What Now For The Democratic Party?

Summary

Summary of "What Now For The Democratic Party?" – The NPR Politics Podcast

Release Date: December 25, 2024

In the episode titled "What Now For The Democratic Party?" aired on December 25, 2024, NPR's political analysts Ashley Lopez, Deirdre Walsh, and Mara Liasson delve into the current state and future prospects of the Democratic Party following a challenging election cycle. The discussion covers the shifting balance of power in Congress, introspection within the Democratic ranks, leadership changes within the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and strategic recalibrations aimed at regaining lost ground.

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1. Congressional Landscape Post-Election

Balance of Power Shifts

The episode opens with an analysis of the recent election outcomes. Deirdre Walsh provides a detailed breakdown of the new congressional balance:

• Senate Control: Republicans have secured a 53-seat majority by flipping four seats in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Montana, leaving Democrats with 47 seats.

  "Republicans took control of the Senate... they will have in January a 53 seat majority with the Democrats having four 47 members in their caucus." [00:40]

• House of Representatives: Republicans retain a super narrow majority in the House. However, this majority is under threat as several Republican members transition to roles within the Trump administration, leading to potential vacancies.

  "House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing vacancies along with the narrow majority, which is going to just make his job that much tougher." [01:31]

Implications of Narrow Majorities

The slim margins mean that even minor changes, such as a single seat shifting, could alter control dynamics.

"Once those members leave, he might be in the position of only being able to lose one because depending on what happens in this race out in California..." [01:53]

2. Democratic Analysis of Election Losses

Dual Narratives of the Election

Mara Liasson outlines two contrasting interpretations of the election results for Democrats:

1. Sweep, Not a Wave: Contrary to expectations, Donald Trump did not benefit from significant coattails, allowing Democrats to maintain crucial Senate seats in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, and narrowly losing others.

   "Donald Trump did not have coattails. They hung onto the Senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan, Arizona, Nevada." [04:51]

2. Broad Republican Gains: More concerning for Democrats is Trump's success across diverse voter groups, including Hispanic men, black men, and young voters.

   "He made gains with almost every voting group in America, including some very important constituencies for Democrats." [05:03]

Shifting Focus to the Working Class

There is a growing consensus within the Democratic Party that reconnecting with the working class is essential. Deirdre Walsh emphasizes the need to move away from the party's recent cultural focus and return to economic issues that resonate with working-class voters.

"There is consensus on the issue of the working class moving away from the Democratic Party... the shift was very significant to Trump." [05:17]

Case Study: Marie Glusenkamp Perez

Highlighting successful Democratic candidates, Deirdre Walsh cites Marie Glusenkamp Perez from Washington state, who retained her seat by focusing on local issues like immigration and fentanyl, rather than nationalizing her campaign.

"Her message is like, we have to represent the people that sent us here... Democrats look to her example as somebody who can talk to working class voters." [04:11]

3. Internal Party Debates and Strategy Shifts

Economic vs. Cultural Messaging

The Democratic Party is grappling with finding the right balance between economic and cultural issues. There is a push to prioritize economic concerns to better connect with disenfranchised working-class voters.

"The cultural left has to be not front and center, has to be pushed to the side, and an economic message for working class people has to be more central." [05:09]

Leadership Adjustments

Senate Democrats are adapting their leadership structure to address these strategic needs. Chuck Schumer remains the top leader, while new positions focused on working-class messaging and strategic communication have been introduced.

"They added some new positions to the Senate Democratic leadership table, including one for Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, focused solely on messaging for the working class." [06:00]

Policy Re-engagement

Democrats are reassessing how they communicate the benefits of their policies, acknowledging that despite legislative successes like the Inflation Reduction Act, voters did not feel the immediate impact.

"The idea that, well, we did this, just take our word for it, it's gonna benefit you wasn't what voters were feeling." [06:00]

4. Democratic National Committee Leadership

DNC Chair Transition

The DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, is stepping down, sparking a competitive race among several candidates. Mara Liasson outlines the key contenders:

• Martin O'Malley: Former Democratic governor of Maryland and Social Security commissioner.

• Ken Martin: Chair of the Minnesota state Democratic Party.

• Ben Wickler: Chair of the Wisconsin state Democratic Party, noted for maintaining competitiveness in a crucial battleground state.

• James Scoufus: State representative from New York.

"It's really who you want to be the face of the Democratic Party... One of the things that Ben Wickler says is that the party has to figure out how to reach voters who get all their information about Democrats from Republicans." [12:05]

Strategic Vision for the DNC

The incoming DNC chair will play a pivotal role in reshaping the party's strategy, focusing on reconnecting with lost voter bases and enhancing communication strategies to navigate the current political landscape.

"The new chair of the DNC is going to conduct some of that. There's going to be a lot of meetings about what went wrong, what do we do differently." [13:33]

5. Future Prospects and Campaign Strategies

50-State Strategy Reevaluation

Deirdre Walsh discusses internal debates regarding the effectiveness of the DNC's traditional 50-state strategy. Critics argue that an overemphasis on a statewide approach may neglect the unique needs and issues of rural areas.

"There was this effort to like lose by less in rural areas, but that wasn't a really like effective strategy." [14:56]

Role of External Organizations

Both Democratic and Republican parties rely heavily on external groups and super PACs for fundraising and strategic support, sometimes overshadowing the influence of the DNC leadership.

"Those sort of outside super pacs were a massive factor in the small number of competitive races we saw in both the House and Senate." [15:33]

Path Forward

As the party undergoes this period of introspection and leadership transition, the focus remains on understanding past electoral shortcomings and implementing strategies to engage effectively with a broader and more diverse electorate.

"Let's look at the results and sort of figure out, you know, how do we get back out there after losses in places that they didn't foresee." [16:26]

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Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive overview of the Democratic Party's current challenges and the strategic shifts necessary for future electoral success. By addressing internal divisions, reevaluating messaging strategies, and selecting new leadership within the DNC, the party aims to rebuild its connection with key voter demographics and navigate the evolving political landscape.

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For those interested in the detailed discussions and expert analyses, listening to the full episode of "The NPR Politics Podcast" is recommended.

Transcript

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[Ashley Lopez]

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.

[Deirdre Walsh]

I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.

[Mara Liasson]

And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

[Ashley Lopez]

And today on the show, we're going to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party party after a pretty bruising election cycle. Deirdre, I want to talk about Congress first. First of all, let's talk about the balance of power in each of the Houses first.

[Deirdre Walsh]

Right. Well, Republicans took control of the Senate. They flipped four seats in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Montana. So they will have in January a 53 seat majority with the Democrats having four 47 members in their caucus. In the House, Republicans will keep their super narrow majority. The other challenge Republicans in the House are already facing going into January is that a couple of their members have been tapped to serve in the Trump administration. Another member, Matt Gaetz, who was initially tapped to be Trump's nominee as attorney general, ended up withdrawing, but but does not plan to come back to the House. So House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing vacancies along with the narrow majority, which is going to just make his job that much tougher.

[Mara Liasson]

Well, are those seats expected to be filled by Republicans?

[Deirdre Walsh]

They are. They are. These are all solidly Republican vacancies in Florida and upstate New York for Elise Stefanik, who is tapped to be ambassador to the U.N. but still, Deirdre, what.

[Mara Liasson]

You'Re saying is he only can afford to lose three votes? Pretty much. I mean, if he gets the 221 seats.

[Deirdre Walsh]

Right. But once those members leave, he might be in the position of only being able to lose one because depending on what happens in this race out in California, because if they don't win that and Democrats take that seat, they could have potentially a 220 seat majority. And in the House, if there is a 216, 216 vote, it's a tie and the majority loses. You know, it's not really stopping Republicans from arguing that they have a mandate. And that's one thing that Republicans in the House and Senate have been saying since Election Day, despite their really narrow majority, I think they feel like Trump's win and win of the popular vote gives them what they believe is a mandate. But executing the priorities that they need to do is really still going to be really challenging.

[Ashley Lopez]

So, yes, this was a loss, but it wasn't a wipeout. I wonder what you're hearing from Democratic members who won tough races about how they won in their districts.

[Deirdre Walsh]

Well, I think the ones that won in places where Trump won are places where a lot of Democrats are trying to take some lessons right now in districts where Democrats were able to keep their seats, but Trump won at the top of the ticket. There are a couple of examples of those. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, who's a Democrat in a rural district in Washington state, is one who has been arguing that, look, she never let her race become nationalized. She always focused on local issues. She was mindful of the fact that her constituents were worried about immigration in the sense that fentanyl was an issue that was impacting constituents in her district, and high prices were something that people were talking about all along. She did not hesitate to break with her leadership on a lot of votes in the House. She got flack for it. And some folks worried she wasn't gonna win reelection because she had broken with some progressive priorities. But in the end, I mean, her message is like, we have to represent the people that sent us here. She ran an auto shop. And really, a lot of Democrats look to her example as somebody who can talk to working class voters, which is something they really are admitting is a major problem for the party going forward.

[Mara Liasson]

Well, what's really interesting for Democrats is they try to figure out what happened, why did they lose so badly, and what did they, as they move forward, is that the election has two different stories for them. One is it was a sweep, not a wave. Donald Trump did not have coattails. They hung onto the Senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan, Arizona, Nevada. He was the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote. He is going to win it when all the votes are counted by a tiny, tiny little margin. But the other story, which is much worse for Democrats, is that he made gains with almost every voting group in America, including some very important constituencies for Democrats. Hispanic men, black men, young voters. So they have to figure out why they lost among those groups and what they can do to get them back. And one thing that seems to be forming as a consensus, at least so far, is that the cultural left has to be not front and center, has to be pushed to the side, and an economic message for working class people has to be more central.

[Ashley Lopez]

Is there, like, consensus on this within the party about, like, where they went wrong, or is this still something they're sort of debating?

[Deirdre Walsh]

I think there is some debate inside the party. It really depends on, you know, sort of where regionally you're from where on the ideological spectrum you're from in terms of being a progressive or a moderate. But I think there is consensus on the issue of the working class moving away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was the party of the working class and the middle class for decades and the shift was very significant to Trump. And away from the Democratic Party, there's consensus that that at least is somewhere they need to start. Even today there is a move to do that. Senate Democrats elected their leadership for the next Congress. They reelected Chuck Schumer to be the top Democratic leader in the Senate. But they added some new positions to the Senate Democratic leadership table, including one for Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, focused solely on messaging for the working class. And they added another position for New Jersey Senator Cory Booker to on strategic messaging. So there is a recognition that maybe they're keeping some of their top leaders, but they need to sort of revisit how they talk about their issues. They're not talking about changing their positions like abortion rights, but they're trying to figure out how to re engage with voters in a way that's not. Washington is telling you that they are right. Here are the policies that we're right on and you're wrong or you're not part of the party if you don't accept this position. Look, Democrats passed a lot of policies under the Biden administration that were pretty popular in terms of the inflation Reduction act, but voters weren't feeling them. And the idea that, well, we did this, just take our word for it, it's gonna benefit you wasn't what voters were feeling. They were still going to the grocery store and paying high prices. Yeah.

[Mara Liasson]

And there wasn't a magic solution for that either. But you know what's so ironic about this? If we are in the midst of a reenlignment. Cause we don't know that yet. Where the Republican Party is gonna be the multi ethnic working class party that gives tax breaks to billionaires. Hmm. That's something that looks like it has some advantages in there that Democrats can work with.

[Ashley Lopez]

I do wanna go back to the position that Democrats were in for the past four years, which is defending Washington and institutions. Things are very different moving into the new year.

[Mara Liasson]

Right.

[Ashley Lopez]

They are going to be in the position of opposition, which is a much more comfortable place for them to be. I mean, during Trump's first term, the Congressional Democrats were very focused on being a. And I wonder if that's something, Deirdre, that we're going to see again in this cycle.

[Deirdre Walsh]

I think they'll see some of that. I mean, there's already some jockeying in the House Democratic Caucus about trying to pick messengers in key committees like in the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee that are effective messengers who can respond and push back when they think there is executive overreach. But this time around, there's a real shift that I'm seeing because I did cover the last time that Trump had full control of both the White House and both the House and Senate where there was this very focused Democratic sort of resistance movement. Now you're seeing Democrats say people like John Fetterman in the Senate. Trump won. He has the right to pick people for his Cabinet who he wants. I'm willing to take a look at them. So you're starting to see ideas come from Democrats to this proposed outside entity called the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash federal government spending. People like Bernie Sanders says Doge is right. I think the Pentagon needs some cutting. A Florida Democrat today, Jared Moskowitz, agreed to be part of a House committee that is gonna work on this project. I mean, these are places where they're proactively saying, like, these are things that we agree need to be tackled. And that's a very different vibe from the full on sort of like pushback we saw in 2017.

[Mara Liasson]

But, you know, that's a different kind of resistance. In other words, that doesn't equal capitulating.

[Deirdre Walsh]

Right.

[Mara Liasson]

But I think that they're gonna use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, when they decide how to oppose him. And don't forget, when is the time that Donald Trump has been the most unpopular when he's been in office and he all of a sudden is now responsible for bringing prices down, securing the border, making sure that there's peace in the Middle east and no more war in Europe. There's a lot of things that he has to do that his own party is skeptical about.

[Ashley Lopez]

Yeah. Okay. Well, let's take a break. When we come back, how Democrats plan to find future success.

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[Ashley Lopez]

And we're back. Next, I want to talk about the Democratic National Committee. This is the group that runs the party essentially and helps set the party's direction. Candidates are going to look to the DNC for guidance and support as they try to run and win in the future. The DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, is stepping down. Mara, there's already a couple people who are vying for this position. Can you talk to me about who these people are and what they would sort of represent?

[Mara Liasson]

Sure. This is a very inside baseball kind of election. 448 people vote the members of the Democratic National Committee. And when the Democrats have the White House, you really don't hear much from the DNC chair because you have the bully pulpit of the White House and the president is the spokesman for the party. But when you don't have the White House, who runs the DNC becomes more important because they are one of the most prominent Democrats, along with the minority leader in the House and the Senate, Jeffries and Schumer in this case. So who's running? Martin O'Malley. He is the former Democratic governor of Maryland and the Social Security commissioner. Ken Martin is the chair of the Minnesota state Democratic Party. Ben Wickler is the chair of the Wisconsin state Democratic Party. And Wisconsin, of course, was an important battleground state. And Ben Wickler's claim to fame is that Democrats lost Wisconsin by the smallest margin of all the battleground states. And then there is a state representative from New York state, James Scoufus, who's also running. And it's not like there's an ideological battle among these people. It's really who you want to be the face of the Democratic Party. You want someone who's A good communicator. One of the things that Ben Wickler says is that the party has to figure out how to reach voters who get all their information about Democrats from Republicans. So how to compete in the new information environment.

[Ashley Lopez]

Yeah. How do you think this is going to change the vision for the party? I mean, do you think that's going to change at all moving forward?

[Mara Liasson]

Well, I think the party is doing a lot of soul searching and I think the new chair of the DNC is going to conduct some of that. There's going to be a lot of meetings about what went wrong, what do we do differently? We've already talked about some of that. How do we talk to the people who used to be our base? Working class people, non college voters of every ethnicity. And there are two off year elections in 2025 in New Jersey and Virginia and they're going to focus on that and then the midterms.

[Deirdre Walsh]

I think the other thing that I've been hearing from Democrats as they contemplate, you know, the new head of the dnc, but also sort of strategy going forward is this idea of, you know, should we be trying to compete in more places? A lot of DNC candidates come in with this so called 50 state strategy. Like we should be able to run everywhere, have resources everywhere. A lot of Democrats are saying the big problem this cycle was too much sort of Washington focused ideas and not enough ideas connecting people who live in rural areas. There was this effort to like lose by less in rural areas, but that wasn't a really like effective strategy. And it wasn't really putting the issues front and center that those people cared about. If you, if you're going to somewhere saying like, okay, we're just gonna cut down the margin, but you're not connecting with the things they care about. You can't expect to win.

[Mara Liasson]

Why can't you do both?

[Deirdre Walsh]

I think that's a big question for this DNC race, right? I mean, how, how do you execute a 50 state strategy? Like, how do you bring all of those ideas under one tent where people felt in this past election that there were too many people dictating what they could and could not talk about?

[Ashley Lopez]

Yeah, well, beyond the dnc, Deirdre, there's these groups that both the Democratic Party and Republican Parties have set up sort of help their candidates in the House and the Senate. Do you get a sense from folks on the Hill that those groups are more important than whomever ends up being in charge of the dnc?

[Deirdre Walsh]

I mean, I think they're more important when it comes to fundraising. Those sort of outside super pacs were a massive factor in the small number of competitive races we saw in both the House and Senate. Without the resources of those outside groups, I think a lot of these tight Senate races, these tight House races could have been a lot different. I don't think that a lot of those candidates got a lot of money or direction from the national party apparatus in terms of whether they'll listen to the message of the new dnc. In terms of Democrats, I think it's a little early to tell. I think there's still a lot of what they call sort of autopsy reports that both House and Senate Democrats are trying to take a look at. Like, let's look at the results and sort of figure out, you know, how do we get back out there after losses in places that they didn't foresee.

[Ashley Lopez]

All right. Well, let's leave it there. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.

[Deirdre Walsh]

I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.

[Mara Liasson]

And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

[Ashley Lopez]

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

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