Article: What the Democrats Need to Do Now
To win back working-class voters, they need to signal more clearly to working people that they are on their side. That means picking fights on their behalf with the bad actors who are making their lives harder—and the democracy-hating billionaires.
I. Past and Present: The Democrats’ Four Core Problems
1. Why Don’t the Democrats Fight More?
Last July, I attended one of those Washington salon dinner-discussions. A private room at a restaurant, about two dozen invitees, discussion focused on some policy issue. The topic that night was wide-ranging but centered around the debate over the abundance agenda, and how blue states should move to counter the impacts of Donald Trump’s initiatives.
Navin Nayak was there. I first met him at another such dinner, in the wake of the 2022 elections. At the time, he worked at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and he and some colleagues had undertaken a massive study of Democratic ad messaging during those midterms. He was interested in an issue that has obsessed me for a while now: why polls routinely find that Americans think Republicans—whose last three presidents have presided over 1) a massive savings and loan crisis and a double-dip recession, 2) the near-collapse of the entire global capitalist economy, and 3) a pandemic-related economic meltdown that saw the disappearance of 23 million jobs—are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. Nayak and his team looked at more than half a million pieces of Democratic communication to voters in 2022 and found that, to their surprise, “only 5 percent mentioned the words ‘economy’ or ‘economics.’” So maybe one reason Republicans outpoll Democrats on the economics question is that Democrats don’t talk about it much.
But I tell the story of this dinner for another reason: something Nayak said that night. A range of views was represented at that table, but everyone was looking for answers to the basic question, the main question to emerge from the 2024 election, of how the Democrats—or “the progressive movement,” since the dinner was held under 501(c)(3) auspices, where Washington denizens know they need to make a good-faith effort not to be overtly partisan—could win the economic argument they’ve been losing for the better part of four decades and convince more working Americans that they are fighting for their interests.
I forget the exact context—we were probably complaining about the Democrats not putting up much of a fight against Trump—when Nayak said (close paraphrase): “Well, Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.”
Sometimes, somebody says something at one of these dinners that cuts a little deeper than the usual policy chatter, and for me, this was such a statement. Nayak distilled in a few simple words a mindset I’ve observed and tried to write about for decades now; at least since the run-up to the Iraq War, when so many congressional Democrats seemed to be just terrified of criticizing George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.
Continue reading at The New Republic
