“You’ve got to have a vision to strengthen the grass roots” at the Democratic Party’s local levels, Rep. Keith Ellison said. | Getty Ellison: Democrats need to focus less on donors

Rep. Keith Ellison, reported to be planning a run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Sunday that his party will mount a comeback after a disastrous 2016 election cycle by focusing harder on voters and less on donors.

Ellison has not yet officially announced plans to mount a bid to be his party’s chairman but has already earned the endorsement of incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). If he were to win, he would be given the unenviable task of rebuilding the suddenly scuffling Democratic Party, which is without a clear path forward after it failed not only to win the White House but also a majority in the Senate, both of which were anticipated before Election Day.


The Minnesota Democrat told ABC’s “This Week”: “You’ve got to have a vision to strengthen the grass roots” at the party’s local levels and that “the most important criteria for a DNC chair is going to be vision.”

“Well, I do believe that we should have to make the voters first. Not the donors first. I love the donors, and we thank them, but it has to be that the guys in the barbershop, the lady at the diner, the folks who are worried about their plant is going to close — they’ve got to be our focus,” Ellison said. “They’ve got to be a laser-beam focus on everything we do, and everything we do should animate and empower them at the grass-roots level for working people across this country. That’s how we come back.”

Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign “picked on people’s fears or anxieties, and he gave them somebody to blame,” Ellison said, while Hillary Clinton’s failed to connect with the working-class voters who have historically backed Democrats in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He said the late October announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the bureau was examining additional evidence related to Clinton’s long-running email scandal “changed the conversation” around the two candidates.

“The conversation should’ve been about middle-class people. The conversation should’ve been about how to raise the minimum wage and strengthen Social Security,” he said. “But then we started talking about this whole email stuff again.”

Ellison would not officially commit to running for the DNC chair, telling host George Stephanopoulos only that “I’ll have something to say real soon.”

Filmmaker and liberal activist Michael Moore said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Ellison, an African-American and the first Muslim elected to Congress, is “the exact way to go,” because he is representative of the nation’s changing demographics.