HOW THE DEMOCRATS CAN RISE

Let this be your bottoming out, guys, and you’ll fly high into 2026 and beyond.

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.

Well, 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 Democrats are the unequivocal advocates for working people is no longer a given.

The Democrats, in other words, are in trouble.

Parties fall, and parties rise. One of the reasons the Republican party has been as resilient as it has, is because many of its leaders have a background in business. 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 Democrats are pretty much the opposite. If it doesn’t work on Tuesday, it doesn’t work on Thursday, and even if the whole thing crumbles around them on Saturday, they pretty much go on with the same behavior on Monday because that’s just the way they do things and maybe you won’t notice.

But we sure noticed this time. 2024 was a Red Tsunami. The spectacular failure of the Democratic party to wage a winning campaign against Trump this year was a crash and burn of historic proportions. Worse than that, it was their own damn fault.

It was they who in effect canceled the presidential primary, de-amplifying and deriding anyone with the audacity to challenge their supposedly superior wisdom regarding who could best beat Trump. The threat to democracy posed by the former president, they felt, was so great that it entitled them to suppress democracy so they could defeat him. This questionable strategy was enabled by Democratic voters who were willing to go along because surely the DNC must know what it was doing.

Clearly it did not. And now we are where we are.

Millions of people have needed the space to grieve since last week’s election. In many cases, their disappointment is mixed with genuine fear that Trump will demonstrate the more dictatorial and authoritarian policies that he in fact has touted. Yet he isn’t president yet, so we can’t really know. In any case, he won the election.

The thing Democrats need to think about now, of course, is the 2026 midterms. And if they’re to have even a chance of taking back the House, some important changes need to take place within the culture of the Democratic party. So far, we’re not hearing much from Democratic leaders other than justification and blame, the latter seeming to ricochet between blaming Biden and blaming the voters! Neither represents anything close to a new attitude - much less a winning one - for the political fights that lie ahead.

What we need to see now is that Democrats are willing to look in the mirror.

Trump didn’t take voters so much as the Democrats gave them away. The party dropped many issues - particularly economic ones that affect the lives of everyday Americans - like diamonds in the sand, and Donald Trump simply picked them up and said, “Great! I’ll take ‘em!” Over the last few years, the Democratic party has seemed almost intent on shrinking its own base, leaving issues that should have rightfully belonged squarely in the Democratic camp out of their conversation completely. The Harris campaign seemed to be playing more to disaffected Republicans than to their traditional base of working-class Americans! How anybody could have thought that this was some genius strategy I don’t know, but it’s fair to say that it wasn’t.

Traditional Democratic values have often been sacrificed at the altar of corporate donations, corporate consulting firms, and highly paid operatives who in their hearts didn’t really care. The gut level relationship between people and party - the main source of power for the Democratic party - has been taken for granted too many times. The party’s power lay in its values, not its money, and any party leaders who didn’t get that have been destroying the party from within.

Too many DC, LA, NYC, Sun Valley, and Martha’s Vineyard cocktail parties, 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. A perfect metaphor, that, for how you ignored your base.

Democratic leaders should come off their high horses - hear me out here - and go on a speaking tour. A few of them together. And three words should guide this tour: respect, humility, and economics.

It should actually be more of a listening tour. Show some respect to people you haven’t been listening to. Don’t just take their questions; ask some of your own. Show enough humility to say you know you’ve lost their trust, and you’d be grateful if people would explain to you what they’re going through and how government might help them. Ask about their lives and where they need support, particularly economically.

The Democratic message to a whole lot of people now needs to be, “Please come home.” But people are not going to come home to the Democratic party if all they’re going to encounter is the same fundraising emails they’ve been getting for years. The party’s main message to voters for a while now has been a panicked, “We need your help! Send money!” But given how panicked millions of Americans are about the price of cereal, the message should be the exact opposite. It should be, “How can we help you?”

Don’t assume that you know. It’s so clear to everyone that you don’t.

Only serious contrition will be enough to restore the soulfulness of the Democratic party, repairing the fragile bonds of affection that have now been broken. And nothing performative will do the job. There are millions of politically homeless people out there; no, they’re not Trump supporters, but they wouldn’t call themselves Democrats anymore either. And they do have alternatives, from third parties to staying home.

This moment can lead to a rebirth for the party, but only if the Democratic elite are willing to come down a notch. Let this be your bottoming out, guys, and you’ll fly high into 2026 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 more.