To be competitive, Democrats not only need a new message, they also need new messengers.
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On Saturday, Democrats elected [FILL IN THE BLANK] as chairman of their national party. In case you are wondering, [FILL IN THE BLANK] is not an editing omission, it’s simply our way of saying that it probably does not matter who fills that role.
However, if you really want to know, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is now Ken Martin, who was chosen to help the party recover from a brutal defeat in November.
Even interested observers would be hard-pressed to name his immediate predecessors in what is, for the most part, an organizational role.
In any case, organizing is the least of the Democrats’ worries (although they should try to be competitive in all 50 states, which was a winning strategy when Howard Dean, the most consequential DNC chairman in recent memory, was at the helm).
One of their biggest problems is age. Democrats are perceived to be a party led by old people who hang on to power for too long.
There is no better example of this than Joe Biden, whose refusal to step aside when it became apparent that he would not be up for a second term helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s victory in November.
But he is not the only one.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), 74, is another great example, as is former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who finally made room for somebody else in 2023 at the age of 82.
Both of them, as well as other leading Democrats, are highly capable politicians, but there’s a perception that they’re out of touch, not just because they’re old but also because they represent “elite liberal bastions” like New York and California.
What is particularly baffling is that Democrats have a new generation of leaders waiting in the wings to take over. Many of them have a record of getting stuff done and winning elections in swing states and red states.
Last year, after the party’s convention prominently featured many of these young stars, we wrote that the Democrats’ future is bright because they finally seemed willing to perform that much-needed generational change.
We were wrong. Apparently, the party is not yet ready to move on.
The early days of the Trump administration and the confirmation hearings made it quite clear to anybody watching that the Democrats continue to be dominated by the same (literally) old people. We saw a lot of Schumer complaining about the president’s executive overreach and old Democratic senators questioning much younger Republican nominees.
Some of this criticism may seem a bit unfair because the average age of Democrats in Congress is not significantly higher than that of Republicans. However, in politics, appearance is reality, and they simply seem older. In a news environment built for sound bites, hearing Schumer drone on about the importance of the civil service is simply not appealing to anybody.
Another of the party’s problems is that its direction is determined by a class of liberal consultants that has been around since the Obama administration (if not that of Bill Clinton), and meets the definition of “coastal elites.” They are not only overpaid but also out of touch with the issues that Americans outside of San Francisco and Manhattan care about.
And that brings us to a much bigger problem, which isn’t the messengers but rather the message itself.
Democrats have a tendency to want to fight every little skirmish, even in hostile terrain, while they are losing the larger war. However, that’s not a winning strategy, especially because Republicans are much better at picking the battles being fought in Washington and, more importantly, on TV and social media.
For example, the number of trans women in sports is infinitesimally small, but Republicans have done a great job of making this seem like a huge issue, and the American people (including Democrats) overwhelmingly come down on their side.
The next problem is that Democrats often get caught up in sideshows. As we wrote recently, everybody now knows who Donald Trump is, and as the election results show, the American people have come to terms with his bizarre behavior, self-dealing, and even criminality. Highlighting them over and over again is just not going to move the needle.
Perhaps one of the Democrats’ greatest struggles is internal party unity. They spend so much time fighting among each other over social issues that they rarely present a united front.
Outgoing DNC chairman Jaime Harrison nailed this problem this week. “Sometimes, we got folks that are very rigid. If you don’t have the right job, if you didn’t come from the right community, if you don’t say the right word, and then therefore you are x-ed out or you’re castigated,” he said. “We need to pause on that. Let’s be a big tent, and let’s be an open tent and embrace more diversity, in terms of thought.”
In other words, don’t force more conservative blue-collar Democrats or religious Hispanics to be on board with every part of the “woke” agenda being championed on college campuses.
Because, if Democrats don’t win elections, they are not going to be able to help anybody.
And to make sure they do not, Republicans are trying to make every policy debate about issues on which they believe they are winning, and being “anti-woke” is a winner right now.
Of course, one of the reasons why this GOP strategy is so effective is that Republicans can rely on a right-wing propaganda network that Democrats are unable to match.
This is another problem they have to address.
Republicans have many powerful allies that will help them steer the conversation, such as Fox News, the human misinformation campaign also known as Elon Musk, conservative podcasters, and political influencers.
Democrats don’t have any of that. Yes, the myth is that they benefit from the left-wing bias of “the media,” but that’s not even a thing anymore.
Sure, reporters, writers, and editors of major newspapers and on network news may lean left, but they are still doing real journalism (though often poorly) and are bending over backwards to give Republicans a voice. Right-wing news outlets don’t bother. They just spout propaganda and help the GOP create a false reality tailored to draw votes.
With these tools, it’s simply easier for Trump and his allies to rile up and mobilize their base. In other words, they are serving them red meat all day long, while the old chefs in the Democrats’ kitchen are offering the kind of cuisine that makes food critics happy but nobody else.
Another part of the Democrats’ messaging problem is their inability to tout their victories. Republicans celebrate every little thing that Trump does as the greatest accomplishment in American history.
In the case of Biden, however, most voters only remember his failures, both real and perceived — like high inflation and porous borders — and not his genuine achievements, for example, those hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments that Republicans opposed but now are trying to take credit for.
Finally, there are some things Trump is doing in his first days in office that Americans strongly approve of. For example, getting criminal immigrants off the streets. You can’t blame voters for thinking, “If it’s that easy, why didn’t the Democrats do it?” (Of course, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are hard-working, law-abiding people who paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, and collect very little in benefits, such as Social Security). Add it all up, and it’s not surprising that Democrats are doing so poorly in national elections.
Right now, Americans just don’t like them. According to a Quinnipiac poll from earlier this week, only 31 percent of them have a favorable opinion of the Democratic party as opposed to 43 percent who view the Republican party favorably.
That’s a huge gap, and, more than any election results, these are the kinds of numbers that should convince the party that it’s high time to change course. But that’s not something that [BLANK] can achieve. It requires wholesale changes to the party’s message and a completely new generation of messengers.
