was personally “soul-crushing” — but also, he realized, not a serious way to further the public good. Forcing both voters and advocates to choose between the same two flavors of politics that existed a century ago, he said, ignores the hallmark of this modern technological age: Infinite choice in every other pursuit.

Daschle’s gamble, then, is that providing an online political smorgasbord via Ruck.us could change how people view politics and become profitable for him as a way beyond the traditional means for campaigns to reach potential voters.

The site, which launched four months ago and has 20,000 accounts, sorts users into groups based on the issues they care about rather than party. Such groups — dubbed “rucks” — are Facebook-style issue boards where members post articles of interest and discuss possible actions from writing to senators to organizing a protest. Perhaps, he hopes, a same-sex marriage supporter who also favors a hawkish Israel policy may find a way to work with like-minded folks despite where they might land on the bipolar political continuum.

One investor is his famous father. The former South Dakota senator and failed Obama nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services isn’t quitting the Democrats anytime soon, but he admires his son’s sudden hopscotch away from his footsteps.

“He has come to the conclusion that there are a lot of people who feel just as passionately about the issues but don’t feel bound by partisan strategies around these issues,” the former senator told POLITICO. “To a certain extent both parties are failing to convince a lot of voters that party ID is a strength or an asset. For a lot of people like me, it’s a wake-up call.”

And Rich Tafel, former head of the gay political action group Log Cabin Republicans and a Ruck.us advisory board member, views the younger Daschle as “the best person to get this done. … He comes from Democrat Party royalty and, to be blunt, D.C. could be his playground if he just decided to play the partisan game. He’s risked his political and personal career. He’s been attacked by those in his party. He’s risked for his values. That’s hard to find.” (Other advisory board members include former George W. Bush adviser Mark McKinnon and Michael Bloomberg campaign manager Bradley Tusk.)

If some partisans are predictably critical of Daschle’s defection, tech folks as well as those already toiling outside the two-party world find his ideas naive and the execution in the form of Ruck.us banal and clunky. Daschle promises to improve the user experience, but skeptics doubt it’ll matter unless the winner-take-all Electoral College is abolished.

“Plots to disrupt the two-party system through technology tend to all have the same basic flaw: They treat politics like commercial markets,” said Dave Karpf, a George Washington University communications professor and author of “The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy.”

“Our two-party system doesn’t form out of a market problem; it forms out of an electoral-system design,” Karpf said. “The party coalition that attracts a plurality of voters wins everything. The party coalition that comes in second wins nothing. That yields two parties. Every time. New information technologies haven’t made that irrelevant. … I am frankly astonished that the ex-executive director of the Democratic Governors Association does not understand this. It’s pretty basic stuff.”

Sometimes, though, it takes people like Daschle to step out like this, said his one-time debating adversary Nick Ayers, former executive director of the Republican Governors Association. Ayers recalled talking with Daschle about the problems inherent in their respective hard-line roles early on in their tenures, and he said the two quietly agreed in 2007 that under their watches the DGA and RGA would no longer sue one another over minute procedural issues. “I believed the DGA was run by an ethical guy and he believed the same,” Ayers said. “It was a waste of each committee’s resources. We shook hands on it and never went after each other again that way.”

Whether Ruck.us works out — he wouldn’t say how much money he’s got invested in the site except to call it “a lot” — Daschle seemed comfortable that he’s taken a one-way ride away from his old life. That said, he compares his business experience to one of his very un-Washington hobbies, boxing.

“Startups are a lot like that; in many ways, they absolutely suck,” Daschle said. “In many ways, they’re really, really tough. And the fear of failure, I’m not going to lie to you, it’s very palpable. And the fear of failing big is very, very palpable, and it weighs on me.”