A mass-shooting survivor turned gun-control activist will help steer the Democratic Party’s political response to being shut out of federal power.
David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor and March for Our Lives co-founder, was elected vice chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday. He secured his position alongside two other vice chairs and new party chairman Ken Martin, the former head of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, to help lead the DNC’s efforts to regain electoral ground and combat the second Trump administration.
“I’m deeply grateful to the members for their trust and belief in me, and I don’t take it lightly,” Hogg wrote on X after winning his election. “Now it’s time to get to work.”
The changing of the guard atop the DNC comes as the party has been plagued by dejection, deep unpopularity, and internal recriminations in the aftermath of an election that saw the party lose control of the White House, Senate, and fail to retake the House. As the newly minted Republican trifecta continues to aggressively advance its agenda at a blistering pace, Democratic party insiders have scrambled to marshal a political response and re-capture voters formerly in their coalition, particularly working-class men in swing states that helped tip the election toward Donald Trump. The election of David Hogg suggests the party is unlikely to soften its stance on gun restrictions as part of that appeal.
Hogg, just 24 years old, rose to prominence in the aftermath of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. After a gunman attacked the school—where Hogg was a student at the time—killing 17 and wounding 17 others, he co-founded the group March for Our Lives and participated in nationwide protests calling for stricter gun laws that drew participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
He has continued to be a public advocate for gun control alongside other progressive causes. He is best known for pushing the Democratic party to enforce a hardline orthodoxy against gun rights.
“You have no right to a gun,” he wrote in a 2023 social media post. “You are not a militia. When you’re talking about your second amendment rights, you’re talking about a state’s right to have what is today the national guard. The modern interpretation of 2A is a ridiculous fraud pushed for decades by the gun lobby.”
“If you don’t support banning semi-automatic rifles you should leave the Democratic Party and join the Guns Over People party,” he wrote in another post later that year.
Hogg’s DNC candidacy drew the support of prominent Democratic figures, including Minnesota Governor and VP candidate Tim Walz and California congressman Eric Swalwell.
“From taking on the gun lobby to mobilizing millions of young people nationwide, he knows how to build movements that win,” Swalwell wrote in a statement on X.
With the election over and new blood coming in to steer the party’s future, the committee will be forced to work quickly to establish a gameplan as the opposition party and plan for upcoming off-year elections and the 2026 midterms. Ken Martin, the new chair elected to replace the outgoing Jaime Harrison, has said he plans to conduct a post-election review to get to the bottom of what went wrong for Democrats last November but has not yet committed to a broader plan for leading the party’s messaging approach.
For his part, Hogg seemed to suggest that his leadership role at the DNC would see him continue to pursue a confrontational style and encourage the party not to shy away from its stance on guns.
“We need to build a Democratic Party that is authentic, relatable, earns people’s trust, and wins again — and that stops apologizing for being who we are,” he said. “We have to stop being cowards—it’s time to be bold, aggressive, and to fight—just like we did after Parkland.”
