As Trump manages to get closer to massively expanding ICE and creating his own personal force of ICE goons, head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, Kristen Gillibrand has decided to spend much of the past week boldly crusading against fascism attacking the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. That she feels the need to do so and so publicly indicates she’s bad at her job.

The job of DSCC chair is not to game out strategy–though the ‘fundraiser in chief’ plays a significant role in that for obvious reasons–it’s to raise as much money as possible from wealthy and rich people. That’s it. That’s the job. The trick, especially for Democrats whose rank-and-file often want different economic policies from the donor class (there’s a Republican Senate Campaign Committee too!), is to not make it appear like you’re pandering to the wealthy. And Gillibrand is failing hard at this.

It’s clear the anti-Mamdani sentiment is coming from the donor class, some of it motivated by earnestly held, if utterly wrong, beliefs that Mamdani is an antisemite, and for others, the idea of a nominal socialist, which is in a historical sense, ‘socialism‘, is leading some donors to freak out. Gillibrand is trying to placate them, but, in doing so, she is making it so obvious what she is doing. This means she is undermining party unity when we can’t afford that. A smarter DSCC chair would do this on the down low, not on television.

All of this means she’s very bad at her job.