AUSTIN, Texas — Democratic National Committee members spent their summer meeting projecting a united front against President Trump and saying the gathering of party leaders was about “infrastructure,” not ideology.
Beneath the choreography, divisions kept resurfacing, with clashes between the establishment Democrats and socialist insurgents over how to dismantle Mr. Trump’s immigration force and which side to back in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They hit an impasse over whether to call for “abolishing” or simply “reforming” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By the Saturday conclusion of the three-day meeting, the solution was to pass both an “abolish” resolution and a “reform” resolution rather than choose just one.
Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel factions traded raw, personal accounts of pain over deadly conflict. The DNC punted taking a policy stand until a report on the issue is delivered at the winter meeting, which is traditionally held in January or February — after this year’s midterm elections.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin played down the ideological divisions as part of being a “big tent” party.
“We have conservative Democrats with centrists. We’ve got progressives like me. We’ve got leftists. All are welcome in this party — all voices. But don’t tell me there’s only one way to be a Democrat. Don’t tell me there’s only one stripe to wear,” Mr. Martin told a gathering of LGBTQ activists during the DNC summer meeting at the Hilton Austin Downtown.
Asked by The Washington Times about party unity, Mr. Martin said his party would win in November.
“We’re confident, but we’re not complacent,” he said. “We’re working as hard as we can to make sure we win every election.”
Still, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a past DNC chairman, said the rifts carry big risks in a year when Democrats expect to win back control of the House majority and possibly the Senate.
“Democrats are trashing fellow Democrats. I got a simple message for you: knock it off or get off the playing field. Because we have too much work to do,” Mr. McAuliffe said Saturday. “I’m a little tired of all of this stuff you hear every day about all of these labels … moderate, progressive, whatever, liberal.”
In the end, Democrats left Austin without resolving many of the biggest issues facing the party, including a midterm election cash crunch compared to the Republican National Committee.
However, the DNC set a new presidential primary nominating schedule for 2028. The Democratic race begins in the deep South instead of the Midwest.
Though they couldn’t decide how to take on ICE, Mr. Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda remained an energizing issue for Democrats.
The opposition to ICE, which unifies Democrats, intensified again in July when three people died in separate encounters with federal immigration agents, including shootings in Texas and Maine, and a man struck by a tractor-trailer fleeing agents in Florida.
At the DNC meeting, the sticking point was whether to use the “abolish” language that backfired on Democrats after it became popular in the summer of 2020 and exposed the party to criticism for rising crime.
The party’s far-left and socialist wing, which is the same faction that embraced “abolish the police,” said voters demand real action against Mr. Trump’s deportation force.
“We have seen voters wanting bold language. Democrats especially really want us to take a stand and say, ‘This is what we stand for and we’re not going to back down,’” said Stephanie Beal, a DNC member from Colorado.
“I think it comes down to trust,” she said. “When you say ‘restructure’ and you use those kinds of softer semantics, that kind of softer verbiage makes people not trust you.”
Instead, the DNC opted for mixed messaging on how far to go in stopping ICE.
Immigration endures as a top issue for Republicans. Though support for Mr. Trump’s performance on immigration has waned, it is still stronger than support for his handling of the economy and Iran, according to a poll released this month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The survey found that 39% of U.S. adults approve of Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, down from 49% at the beginning of his second term.
Democrats also refused to grapple with the rift over the party’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was hotly debated at the DNC spring meeting in New Orleans.
Rather than taking up new floor resolutions in Austin, the committee left the issue to its Middle East Working Group, which is expected to deliver a report after the midterm elections.
Mirvette Judeh, chair of the DNC’s Arab American Caucus and co-chair of California Democrats for Justice in Palestine, criticized the party’s slow-walk to taking a position on the issue.
Ms. Judeh said Palestinians lack a genuine voice within the Democratic Party and called on Jewish Democratic colleagues and pro-Israel members to acknowledge her family’s ongoing experience as real and current, not historical or exaggerated.
“That doesn’t help humanity, and that does not help our party to keep dismissing that and shoving it up and putting it on a task force that has not passed anything in the past two years,” she said at a DNC interfaith council meeting.
Ms. Judeh said she maintains friendships with Jewish people holding a wide range of views — from zionists to former zionists to secular Jews to what some have called “self-hating Jews.” Those relationships, she said, keep her accountable and are necessary for an eventual resolution of the conflict.
Still, she objected to DNC Jewish caucus members accusing her of antisemitism when she called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“I watch people [compare] a ceasefire with antisemitism that is problematic. Does that mean that antisemitism does not exist? Absolutely not. Of course it does,” Ms. Judeh said.
Sam Crumpleton, a Nevada DNC committee woman and vice chair of her state committee’s Jewish Caucus, responded: “I want to say what’s happening is horrific. No one is advocating for it. And we’re hearing you. You have your voice. You’re here today. As a Jew, I don’t want you to tell me what is and isn’t antisemitic.”
She also said that both sides of the debate feel isolated in the Democratic Party.
“We also don’t feel heard. And I think the fact that we’re all here today says we’re all feeling the same way. So we should all hear each other,” Ms. Crumpleton said.
Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison pushed back when asked by The Times if the party has lurched leftward on policy.
“The DNC is not a policy organization. It is a party infrastructure. It focuses on making sure that you have the infrastructure to win elections,” Mr. Harrison said. “We don’t set policy. We are not a legislative committee. We are not the House. We are not the Senate. We’re not governors.”
While the resolutions adopted at the meeting are not binding and not the official platform, they do represent the party’s views. The party platform — and potentially a formal position on ICE and Israel — will be set at the 2028 Democratic National Convention.
Mr. Harrison said the party platform will be decided by who wins the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s how it worked for the Biden campaign, and that’s how it always works, he said.
“That platform is what came up because it was a Joe Biden platform, in which those are the core beliefs of what a Biden administration would have looked like because it was the Biden delegates who helped to craft that platform before the big switch,” Mr. Harrison said.
