Where Do the Democrats Go From Here?

A civil, entirely constructive discussion with my old sparring partner, Michael Walsh

Stacy: As a trans veteran I have to say that America doesn’t deserve the men and women who are in the military. They don’t. 1/3 of Americans voted for fascism. 1/3 didn’t bother to fight fascism. 1/3 stood up against it. 2/3 against 1/3 is a losing battle. How can we say that we deserve better? Because as a whole, we don’t. Why should American service members die for people who are fascist or enable fascism? I certainly wouldn’t expect them to.

Michael: So true

Not much we can do about the 1/3rd who are cultists. They're gone. Just listen to some of stuff they're saying to defend these tariffs, El Salvador, the looming recession, etc.

"We're gonna have a recession today so your kids can have a better life in 20 years".

But it's the 1/3rd who don't care and didn't vote who are most disappointing/disturbing and THEY are who we need to focus on.

What has to happen to wake them up? I fear too much of our messaging is "we're not Trump". That clearly hasn't worked in 2 of the last 3 elections and there's no reason to believe it will in '28. How do we reach them?

Good news is, "not Trump" will probably work just well enough in '26 to recapture the House.

Bob: It worked pretty damn well in the SCOWI election. We popped two red-district statehouse wins in PA this year. The Liberals won resoundingly in CA as a direct, unequivocal response to Trump and Labour romped in AU last week. And Merz won the Chancellorship in GE.

There is a an international growing resistance to the populist right. It is not delivering. Farage and the Reform Party back in power in the UK might be just the kick in the ass that the hapless Kier Starmer needs. The UK left is actually excited about it.

Also, watch the VA specials this year. Thousands of workers laid off in those districts courtesy of Elon Musk. Northern VA will have its righteous revenge.

Bear in mind that the tariffs haven't kicked in yet. If Trump went "psych!" and dropped all tariffs tomorrow, there's already more damage in the supply chain from uncertainty than there was during covid, and this will be burned into everyone's brains by the midterms. The GOP has a good map for the Senate but by that point it may not even matter.

"We're not Trump" isn't a bad meta-message, as messages go. Remember, your despised Democratic leadership wants to keep everything focused on egg prices.

Michael: As I said, it'll work to some degree in '26. I expect we'll take back the House.

I live in an ultra red district. CD-1 in AZ, represented by the Dishonorable David Schweikert, as weak of a man as exists in Congress. So "I/We are not Trump" won't work here. In fact, it's likely nothing will work, it's that red. My zip, 85255, has been the #1 Trump donating zip in the country and the cult thrives here. Perhaps that PARTLY explains why I am, to use your words, doom and gloom. (There are other reasons)

All politics is local

But you can't deny that, writ large, we have a messaging problem in this party. And we SHOULDN'T, given that he's offended and threatened so many demos. Taking just one, why would ANY senior who needs SS and Medicare vote for a Repub? But they will.

Answer is simple: Fox News

Bob: I know you don't like it when I write too much to you, but I just want to make a point about seniors and Social Security / Medicare. I'm a 65-year-old with no assets who lives in a HUD-subsidized senior building; my rent is pegged to 30% of my SS income. That means I pay $257/mo for a studio apartment in Center City Philly that would go for $1.6k on the open market. For the entire year, I've been sweating bullets when the 3rd rolls around, and every month, my SS has been electronically deposited in my account without a glitch. To my current knowledge, there has been nothing yet about defunding HUD.

Now, I'm politically aware but many seniors are not. Many are likely experiencing the same thing and wondering what all the fuss is about. Democrats, after all, have been saying that Republicans want to gut entitlements since forever. Republicans call it MediSCARE. So I think there's a sky-is-falling / boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic going on here.

It may take their checks getting reduced, delayed or even cut off for the majority of seniors to wake up from their political slumber, sadly enough.

Bob: Michael, I feel your pain about your district; you're right that likely nothing will work there. But bear something in mind; the FOX demo is not growing. It's shrinking. Not only is it very much older and simply dying off, but FOX watchers are a cohort that isn't cutting the cord; they remain glued to their cable boxes as everyone else, including younger red-pilled right wingers, get their news from a plethora of alternate sources. Cable itself is dying.

The Democratic Party has always been a motley coalition. As Will Rogers said in the 30s, he doesn't belong to an organized political party; he's a Democrat. We had hardcore racists in our party during FDR and hardcore racists during JFK. LBJ signed the laws (after considerable virtuoso arm twisting) that sent most of them scurrying to the GOP. When, in the wake of Nixon and a lost election, the GOP embraced religious populism (and demagogy), they began to lose their economic elite. That process accelerated under Clinton and Obama until today, where Democrats are the party of the elite and highly educated with a mandate to protect the poor and working class. This has produced the ongoing messaging crisis, as long as I've been in politics, about how the highly educated economic elite can message to the poor and working class.

This is a systemic problem that won't be solved quickly or easily.

Michael: Never suggested it'd be easy. Especially since I see zero effort right now.

Rural America is gone. Where's the plan to get them back? Young people might not watch Fox (not so rue about that, btw) but they listen to clowns like Rogan, Pat MacAfee, Charlie Kirk, and Poole.

Where is our response? Where is our counterprogramming? Who are our loud voices? What is being done on a large scale to inform seniors of the looming danger? How about vets? He's insulted them every imaginable way and they still support him (62%). How about diabetics? He just jacked the price of insulin back up to $400/month. I've heard Dems say nothing about that, except maybe Schumer wrote a memo

We. Aren't. Doing. Enough.

Jasmine Crockett, Bernie, AOC, Mallory McMorrow, Booker, Murphy, few others ... those are a few who give me hope.

Other than that ... I see almost nothing other than Trump bashing.

Bob: Republican Jefferson Griffin just conceded to Democrat Allison Riggs in the NC Supreme Court race, speaking of rural America. Seems the courts wouldn't let MAGA disenfranchise 60k voters.

The last time the Democrats got a substantial vote from rural America during the so-called Solid South, they were a racist party. We're not going back to those days. Rural America's revulsion at urban America is deep and cultural and there's a hard limit to what the Democrats could or should do to reverse that trend. But Bernie and AOC's Fighting Oligarchy tour is showing that a message of straight economic populism is not completely lost there. Rural America is also more dependent on government largesse than blue state America and the chickens are just coming home to roost.

The bros are restless. Rogan called rendition without due process horrific. The Barstool Sports clown is freaking out over his portfolio. The paid Putin shill (literally) Tim Pool is hopeless; he's cheering on some Karen who called a Somali 12-year-old the n word and is raising money off it. As you yourself said, 1/3 of the country is completely gonesville and there's little if anything the Democrats can do to get them back. I mean, should we appeal to racists?

That's the first I've heard about diabetes meds. If that's true (I'm not saying it isn't), that will have an enormous impact. Everybody knows that Biden lowered those prices and everyone will know that Trump raised them. I feel horrible that people's health will make that point.

There are plenty of loud voices on our side. Every day, my YouTube algorithm is stuffed with them. Counterprogramming on their own shows has a limited impact. You need a rhetorical ninja like Pete Buttigieg to do it well and even he gets quoted out of context and played on a loop by FOX. If we showed up in SWAT teams, FOX will just use them as a foil. The only thing that can fix the FOX syndrome is for Reid Hoffmann and a coalition of liberal gazillionaires to buy FOX from Murdoch, fire all their commentators and political people and stock the station with liberals. And even if that wet dream comes to pass, the benighted 1/3 will find other outlets.

"Almost" nothing is not nothing. The Dems are moving in the right direction, if too slowly for anyone's comfort. Trump bashing is also effective when his numbers are on the trajectory that they are. Biden bashing surely worked for the GOP and his numbers were better.

Michael: Apparently he didn't kill Biden's $35 insulin cap. Yet. My mistake

Michael: By this time next year, we'll know where we stand in terms of taking back the House. (I don't have much hope for the Senate).

So RIGHT NOW is the time for us to get our sh** together, come up with an effective messaging strategy and start driving it home. RIGHT NOW. (It is extremely discouraging to see us led by a pair of guys - Chuck and Hakeem - who aren't just incapable, they're UNWILLING to engage beyond flaccid, weak memos)

There is 'some' light at the end of the tunnel, but not enough. Invoking Spinal Tap, if we need to get to 11, we're at about a 3. That HAS to change

Bob: The number one variable is the economy (stupid) and things don't look good for next year. Nor for Christmas this year when retailers have to make their toy orders by June 1. Trump is going to slowly and painfully be forced to back away from most of his tariffs but the damage is already done. He thinks backing the Chinese tariffs down to 80% is a sweet deal considering they were 145%. Xi will tell him to go fuck himself in Switzerland. China is a country that was locked down like a supermax during covid. Xi ain't afraid of no US tariffs and it gives them an opening with the rest of the world they couldn't dream of before the idiot Trump drove Japan and South Korea into their arms.

And this isn't even considering the disaster of Trump's "big, beautiful" tax bill which is nowhere near getting passed in either chamber. Johnsonless is on the brink of losing his speakership over the debt ceiling. There's fierce support to reinstate the SALT deduction in the Senate. It's all heading to the mother of all clusterfucks by the summer, including a government shutdown.

I'm very confident we'll win the House next year. I'm waiting until mid next year to predict a wave of 40+ seats and if I'm predicting that, I'd be predicting flipping the Senate as well. Waves gather quickly and are inexorable.

As for messaging, I think an all-of-the-above strategy works, with specific messages tailored to different demos. Trump sucks, check. Corruption sucks, check. Lawlessness sucks, check. Empty shelves suck, check.

Do you have any suggestions?

Michael: I've made a few here, like sending waves of our best people to Fox News Every. Single. Day. 10s of millions of Americans consume that garbage and never hear the truth. Where is our counterprogramming?

And focus on demographics who are being disenfranchised by these cruel policies. Vets will have their VA benefits cut; Hispanics are watching their type get deported; Seniors will have their SS and Medicare cut. Muslims .. how ya likin' Gaza now?

Farmers: If what I've read is true, Vance actually invested in a company that scoops up farms for pennies on the dollar. USAID being slashed or eliminated is just KILLING farmers. Why should ANY farmer vote for them?

Focused outreach. None of those demos should be lost to this MFer. But other than the AOC/Bernie tour, and a couple others who are energized, I see nothing from our leadership. Absolutely nothing

Off the top of my head ... that's the best I got

Bob: Palestinian supporters can be insane. I saw on Vaush this woman at a town hall yelling her head off at AOC, calling her of all people a "war criminal." She wasn't escorted out by security but three guys had to get in front of her and force her out of the venue. My point is that there are always going to people, whether on their side or ours, who are simply impossible to reach. I think for the Uncommitted bloc who are not insane, Trump on Gaza has to be a constant facepalm. Vaush is very left wing and that woman made him practically pro-Biden.

As I said previously, I have strong doubts about a FOX counterprogramming strategy. I'm fine with doing it occasionally with our best communicators, but I think there's a diminishing return. It's hard to imagine someone who watches FOX regularly see their hosts contradicted and deciding that the hosts are wrong. Democratic foil Jessica Tarlov does a helluva job, but we're the ones who rewatch her clips, not the FOX audience. I'm sure FOX has her to get a few extra eyeballs from us. And she has clocked The Five hard.

I gave my perspective on the boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic with seniors. I don't think you can generalize about Hispanics. There's always a chunk of recent immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind them: "I'm not a criminal, they won't deport ME." This is where you shift the message to kitchen table issues and the lack of jobs, especially in construction. There's a politicized chunk of vets who are 100% with us, but vets overall have always been a hard community for Democrats; people who go into the military often tend to have authoritarian personalities. Vote Vets does a great job.

Trump bribed farmers last time; I don't think there's the scratch for that this time considering the new export tariffs. USAID is not as straightforward as it looks; yes it was a reliable market for their goods that reasonable farmers understand, but there's a cultural resistance in rural America to helping "shithole countries." You know, gotta lose the farm to own the libs.

The entire strategy of the cabal against America is to bankrupt it, buy it for pennies on the dollar and then sell it back to us at a premium. It's a race against the clock and you're dead-right that the hour is nigh. I'm less concerned about leadership than you are because I don't see Democrats winning as dependent on a one-size-fits-all message that requires iron discipline. There has to be a variety of messages tailored to different demos and there are. Our generic House polling is going up. Chris Murphy demolished Kristi Noem and the DHS in a hearing with many viral moments.

Michael: All my ideas might be bad, terrible, not feasible. But at least they are SOMETHING.

I went to a meeting today in my legislative district and spoke. My overarching point was a message of “being ‘not Trump’ is a losing proposition. I threw out several ideas for both national and local races. Focus on the disenfranchised; farmers, Hispanics, etc

I then sat and listened to 2 hours of “we are not Trump”.

Bob: I'm extremely happy that you're at least out there and trying, Michael. And I completely agree that we need a focus on the disenfranchised. What messages would you suggest for particular groups?

The thing with "being not Trump is a losing proposition" is that it's an assertion that's a bit counterintuitive. You might be right, but I think you need to explain why being not Trump doesn't work as a message. I mean, it certainly worked in Canada and it seems to have worked in Wisconsin.

Why do you believe this? Not being rhetorical at all ...

Michael: Because it's ALL we got, apparently. "I am not Trump" by itself isn't a terrible message, UNLESS it's the ONLY message. And right now, it is.

Where's the tight, coherent, consistent messaging to any of the demos I've mentioned? I don't see it, do you? We gonna wait til August '26?

It all starts at the top where we have the two weakest leaders in recent memory and we've lost the narrative on virtually every topic that voters care about. If I hear the words "constitutional crisis" one more time, I'll vomit. I'm not saying there isn't such a crisis, but you really think the guy who's trying to feed a family of 4, working a blue collar job cares about that?

Where is the kitchen table message? Where is the outreach to Muslims who actually thought Trump was gonna protect Palestinians? Where is the outreach to seniors like you and me who need SS and Medicare? Hispanics?

I see almost nothing.

I'm not a messaging guy, but there are skilled professionals who are, and not necessarily in the political world. Hire them. Hire SOMEONE who knows wtf they're doing

Bob: Believe it or not, this might actually be by design. Rick is a messaging guy; he wrote GOP ads for years and he often reminds us that Democrats love plans. Rick has been adamant that Democrats should not be talking about plans because every plan that one demo we need loves another demo we need despises. The Green New Deal is a great example. I'm all for it; I believe anthropogenic global warming is an existential issue and I support industrial policy. But what about the construction workers who think global warming is a hoax? Can you send a SWAT team of Democrats to FOX to convince them it's not a hoax? The GND is one of AOC's signature issues but dollars to donuts she's not talking about it with Bernie on the Fighting Oligarchy tour in red states.

Same thing with LGBTQ rights. Even immigration rights is dicey as a broad based, consistent Democratic message. Palestinian rights is also dicey because the campus protests did get out of hand and alienated a lot of people. Medicare For All is universally appealing to Democrats but where are we going to get the money for it?

In the broadest terms, I think the best consistent message for Democrats that's not directly focused on Trump is to tax wealth; that's the essence of Fighting Oligarchy and everyone can agree.

As for specifics, in my opinion I think the best course is to keep the focus on what the GOP wants to do rather than plans of what the Democrats would do differently, especially if they involve systemic change which is scary to many people. I think the focus ought to be on fixing what Trump wrecked. We're going to be getting a whole lot more of this as Trump's "big, beautiful" tax bill gets more exposure; right now its still in committees. We ought to attack specifics like the particular cuts in programs people depend on.

"Constitutional crisis" might sound a little conceptual but not that we have to stop an insane, evil-hearted thieving president. Trans rights might be hard to talk about, but not cruel attacks on people who just want to live their lives. Nobody supports illegal immigration but nobody supports depriving legal residents of due process rights, either. We can, and should, talk about lawlessness.

Remember, Trump didn't win by laying out specifics. He ran on a bunch of vague, wish fulfilling platitudes that even his supporters only half believed. We can use that same template to run on the broad agenda of fixing what Trump and the GOP have broken.

Michael: I agree with much of this. But if I have to pick out just one thing that's killing is more than any other, it's the Fox News Industrial Complex and related subsidiaries - Rogan. Kirk, and the rest of those knuckle draggers

You're probably tired of me saying that, but I see nothing that's as powerful and thus, as destructive as that cesspool. Another thing you're tired of me saying: We've lost the narrative on almost all important narratives, and we're not losing because we're necessarily wrong or out of touch; we lose because the right wing media just buries us with their scare tactics and outright lies.

Who exactly doesn't want to breathe clean air? But it's now thought of by 10s of millions as something bad because it requires some regulations and man power. Gun control? Bad. Kids getting slaughtered are just the price we have to pay for being able to carry AR-15s. Good public schools? Bad idea. Requires people, money and standards. Let's just cut taxes for the wealthy instead.

I could go on. These are not sarcastic overstatements. It's EXACTLY what too many Americans believe.

This is what most discourages me about our future as we've literally been steamrolled by the Murdochs and Bill O'Reillys of the world. When I go to rallies or meetings I feel like I'm in a room full of people throwing spitballs at battleships. And yeah, I'm no better.

We seem to have no answer to this ugly behemoth. Is sending waves of smart Dems to Fox News every day the answer? By itself, no, but it could be PART of the answer. I'm reading a book on the Kennedy brothers right now, mainly Bobby and Jack, and occasionally I think "God, we need a JFK; a smart, charismatic, inspirational leader". But if that person came along, the right wing industrial complex would just KILL him/her, turn 10s of millions of Americans against them because they once supported school lunches or some shit like that. "Dangerous socialism". And of course the purity testers in our own party would find a way to NOT support that person

Bob: First, I'm very happy that we're having a discussion like this, Michael. These are very important issues, meta-issues really, to chew over and my mind certainly hasn't been set in stone on any of them. I'd just say generally, though, to quote ol' Donny "My Goodness" Rumsfeld, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want. This is the culture we have and I think a bigger problem than FOX / Rogan et al. is the algorithmization of social media that allows everybody (including us) to exist entirely within bubbles that confirm their (our) biases. If there's one meta-answer to this it's to go out and speak to voters directly. I agree that going on FOX can be part of the answer. I think Bernie and AOC are an even better answer. I think Democrats on listening tours are very important.

I have a book from my dad's library that I've been wanting to dig into called Mutual Contempt, about Bobby and LBJ's toxic relationship. We had a politician like JFK in our lifetimes, Bill Clinton, who squared many of our perennial messaging circles. There wasn't a controversial war that might cause to get him assassinated, but like JFK, Clinton deferred some of our biggest questions, in JFK's case civil rights. Bill Clinton, delirious along with everybody about the fall of the Wall, bought into all the neoliberal bullshit about the New Economy and dreamed of a world where coal miners would become coders in nice, clean offices. So we let our manufacturing go in the name of cheap consumer goods and now we have a president at war with cheap consumer goods and no way to bring back the factories.

Hillary and Kamala both came from this wing of the party and allowed Trump to exploit the growing wealth inequality that comes from an economy geared to rewarding brainworkers (poor Secretary of Labor Robert Reich tried to square this circle in his 90s book The Work of Nations and said that the key to the New Economy was to become the biggest value adder in the supply chain, the Symbolic Analyst. Now, of course, that work can be done by AI. Sheesh). The sad truth is that there are always going to be more people in a given population fitted to manual labor and skilled labor than there are to being brainworkers. But the answer isn't smokestack industries.

What I'm saying is that while FOX / Rogan are deeply odious, they're only exploiting these economic changes and the deepest problem isn't racism or selfishness or character defects which have always been with us. This isn't an "economic anxiety" argument which excuses selfishness or racism; people are responsible for themselves and how they treat others. But answers to the biggest problems aren't simple. Yes, we all need clean air and water but it costs money to protect them. Sadly, our political culture militates against complex solutions.

So if we have to adopt demagogy to make our message resonate, if we have to simplify and scourge as MAGA does so successfully, then I guess the only choice we have is to grab a pitchfork, get with Bernie and AOC at the barricades and charge the castles of the One Percent.

Michael: I mean ... YEAHHHHH on pitchforks. (Chuck and Hakeem enter the chat with their memos)

But this party is not built for that. Never was. We're intoxicated with purity .... "oh, he said something controversial in 2008? Get rid of him/her"

Look at how we shivved HRC and Kamala. WE did that. We had the votes to elect them both, and we failed.

Example: Newsom recently dared to question the fairness of allowing biological males to play women's sports. (Should be pointed out that in actuality, this is a tempest in a teapot; there are VERY few instances of girls getting marginalized by a bio male, but if you listen to the right wing industrial complex, you'd think this is happening dozens of girls at every school across the country)

BUT ... as the father of a girl who played HS sports, I have to admit if she didn't make a team because Claudette - nee Claude - was bigger/faster, I'd have been kinda pissed and YOU and every Dem would have been too if it happened to them. But nope, we gotta take the purity stand and now Newsom is on the verge of being irrelevant. No one eats their own like righteous Dems.

Point is this: We talk about being a diverse, big tent party but the fact is we purity test into oblivion anyone who takes a controversial stand

At that rally I was at yesterday, a woman stood up and railed against the idea of moving toward the center. WRONG WRONG WRONG. Classic Dem purity testing.

America has moved right, perhaps for all the wrong reasons; but the fact remains: America. Has. Moved. Right. We are not gonna get national candidates elected if he/she is at the far left. And we're not gonna win the Senate or House with far left policies. Doesn't mean we have to give on on clean air, healthcare, etc. But FFS, STOP THE PURITY TESTING

(We could play a drinking game with my "purity testing" invocations)

Bob: You know it's funny, Michael, for all our difference we're actually pretty close ideologically. My ideal politics are Euro-style social democratic but my political touchstone has always been practicality. That's given us the interesting dynamic where I'm often arguing the more temperamentally conservative position. You know, stay the course, relax, the Democrats are not fundamentally broken, etc. Which is not to say I've always been right, LOL

You have to admit, though, that the Democrats are hardly the only ones addicted to purity tests. Goodness, remember the Tea Party? For the first time in history, the GOP effectively ejected a speaker because he was too moderate and then they did it again, this time not so passive-aggressively, eight years later. RINO hunting is the GOP's favorite sport. Say what you will about the wan leadership of Hakeem Jeffries but Nancy Pelosi ran an incredibly tight ship; Nancy also agreed with you (and myself) that it's best to run candidates who are the best match for their districts and knew how to let diversity bloom while retaining the central mission on the biggest issues. There's far more ideological fractiousness in the GOP than there is in the Democrats and only fear of Trump keeps them as "united" as they appear to be. There are maniacal deficit hawks, MAGA culture war frothers, a (shrinking) handful of temperamental moderates and foreign policy old schoolers. And everybody in the GOP House fears getting primaried from the right.

Now it's an interesting contrast when on the one hand you're adamant that the Democrats have to move the center and yet you're willing to stand at the barricades with Bernie and AOC. Bernie and AOC aren't about the center. I think this points to an observation of Sarah Longwell's from her focus groups that both moderates and the Democratic left say that it's more important to be a party that's willing to fight the GOP than to worry about their differences.

I generally agree with that. Every day I get an email from the Justice Democrats and I wince. I'm also not too thrilled with David Hogg's $10M campaign to primary "do nothing Democrats." But this is a legitimate dilemma. On the one hand, Congressional Dems are too old and sclerotic. On the other hand, you don't want to primary somebody who has a better chance of winning a general in the name of new blood for new blood's sake. AOC-style victories against entrenched incumbents are extremely rare.

So I don't have a neat conclusion here ...