It doesn’t take too much imagination to speculate why President Joe Biden tapped U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela Jr. as a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Vela, a Brownsville native who was elected in 2012 to represent the newly formed 34th Congressional District, announced his support for Biden as president before every other member of Congress besides Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who endorsed Biden at the same time. Another factor may be that an unexpected number of Hispanic voters in South Texas voted for the Republican presidential candidate over the Democratic candidate in this election, and Democrats want to avoid a repeat.
“I think that’s one of the reasons that they wanted me to take this role is to kind of get a handle on why all that happened,” Vela said. “Why did we lose South Texas counties for the first time in the history of political elections in the United States? Why did we lose Jim Wells County and Zapata County? Those are the kind of things that we’re really going to have to examine.”
Vela said the DNC’s primary objective is to “ensure that we maintain majorities in the Senate and the House in 2022 and keep the presidency in 2024.”
The president decides who serves on the committee, which has been restructured to include representation by governors and mayors, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Biden also tapped for vice chairmanships Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Vela noted that each had made a name for herself nationally and that he is the only one among the new vice chairs who wasn’t a potential vice presidential nominee.
Maintaining Democratic control of the White House in 2024 depends on preserving the coalition of states that carried Biden to victory in 2020, he said.
“We were fortunate enough to win Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania,” Vela said. “We have to make sure we do that again along with Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin. We have further objectives, which are expanding the electoral college victories by winning Florida and Texas.”
Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same number by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Vela said he has extensive relationships with political leaders around the country and, in Texas, with leaders on the state and local levels, and that he’s looking forward to working with them in this new role.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Vela said. “I’m really looking forward to it. It’s more on the political than the official side. I like the political side of it, being able to engage with people around the country.”
He said the DNC’s goal of keeping Democrats’ in power will be more easily met if the pandemic is brought to heel sooner rather than later. Whether the current deadly surge nationwide is something that resolves within several weeks, or is a precursor of much worse to come, likely will have a big impact on the party’s fortunes, Vela said.
“At the end of the day none of this … matters if we don’t get control of the pandemic,” he said.
The Biden team is rolling out a massive federal response to COVID-19, including a proposal for 100 FEMA mass vaccination sites around the country, though the White House plans have already been criticized as too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Vela said the new administration should have some type of grace period, considering Biden inherited a pandemic running rampant after several months of hardly any federal response, but that there’s really no time for one.
“The level of cooperation between the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration during the transition was so treacherous, historically treacherous, that they really are starting from scratch on day one, and today is day two,” he said “So it’s only fair to give the Biden administration a grace period, but the problem is things are so bad that the reality is it’s not going to be a very long grace period.”
