I became aware of David Hogg when, after surviving the 2018 Valentine’s Day school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, he became an outspoken advocate for gun violence control. Seven years later, almost to the day, he was elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). He’s still very young, obviously, and this has been a meteoric rise of power and influence.

In addition to his organizing on gun violence, Hogg founded in 2023 the Leaders We Deserve political action committee.  On Tuesday, he announced that the PAC will spend $20 million to support primary challengers against incumbent Democrats in Congress. The criteria for challenges in explicitly age. Hogg said his group would not challenge Democrats in battleground races and would not target anyone solely because of their age, but the goal is to replace older Democrats with younger ones.

The pushback was broad and immediate. Party organizations like the DNC, DSCC, DCCC, and DLCC are meant to help win elections, but also to serve incumbents.  They are not supposed to take sides in primaries, particularly against sitting members. Hogg argues that he isn’t using any DNC money for his effort and that it won’t detract from his focus on serving as vice-chair, but it can’t help but call his impartiality into question.

When Hogg called other DNC officials to inform them that Leaders We Deserve would would be “funding primary challenges to ‘asleep-at-the-wheel’ Democrats in safe-blue seats,” it caused an immediate uproar.

To be clear, there is no scenario in which incumbent Democrats serving in safe seats will welcome well-financed primary challengers, and there will always be people that think such an effort is a poor allocation of resources, particularly in an election cycle in which the Democrats are trying to win back the House. These objections are not binding on anyone. If people want to give money to challenge Democrats they think are doing a bad job, that’s democracy, and the answer for incumbents is to meet the challenge. Any objection to Hogg’s project that isn’t narrowly focused on his dual role as DNC vice-chair is nothing more than an opinion.

If you think that $20 million could be better spent some other way, well, that’s great. Maybe you should raise your own $20 million then so you can do things the way you see fit.

But if your objection is that by wearing two hats, Hogg will damage the DNC and thereby weaken the party, you at least have an argument to make that others should consider.

And this goes the other way, too. If you absolutely love the idea of replacing old ineffectual Democrats with younger blood, that doesn’t mean necessarily that the vice-chair of the DNC should be leading the charge. It could be that Hogg should choose one role or the other. After all, while he was certainly integral to raising the $20 million that has been budgeted for the project, I highly doubt that he needs to be actively involved in its implementation. He could step down from the PAC and disassociate himself from its future activities.

But don’t expect either side of this debate to be reasonable. Hogg’s detractors offer up strawmen arguments that he’ll risk battleground seats when he’s explicitly stated that he won’t target them. Hogg’s supporters ignore the importance of impartiality at the DNC and like organizations and spend all their time explaining why the party needs to get younger and fight back harder.

Talking past each other won’t resolve anything.

On the merits, I do think the party would benefit from an influx of young talent. Seniority and experience are important, too. I don’t know how you create a consistent criteria for who to target. Some critics see the effort as more ideological than cultural, or as basically an effort to push the party to the left. And that is not clearly what’s called for if the overarching goal is to win as many seats as possible. But standing up to the Trump administration isn’t really about left versus right or left versus moderate. It’s about temperament and courage and judgment. Getting younger might help, but being young by itself is no guarantee of anything. I guess that is where vetting comes into it, but if the vetting is driven by fundraising goals and fundraising is driven by ideological ardor, then…you can see how this can wind up becoming some kind of purity purge.

But, again, my opinion isn’t really important. If Leaders We Deserve wants to spend $20 million challenging incumbents, I’m not going to stop them. I do see an argument with merit that a DNC vice-chair should not be leading that effort. I’d rather Hogg stay on as vice-chair and leave the PAC business to others than have him forced out from his leadership position. People will still grumble, but it would be a decent solution that wouldn’t threaten the project and would reduce mistrust of the DNC.