Until the day he died in 1995, if you asked my father who he voted for in any presidential election he said ‘Roosevelt.’ It was gospel in our house that Democrats were the party of the people and Republicans were the economic royalists.
That was then, and this is now.
The majority of Americans don’t necessarily see it that way anymore.
The emotional connection between the American people and the Democratic Party has been deeply frayed; a sense that the Democrats are the unequivocal advocates for working people is no longer a given.
Today, there are millions of politically homeless in America. They’re not diehard Trump supporters, but they wouldn’t call themselves Democrats either.
The issues they care about were strewn like diamonds on the beach in 2024, and Donald Trump came along and said, ‘Great! I’ll take them!’
This was a spectacular failure and it was the Democrats’s own fault.
They discouraged a primary challenge against President Joe Biden, de-amplifying and deriding anyone with the audacity to challenge their supposedly superior wisdom in selecting a candidate to take on Trump.
It was the Democratic Party that claimed the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by the former president was so great that it entitled them to suppress democracy themselves – and anoint their own candidate.
This questionable strategy was enabled by Democratic voters who were willing to go along because surely, they must have assumed, the DNC knew what it was doing.
It also didn’t help that Kamala Harris’s campaign played more to disaffected Republicans than to the Party’s traditional working-class base.
It’s clear now that the Democrats did not know what they were doing and the elites running the show now have only two choices: Adapt and change or preside over the continuing decline of the Party.
If there is to be any hope of taking back Congress in 2026, important changes need to be made.
So far, we’re not hearing much from leaders other than justification and blame, the latter seems to ricochet between blaming Biden and blaming the voters!
The Democrats need to look in the mirror.
Here is the deal: The political revolution in America today is between populism and the Establishment. The Republican Party allowed right-wing populists to enter their ranks, while the Democratic Party has kept left wing populists at bay.
One of the reasons the Republican party has been as resilient as it is, is because many of its leaders have a background in business. They believe: If it doesn’t work on Tuesday and it still doesn’t work by Thursday, then you sure as hell better change things by Saturday or your business might be gone.
The Democratic Party’s sensibility is pretty much the opposite: If it doesn’t work on Tuesday and it doesn’t work on Thursday, and even if the whole thing crumbles on Saturday, that’s just the way things we do things and maybe you won’t notice. But we sure did notice.
My suggestion to Democratic leaders is go on a listening tour of America. Come off your high horses. Don’t just take their questions; ask some of your own.
Admit that you’ve lost the voters’s trust and say you’d be grateful if people would explain what they’re going through and how the government might help them.
Your message to the voters now needs to be, ‘Please come home.’ And performative measures will not be enough. Show some real humility.
The party’s main message in 2024 was: ‘Send money! We need your help!’. But given how panicked Americans are now about the price of cereal, your message should be, ‘How can we help you?’
The Democrats’s power never lay in money; it lay in their values, and they left those on the floor.
There were too many DC, LA, NYC, Sun Valley, and Martha’s Vineyard cocktail parties and fundraisers, I’m afraid.
At the very least you guys might have stopped by the kitchen on the way out and asked how things were going for the cooks, the servers, and the caterers.
Only serious contrition will be enough to restore the bonds that have been broken and reclaim the soulfulness of the Democratic party.
This moment can lead to a rebirth for the party, but only if the Democratic elite are willing to come down a notch.
If the Establishment allows this to be their bottoming out, they’ll fly high into the 2026 midterms and beyond. But anything less than that and we can all settle in for a long, long stretch of Trumpism.
The American people deserve so much better.
