I decided to become an activist at 8 years old.
When most kids were passionate about baseball or Barbie dolls, I got myself excited about lit drops and canvasses.
This wasn't by accident – I grew up in a struggling working class family in Keene, New Hampshire, and even then, I could see that the deck was stacked against families like mine. Growing up in the 1960s, I was horrified by how people were treated cruelly just because of how they were born. This was especially personal for me, as a kid just coming to terms with being gay.
It wasn't fair and it wasn't justice for all. To help, I got involved in Democratic politics, inspired by now-icons like the Bay Area's own Harvey Milk. It's humbling that I've now received the endorsement of Milk's gay nephew, Stuart Milk, in this race for chair of the Democratic Party.
When I was 15 I volunteered every day for Jimmy Carter, and I never looked back. By now I've held just about every position available in my state's Democratic Party.
Now in my fifth term as chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, I know what it takes to build a winning state party.
When I grew up in New Hampshire, Republicans laughed at the idea that they even had to compete with Democrats. Now, in the last 10 years, Democrats have won 11 out of 13 statewide races, five out of six gubernatorial elections, three out of four U.S. Senate elections, and nine out of 12 U.S. House elections.
The culmination of all this is that today, our entire congressional delegation is Democratic. It has to be noted that it's also the very first all-Democratic, all-female delegation in this country's history.
We only accomplished all that because we did it at the grassroots. Action on Capital Hill or on K Street doesn't win elections; action in neighborhoods does. We've kept people engaged – and turning out to vote – even in midterm years like 2014.
After we bucked the national trend in 2014, we did a deep dive to find out how we did it, and the data showed that we did the best in the towns that had the most active local Democratic committees. The communities that had local volunteers talking to their neighbors, knocking on doors, and making the phone calls were the ones that delivered for our candidates.
It worked again in 2016. We were the only purple state to pick up a U.S. Senate seat, and we delivered our electoral votes for Hillary Clinton. We were able to withstand a late Republican surge because of the time we put in the grassroots. This is exactly what we need to do in every single state, and the Democratic National Committee needs to be the driving force behind it.
I'm running for chair because I'm the best-equipped person to build that grassroots organization. I've got a detailed plan for investing in state parties and radically reforming the DNC. Anything less than that won't get the job done.
You can view my plans for state parties and the DNC online, but a big part of this is that $50 million more for TV ads isn't going to help us. No one likes them, and that approach has clearly failed us. We will instead use those resources to build a progressive infrastructure like we've never seen before.
Of equal importance going forward is the need to restore trust that the DNC is fair and neutral in primaries.
In 2015 when my secretary of state was saying that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) couldn't be on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary because he wasn't registered in Vermont as a Democrat, I told him I'd take him to court. I escorted Sanders personally to the secretary of state's office when he filed to make sure there would not be a problem.
I did that because it isn't the place of party officials to take sides. Our job is to organize primary elections without interfering with the voters' intentions, and that's why I never endorsed a primary candidate while I've been chair. Sanders' voters deserved to be heard, and it was my duty to ensure they were. No one should ever get the sense that a finger is being placed on the scale for any candidate, and that includes my proposal to ban joint fundraising agreements between candidates and the DNC during primaries.
Additionally, too often in the current system, the DNC chair makes unilateral decisions without explanation. That has to end. For example, why is the presidential debate schedule decided just by the chair? That doesn't make sense to me – under my plan, debate schedules and criteria would be approved by the entire executive committee so a more diverse group has a say.
We're the party of inclusion, the party of the middle class, and the party that created and fostered the modern American dream for all Americans, including LGBT Americans. We're the descendants of public servants who made our union more perfect: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson. We must be worthy of their legacy.
I want to rebuild this party from the ground up. I hope California Democratic Party delegates will decide to support me for chair, but more importantly I hope you will take the issues I've outlined here to heart. We have a lot of work to do, and we all have a part in building a party that works.
Ray Buckley is running for chair of the national Democratic Party. For more information, visit http://www.RayForDNC.com.