New DNC vice-chair David Hogg on reaching young voters: ‘We need to be a tsunami of content’

David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting turned gun safety and youth leadership advocate, won his race for one of the Democratic national committee’s vice-chair positions on Saturday, becoming the first member of gen Z to take on a national leadership role within the party.

As he assumes his position, Hogg, 24, has set his sights on crafting a more authentic message to reach the young and working-class voters who supported Donald Trump in November, and he warned that Democrats will remain shut out of power unless they respond to the most pressing priorities of their constituents.

“Part of what I want to do, too, is show young people that the party does care about them, that we are fighting for them, and that things are not just going to be the same after this election,” Hogg told the Guardian.

Democrats’ poor performance in November, when they lost not only the White House but both chambers of Congress, has sparked much introspection among party leaders. In Hogg’s view, Democrats failed in the presidential election because they lost touch with what voters wanted, ignoring their concerns until it was too late to course-correct.

“Voters were telling us two things in this election. They were telling us that prices were too high and Joe Biden was too old, and effectively with $2bn behind us, we spent that money telling people not to believe their wallets and not to believe their eyes,” Hogg said.

Hogg is confident that he and the other members of the DNC leadership team – including the new chair, Ken Martin – are well equipped to steer the party in a bolder direction. Some Democrats had expressed dissatisfaction with the chair race, arguing that the candidates were falling short in reckoning with the root causes of the party’s electoral defeat. Faiz Shakir, the former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders who launched a last-minute and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the chair role, said the race was defined by a “lack of ambition and a sense of powerlessness about what the DNC could potentially do”.

But Hogg expressed optimism about Martin’s leadership, citing his experience running the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor party as evidence of his fitness to rebuild the party.

“I know he has been working every single day since his election to get us back to winning, making the phone calls and having the conversations necessary to get us there, and I’m incredibly excited to work with him,” Hogg said.

Democrats will have their work cut out for them, as the past few weeks have demonstrated. As Democrats have publicly wrestled with the question of how much energy to spend on criticizing Trump versus presenting their own positive vision for the country, the new administration has unleashed a torrent of controversial – and, in some cases, legally suspect – executive orders on everything from immigration to telework policies for federal employees.

Hogg believes that Democrats need to be doing more to respond to Trump’s policies in real time, shedding light on the ramifications of the president’s efforts to shutter the foreign aid agency USAid and block funding for crucial government services.

“Donald Trump is a fire hose that is just constantly pumping out content,” Hogg said. “And we’re kind of like a watering can when what we need to be is a tsunami of content.”

It can be exhausting trying to keep up with the constant churn of Trump’s announcements, Hogg acknowledged, but he thinks that effective social media practices can help Democrats determine voters’ top priorities and then guide the party’s strategy.

“There is so much that is happening right now between the stuff with USAid to the stuff with the Federal Aviation Administration to issues with Head Start … It is overwhelming. There’s no single person that can talk about it,” Hogg said.

“I think the way that we approach it though is, we give the opportunity to the people to tell us through their likes and their engagement with the content that different members produce – through livestreams, through different videos – what they actually are most interested in.”

Hogg pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s direct-to-camera livestreams on Instagram and Representative Sara Jacobs’s “get ready with me” videos, in which she explains her legislative priorities while applying makeup, as two examples of how Democrats can produce more relatable content.

“As much as I enjoy press conferences, I think a lot of the time they’re too formal,” Hogg said. “People want to be spoken to like human beings. They don’t want to be given a bunch of talking points. They want to be told the truth, but they want to be told it as well in a way that is authentic and real.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Democrats right now is the widespread sense of hopelessness among their supporters given that Republicans have a governing trifecta in Washington, leaving congressional Democrats with few options to block Trump’s agenda.

Democrats will have a chance to take back the House in 2026, but in the meantime, Hogg urged the party’s members to get involved in special elections. Democrats have already seen some success in special elections this year; last month, they flipped an Iowa state Senate district that Trump carried by 21 points in November. In the coming months, Democrats will compete in at least three special House elections, where seats have become vacant as Republicans have joined the Trump administration.

“We need to do more on our social media to talk about what special elections are going on around the country to give people a small piece of hope,” Hogg said.

Hogg emphasized that the work to rebuild the party would require the active participation of all Democrats, particularly the youngest Democrats. He was motivated to run for vice-chair after noting the utter lack of young leaders in the room as the DNC held post-mortem meetings after the election.

“We are at a crisis point in our country, and it is calling on us to stand up to fight to protect it and fight back against this oligarchy that is taking over our government,” Hogg said. “But it’s going to only be possible to do that if people stand up and get more involved in the party and create the Democratic party that they want to see.”