Jane Kleeb for
ASDC President
Since December 2016, Jane Kleeb has served as the Chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. She has been re-elected three additional times. Jane serves on the Executive Committees of both the Democratic National Committee and the Association of State Democratic Committees. She was a leader on the DNC Unity and Reform Commission and the ASDC Committee on the Future.
Under Chair Kleeb’s leadership, Democrats elected up and down the ballot have grown from 500 in 2016 to over 900 in 2023. Innovative programs such as Block Captains, 93-County Voter Guides, Frank LaMere Rural Grassroots Fellows and the Candidates of Color Fund were created under her term.
For her years of work in rural communities, Jane was named a Climate Breakthrough awardee in 2023, the highest honor in the climate change field. Jane is setting out to create a new project called Energy Builders that works with rural communities to change the economic model of large-scale clean energy projects to benefit the people who live on the land that is creating America’s next 100 years of energy.
Jane is the author of Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America, published in 2020.
Profiled by PBS in their short-film, “Blue Wind on a Red Prarie” and in the New York Times magazine, “Jane Kleeb vs the Keystone XL Pipeline” Jane is always working to elevate the national conversation on “red and rural” states.
In her professional work, Jane protects property rights while building an engaged base of citizens who care about the land and water. In 2010, she founded Bold Nebraska, which later became the Bold Alliance, a network of “small but mighty” coalitions in rural states working to protect the land and water with a focus on land justice and energy freedom with projects from the Pipeline Fighters Hub to the Easement Action Teams.
Jane started her career as a Commissioner and then training director for Florida’s Commission on National and Community Service. She went on to serve as one of the youngest directors of an AmeriCorps project and then assisted a national AmeriCorps project develop their literacy and youth outreach programs.
As Executive Director of the Young Democrats of America from 2004 to 2007, Jane implemented the first-ever national youth coordinated campaign to mobilize young voters and worked with an alliance of diverse groups ranging from Punk Voters to Stonewall Democrats creating the “hangouts and home” model of voter outreach. Jane went on to be the co-founder of the DNC’s Youth Council, bringing together the Young Democrats, College Democrats, and other organizations to enshrine youth engagement into the institution of the Democratic Party.
Jane worked for MTV as their Street Team reporter in 2007 and for years was a regular contributor on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.
As Nebraska State Director of the SEIU Change That Works Project in 2008–2010, she brought together leaders from advocacy, faith groups, doctors, farmers, ranchers, and small businesses to secure a key vote for passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Jane has a B.A. in religious studies from Stetson University and an M.A. in international training and education from American University. She served as an elected Hastings School Board Member and currently serves on the boards of Our Revolution, Equation Campaign, Jane Fonda PAC and the Rural Democracy Initiative.
She currently lives in rural Nebraska with her husband Scott and three daughters– Kora, Maya, and Willa.
We can learn lessons from the past several cycles on why we are not connecting with more voters–inlcuding our base and voters who are not Democrats but are also tired of corporate interests drowning out new ideas to lift up working and middle class families.
We can no longer operate as a battleground state party where funding and focus is on 7 states and the rest of us are to fend for ourselves. Blue, red and purple states all need to be funded since there are elections to win in every state.
The budget is the beginning and the end to all other reforms. This is how we fund the national and state infrastructure that is supposed to be built to expand our brand and win elections. Right now DNC members, even state party chairs, are never given the budget. If we attend the Budget and Finance Committee meeting, we are not allowed to ask questions. Only members of the Finance committee can ask questions. That is about 8 people out of 450 DNC Members. And, the people appointed to the Finance committee are decided only by the DNC Chair (and when we control the White House, even the DNC Chair has little say since it is all controlled by the White House staff), meaning no questions, no issues get brought up.
The DNC is made up of 50 states and 7 territories as well as the Democrats Abroad group. Only 8-10% of the DNC budget goes to fund the core of our party.When Howard Dean implemented the successful “50 State Strategy,” an idea that came from state parties, we won major elections in 2006 and we laid the ground for the massive Obama wins. But, instead of doubling down on our infrastructure in every state, not just battlegrounds, we went from $25,000 a month to $2,500 a month to every state party. What do you think happened next? We lost over 1,500 state level offices. We have made progress to getting state parties to now $12,500 a month (red states get $15,000), but we are still a sliver of the overall budget and yet all the work happens in the states, not in the DNC headquarters. We need to take the next steps also to ensure state parties are funding county parties and building infrastructure in every zip code because we can win elections in every zip code.
Two years is simply not enough time to implement ideas as a Chair and Vice Chair. Four-year terms will ensure leadership teams go through both a mid-term and presidential cycle. Four years begins to give Chairs and Vice Chairs time to fully understand the complexity of their roles. Many of our Chairs are unpaid and given they are the core to a state party, we should ensure there is funding to provide a salary and health insurance. Conflicts of interest should be thoroughly vetted for our party’s leaders.
The Young Democrats of America left the DNC years ago thinking they could build more power and raise more money as a 527. That started a major divide between the College Democrats (who stayed at the DNC) and the Young Democrats. Despite all of that history, we simply do not fund young voter outreach. This election cycle, the DNC gave the Young Democrats of America a donation of $20,000. How are you to organize on $20,000? Voter registration over the years has been handed to non-partisan groups so donors can get a bigger tax break. The problem with this is the first contact a voter has should be a partisan one where young people are making the case to their peers on why they should become a Democrat because when someone votes for a party three times in a row they become a party voter for life. Instead, we are watching the Independent numbers grow and one of the reasons is basic infrastructure.
Right now the way we govern inside the DNC is with committees,the big three are Rules and Bylaws, Platform and Resolutions, Budget and Finance. The DNC Chair appoints the chairs and members of these committees. There is no rule to say the committees must have a certain amount of state party leaders versus appointed DNC members (the Chair appoints 75 At-Large members, which became a rule to diversify the DNC years ago and now is used to appoint consultants and coastal people who will go along with whatever the DNC tell them to vote). There is also no rule that says the committee members must be regionally balanced. So, we are left with people, mostly from the DC area, making decisions like the Presidential Primary schedule, who have NO experience of implementing the rules and plans they put in place. We do not have enough diversity of thought on the committees which should be places we are constantly reforming. Instead, they are rubber stamps and we end up with primary schedules, debate rules, etc that are unfair and tilt towards the establishment.
We are a big tent party which means generic talking points from DC often do not land in the states which are diverse and have our own issues and dynamics happening at any moment. We need more podcasts, more blogs, more paid media to communicate with voters all the time not just 6 months before an election. We need more shareable content as well as funding to create more videos/social media content at the state and local level. Our party should not fit into a message box. We should embrace the big tent we have which means embracing new ways to communicate with our insiders, pundits and most importantly voters.
