David Hogg (center, facing camera) at a forum for candidates running to be a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in January 2025.Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via AP Images
“It’s all gas, no brakes.” For David Hogg, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, there’s little time away from politics right now, especially considering his $20 million campaign to disrupt his own party.
Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and gun control advocate, is looking to oust what he calls “asleep at the wheel” incumbents in primaries around the US through his political action committee, Leaders We Deserve. It’s a strategy that has won him admirers and detractors, especially from the Democratic establishment, who say he shouldn’t be meddling in primaries, considering he’s now a party boss. So far, Hogg isn’t backing down. But he argues that it might get him kicked out of the DNC altogether. The party is set to vote June 9 to decide whether to redo Hogg’s election.
Just seven years ago, Hogg was a high school senior in Parkland, taking speech and debate classes and prepping for college. But all that changed when a former student entered his school and committed the largest mass shooting at a US high school. Hogg quickly co-founded the student-led organization March For Our Lives and became one of the nation’s most prominent gun control activists. Today, he’s the first member of Gen Z to be a vice chair at the DNC and, through Leaders We Deserve, is aggressively challenging the party’s status quo to generate “an attitudinal shift.”
“What we’re trying to do is say, across the board, Democrats need to stand up and fight harder,” says Hogg, whose PAC is trying to recruit a fresh slate of young candidates. “And if there’s somebody that feels nervous about potentially being challenged as a member of Congress, they should ask themselves why that is ultimately.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Hogg discusses why he’s ruled out running for office himself and how the anger he felt after the shooting in Parkland still drives him today.
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Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Parkland shooter entered the same building as David Hogg. The shooter entered an adjacent school building.
