Candidates for Democratic National Committee chair stand during the DNC Future of the Party Forum at the Sheraton Grand Phoenix Hotel on Jan. 14 in Phoenix. | AP Photo DNC candidates spend big on chair race

The electorate consists of just 447 voters, but candidates to be the next chair of th eDemocratic National Committee might end up spending a small fortune anyway.

The seven Democrats running to lead the national party expect the price of a successful campaign to be over six figures, with some party officials figuring that a winning bid might end up costing more than some congressional races.


“The cheapest race — contest, candidate, whatever — is going to be $100,000 and probably as much as half a million or more,” estimated Don Fowler Jr., who ran for DNC chair in 2005.

There are no spending figures available for the contest, which will be decided Feb. 23 at the DNC winter meeting in Atlanta. And staffers and candidates are loath to go on record about exactly how much much money they're aiming to raise or spend.

But according to interviews with candidates, their staffers and veterans of past DNC chair races, the price of entry this year is about $100,000, and some candidates could end up spending more than $500,000, depending on the size of the campaign and how long the candidate has been in the hunt for the post.

“We’ve raised, I think, around $75,000, so we’re doing good. I’d like to raise another $25,000 in the next two weeks or so. So that piece has been going fine,” said Idaho Democratic Party executive director Sally Boynton Brown, who entered the race in mid-December.

Simon Rosenberg, who ran for DNC chair against former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in 2005, guessed that his campaign spent $250,000 to $300,000 in what was essentially a two-month effort.

“In part, that’s because there was a lot of travel as there is in this one, just moving, going to these regional forums and bringing a handful of staff. We didn’t travel with a ton of people, but we traveled with some and that cost money,” said Rosenberg. “The structural reason that this is so expensive is that it’s actually organizationally very expensive to run for chair because the way the voting happens is that it’s very decentralized."

That organizational effort includes travel across the country to personally woo undecided DNC members and attending regional candidate forums. There’s also staff costs — several of this year’s candidates have formal campaign managers and designated fundraising directors running their operations. While none of the candidates travels with a significant entourage, a handful of staffers at the forums is par for the course.

“Believe it or not, running around the country, takes a lot more arms and legs than you think. We’re in a media environment today where it’s not just a handful of national newspapers anymore,” Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, said. “It is much more difficult to servicing the news in a national context today, so that takes a press staff.”

According to a member of Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison’s campaign, his DNC team alone numbers nearly 20. Ellison has moved his district director over to his campaign and brought on Nick Carter to help with DNC member outreach. Some of his staff have participated in mock debates ahead of the DNC forums. The Minnesota congressman, who announced his bid in November, also has a press secretary just for the DNC effort as well as a communications director.

Similarly, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez has a campaign manager, multiple communications staffers, and Clayton Cox, the former southern regional finance director for the DNC. Boynton Brown, Buckley, and Harrison have a handful of paid staff each. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, a small city, has a campaign manager, general consultant, outreach director, and media consultants and communications staffers.

Rosenberg recalled that he had a staff of about 30 — and his campaign manager alone was paid about $10,000 a month. His staff included Jill Daschle, the daughter-in-law of the former Senate Democratic leader, as a fundraiser to boost his coffers.

The methods of raising the cash necessary to compete range from email solicitations to more formal events. For the candidates, it’s good practice for a job in which fundraising is an essential component.

Ellison, according to his team, has held fundraisers so far in Minneapolis and San Francisco. Perez held a Washington, D.C., fundraiser on Thursday co-hosted by his team and a host of top names in the Democratic fundraising community: Jeremy Bird, a former top Obama strategist, Sam Brown, a former DNC finance chief of staff, and Meaghan Burdick, who ran marketing for the campaign arms of the Senate and House Democrats, respectively..

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison, who has held fundraisers in his home state and is planning to do more in New York and D.C., notes that fundraising is easier for elected officials like Ellison or Buttigieg, who have fundraising infrastructures in place, than it is for party officials like himself or New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley or Boynton Brown.

“It's a challenge, particularly in such a short time frame after a presidential election, when there’s so much donor fatigue already. It is an extreme advantage to have a congressional campaign account or whatever account that you can utilize and tap into in order to pay for this,” Harrison said.

Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network and one of the last DNC candidates to drop out of the race against Dean, said he lasted as long as he did because of his fundraising strength.

“In part, I had been raising money for years among party people, and it was one of the reasons I was able to raise money very rapidly,” he said. “Look, one of the reasons I was competitive, I had already been out raising money among party people. I’d been deeply involved among elections, and I got endorsed by people like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. I had a huge national footprint of elected officials that supported me. But the other piece of it was, I worked in 49 out of 50 states, so I had somebody who was politically connected who I could call on in every state. Many of these other people [currently] running don’t really have a similar footprint.”

It’s a lot of work for a job that isn’t all that appealing, said Democratic strategist Eric Adelstein.

“It's a thankless job. The only benefit is, you get floor passes to the Democratic National Convention,” Adelstein said. “Other than that, that’s a lot of money to spend for floor passes to the convention. You could be a donor to the party and get that.”"