Democrats say they’re in need of serious course corrections to stay competitive in future elections, warning the party may no longer be able to rely on anger at President Trump to drive voters to the polls.
Top liberals interviewed by The Hill expressed concern that the party would drift back to old established ways after using Trump as a boogeyman to raise money and juice turnout for the past two cycles.
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“The 2020 election was a referendum on Donald Trump, plain and simple,” said Robert Reich, a former Labor secretary under President Clinton and economic adviser to President Obama. “Democrats really have not had to worry about their message or having substantive policy proposals over the last four years. But going forward, Democrats can’t just rely on being against Trump. The question is, who do Democrats stand for and what do they stand for now in the post-Trump era?”
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“I don’t think Democrats can sustain themselves as the party of the college educated,” Reich said. “There aren’t enough of them, and it leaves a huge void in American politics. ... Biden could still fill it. He has working-class roots and he’s connected to labor unions, but both rhetorically and in terms of policy, he’s got to show Americans he’s on the side of the bottom two-thirds who have all but been forgotten.”
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The coalition of voters that turned out to elect Biden in 2020 included wealthy, formerly right-leaning suburban-dwellers. Democrats would be thrilled to keep them as a part of their base going forward, but many view those as fleeting “tactical” votes against Trump.
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Liberal strategist Chuck Rocha, a veteran of Sanders’s presidential campaign and fierce critic of the party’s Latino outreach efforts, said the upper crust of Democratic consultants are largely white intellectuals who have no idea how to speak to working-class Latinos.
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Democrats, he said, should rip pages out of the Trump playbook, appealing to voters’ emotions rather than banging them on the head with policy proposals that make for good governing but do nothing to capture the imagination in a win-or-go-home election.
“We need to own the narrative and take credit for things that we do. We need to send our Black and brown surrogates out for a victory lap and to spike the football in these communities when we pass legislation that improves their lives,” Rocha said.
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“It’s about owning the narrative and being on the offensive. Trump is great at this. Our consultants are brilliant, but if this was a public policy debate, Trump would never have been president. He was smart enough to put a slogan on a hat. There’s no hat big enough for our 15-point plans.”
