Democrats talk. Who is listening?
By David Weigel | Semafor
Center-left Democrats spent much of Thursday morning on their latest post-election airing of grievances, bemoaning how little voters had heard their messages or appreciated their record.
NewDEAL, created to build a Democratic farm team after the party’s 2010 losses, gathered elected officials and strategists at a progressive D.C. hotel. They saw polling from Third Way, another center-left idea shop, which found that voters trusted Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris on all but two issues: abortion and climate change. They marveled at how good Republicans were at activating unlikely voters and yanking the news cycle where they wanted it.
Then they broke for lunch and learned that Matt Gaetz had abandoned his eight-day campaign to become Donald Trump’s attorney general.
Gaetz’s humiliation was the best news Democrats had gotten since Nov. 5. It revealed their easiest path to a quick comeback – Republican self-destruction. And it punctured one of the most questionable pieces of post-election punditry about Trump, the idea that traditional scrutiny and investigations didn’t work on him and couldn’t break through to voters.
But Republicans’ first self-own of the second Trump administration didn’t solve Democrats’ other problems. In post-election conversations, Democrats have worried that non-college-educated voters have tuned them out and theorized about major adjustments to reach that bloc again. But the party is still talking cryptically about what those adjustments might be.
The Democrats who won in areas where Harris didn’t credited tactics that wouldn’t have worked for her. They appealed to voters who were increasingly disinterested in policy details – and could be captivated by the stories they saw on conservative social media. The warnings they delivered about Trump’s GOP were much less compelling, with shorter reach.
Those voters “just didn’t buy that Trump was gonna do a national abortion ban,” said Third Way vice president Lanae Erickson, sharing polling and word clouds about Trump’s popularity that had made it hard for her to get to sleep.
But national Democrats aren’t exactly raring to embrace a policy-light approach that downplays what they see as the risk of the coming GOP ascension in Washington.
“Explain how in a country that has crises ranging from the character of its democracy to the affordability of its housing, [Mike Johnson] is spending one second of his time policing where one of his congressional colleagues could go to the bathroom,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Thursday, referring to congressional Republican attempts to bar the first trans member of Congress, a Democrat, from women’s restrooms in the Capitol.
The View From Democrats
Trump helped Republicans flip four Senate seats in states he carried and enough House seats to keep his party in the majority there. Still, pending the results in two close California congressional races, Democrats may have netted one or two seats by running slightly ahead of Harris everywhere and significantly ahead in key targets.
According to an early survey by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, their candidates ran, on average, 2.7% ahead of Harris in battleground districts.
There was no agreement, yet, on what had worked for those candidates. But separation from the Biden administration helped, accompanied by high-profile criticism of its least popular positions.
“I don’t think there’s a generalizable answer, but I really worked hard to show my independence,” said Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., who won re-election in his competitive Hudson Valley district by nearly 14 points. “I was one of the first to call on Biden to step aside. I consistently called him out on failing to secure the border. I stood up to our own state leaders on what would have been a very harmful congestion pricing policy that would have taxed a lot of working people in my district.”
The administration gave Democrats accomplishments to run on, mostly in its first two years: Infrastructure funding, healthcare subsidies, student debt relief, and a labor policy that synced up with the demands of unions. But some members who won tough races said that voters weren’t aware of that.
“It didn’t really come up that much,” said Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., who expanded her win margin in a district where Trump also won. “You don’t talk over people and say: ‘Oh yeah, I know you’re having a rough time, but have you heard about this new regulatory piece?’ You have to hear their stories first, before you have the currency to chime in.”
Democrats have talked generally about how to separate their brand from “identity politics,” without many specifics on what that would mean. None of them say that they need to abandon any particular progressive views or causes; instead, they focus on tone.
“It’s not just what you’re saying, but from what place you are talking about those issues,” Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said at a roundtable with other winning candidates in Washington this week. “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo.”
But no other Democrats were following the lead of Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who’d suggested that Republicans might have a point when they warned against trans women playing in women’s sports leagues. Democrats tend to see a bigger problem: That the media ecosystem they relied on didn’t reach most people anymore, and that narratives they saw as distractions were more widely discussed than their own policies..
The Democrats who survived this year had enough money and time to clarify why they weren’t like colleagues who were portrayed as out of touch with everyday Americans.
David’s view
The Democrats’ post-election conversation is a muddle right now, with circular rhetoric – a lot of clamoring that the party must change its messaging without many specifics about what message didn’t work. No one has really followed Moulton into the breach, picking the sort of fight that gets a lot of media attention and attaboys from conservatives.
This week, I got a clearer idea of why. It’s not so much fear of backlash, but understanding that Republicans can drive news much more effectively than they can, particularly Trump. Why? One of the most interesting comments at NewDeal’s conference came from Scranton, Pa., Mayor Paige Cognetti.
She recalled meeting a constituent who said he saw her on TV recently, then asked what she was talking about.
“It happened to be a no-tax-increase budget for 2025,” she said. “They didn’t care what I was saying. They didn’t listen, even when it was good news.”
This wasn’t a problem for her – the constituent liked her and assumed she was doing something good – but it clarified for her how many people see information zoom across their screens and don’t pay close attention to it.
Notable
- In the Washington Post, Philip Bump looks at how quickly voter opinion of the economy shifted after the election, with Republicans growing much more optimistic about the same set of facts. “The pattern with Trump and his supporters has long been that reality is viewed through a Trump-friendly lens; the same facts that applied under Barack Obama were considered very differently when Trump was inaugurated.”
- In RealClearPolitics, Parker Thayer writes about one of the canaries in the Democratic coal mine: Voter turnout nonprofits that changed strategy after realizing that less likely voters were not Democrats.
