How will Democrats move forward? Three strategists weigh in
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When Vice President Kamala Harris was campaigning for the presidency, she landed on a signature line. This summer at the Democratic National Convention, it was everywhere. In the pump-up video set to Beyonce. And when we fight, we win! Clastered across posters in the audience and in speech. When we fight!

We win. After speech. Because as we've always known in Texas, cuando luchamos, ganamos. When we fight, we win. After speech. And as the next president of the United States always says, when we fight, when we fight, when we fight,

Thank you. God bless. In this election, the Democrats' fight was pretty good. They successfully ditched their unpopular presumptive nominee. They raised a billion dollars with record-breaking speed. They reached tens of millions of people with their massive door-knocking and phone-banking operations. But the win, of course, never came. And since then, we've seen another law of politics take shape—

When you don't win, you fight amongst yourselves. The finger-pointing began the morning after the election. Democratic Representative Richie Torres from New York said that, quote, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left. Look, if the goal is to win elections on Twitter, then you should embrace movements like defund the police. But if the goal is to win elections in the real world, where it matters...

then you have to appeal to working class people of color who historically have been the base of the Democratic board. That's him on MSNBC. Meanwhile, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was instrumental in convincing President Biden to step aside, suggested in a New York Times interview that he should have thrown the nomination open earlier. Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.

Kamala, I think, still would have won, but she may have been stronger having taken her case to the public sooner. Pramila Jayapal, the Washington congresswoman who leads the Progressive Caucus, says Democrats didn't do enough to distinguish themselves from Trump. We don't offer a different option.

He is a billionaire, yes, but we also surrounded ourselves with billionaires and we allowed corporate interests to dictate policy. She's speaking there to NPR member station KUOW in Seattle. We have to stand up for who we are and I'm not sure we totally know as a party who we are. Consider this. After a resounding defeat, the Democratic Party has to figure out where it goes next and the struggle over its future is already underway.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. Support comes from our 2024 lead sponsor of Consider This, Anthropic.

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It's Consider This from NPR. So needless to say, things don't look great for Democrats at the moment.

The so-called blue wall states went red. The party has no obvious leader. And many of the voter groups Democrats have historically relied on shifted to the right last week. So what should the party do now? I talked with three strategists with different answers to that question. They are Paul Begala, who worked on Bill Clinton's campaign and in the administration as a White House advisor. Adrian Shropshire is executive director and founder of the political action committee BlackPACC.

And Waleed Shahid is co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, and he's a former spokesman for the progressive PAC Justice Democrats. Good to have you all here. Thanks, Ari. Thank you. Thank you. Will you each begin by giving us a one-sentence headline of where to start? What is your top-line prescription for what Democrats need to do now? Who wants to take it first? This is Paul. I'm the old guy, so I'll start. Democrats have got to rebuild their connection to the working class. It is the

most heartbreaking result of this election is that the Democrats lost the middle class. Okay, Paul says middle class. What's next?

I think that maybe a little bit of what Paul just said, but there is some party building that actually needs to take place. I mean, there are parts of the American working class that the Democratic Party lost, and there are parts that actually held strong. We need to have a conversation with folks, certainly the folks who did not, and understand that. But I just think there's a lot of conversation to be had. I think the Democratic Party actually doesn't understand its base. Paul says the working class. Adrian says the base will lead. What do you say?

I think most working class and middle class voters can't answer the question, what did Democrats do for me in the last four years? And in that vacuum, you're going to get far right messages about migrants, trans people, conspiracy theories from the far right. And I think that's the number one question that voters had is, in the last four years of Democratic rule, what tangibly improved my life? So more than who does the party speak to, a question of what does the party stand for?

Let me ask, for as long as I've been covering politics, 20 years or so, Democrats have preached demographics is destiny, believing that as the country gets less white, it will move left. This election showed that to be false. So what replaces that as the new paradigm, the vision of where the party goes from here? So...

My parents and many people, pretty much everyone in my family has voted Democrat every single year since they've been citizens. My family is Pakistani-American, Muslim-American. And this was the first year that people in my family voted for Trump. People entertained the idea of voting for Trump.

And it was largely about two things. One was the war in Gaza. Second thing was they didn't feel like their number one issue, which was the cost of living, that Democrats had done anything for them. And so what they heard from the Democratic Party is vote for us, we'll protect democracy. But they don't really believe that democracy is working for them. And in that vacuum, unfortunately, strongman authoritarians like Donald Trump who say, I alone will fix everything, it kind of works because...

The current system that the Democrats were defending, the status quo that they were defending just wasn't the mood of the country and wasn't the mood of a lot of Democratic voters. So, Adrian, Paul, what's the new paradigm? Yeah, I mean, I this idea that demographics is destiny, I think, was never real. I think that the the challenge for us right now, I think I agree with Waleed about the sort of vacuum that has been left behind.

in communities in terms of that vacuum being filled with misinformation, disinformation, outright lies and propaganda. You know, when we think about what is the new paradigm, when you have real conversations with people and not just sort of gloss over and have knee-jerk reactions, I think that we're sort of seeing right now in the postmortem that's happening about, you know, have we gone too far? Did we go too far left? I think the Democrats need to decide what they are fighting for and they need to fight for those things. I want you to jump in, Paul.

I hear you, Adrian, saying the messaging is important. What is the message, though, Paul? We're fighting for you. If you work for a living, OK, if you actually got to show up for work, we're a friend of yours. You see, the Democrats have this huge, diverse, fractious coalition, which is a very good way to prepare to govern a huge, fractious, diverse country.

So we need web issues, not wedge issues. The other side uses wedge issues because their coalition is not as difficult to manage and they want to divide ours. But when you talk about – go ahead. Yeah, Adrienne.

I mean, if there is a message that Democrats say, this is who we are and here are the policies we're going to put forward, it is those things, though, Paul. I mean, I do think that there's my concern is that the party does not lean too much into it is just the economy. It is not economic anxiety that causes a woman to go to the polls in her state where there's a ballot initiative for abortion on the ballot and vote to protect abortion rights and then goes to the part of her ballot where the man who is responsible for

for putting justices on the court that would eliminate Roe and vote for that person. That's not economic anxiety. I think it is. See, I think it is. I think she's pissed that her carton of eggs is twice what it was four years ago. And while she stands for choice, she's like, well, at least this guy is going to make my eggs cheaper. Waleed, I'd love you to jump in here because Paul distinguished between web issues and wedge issues.

If Republicans continue to lean into the wedge issues, should the Democrats run away from that? Should they ignore it? Should they talk past it? Should they lean into it? Like, what do you do when the Republicans say on day one, we are going to address policy towards transgender people, for example?

I think that Democrats need a both-and approach around delivering real economic results to working-class Americans and not shying away from real societal changes that are happening around us that we can't just...

pivot away from. We need to humanize trans Americans. We need to contextualize trans Americans. We need to do the same thing that we did in the struggle for gay rights, which is fight these battles and persuade not just in election season, but in the years before election season. And I think we lost to the oldest playbook in human history, which is divide and conquer. And one place I would push back on, Paul, is that Democrats also need

We're too conflict-averse. We're trying to be everything to everyone. We need to create villains. Part of the thing is the Democrats have gotten too close to the boardrooms of Uber and Facebook and Wall Street, some of the grocery companies, and we need to take on those villains. Otherwise, the Republicans will create and manufacture villains every single time. The last time Democrats were in the wilderness for 12 years—

Ronald Reagan for eight years, followed by George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton got back into power by saying it's the economy, stupid. We're going to tack to the center. Is the same answer going to work for Democrats four years from now, two years from now?

No. Yes. We got a no, a yes, and Adrian? No, no. I don't think that we're in a fundamentally different world than we were then. Again, I would say to Walid's point, like the country has changed, right? Not just in terms of its complexion. And we have to address the issues that are fundamentally dividing Americans. And that is not just the economy. You know, we can't, as a country, we are incapable of

unwilling to address the sort of central issues that have created our inability to get to a more perfect union. And that is absolutely racism. The Democratic Party absolutely cannot run away from that. And I know that for

myself and my community. We've been dealing with this for a very long time. I think when we look at Black folks right now, the sort of general sentiment is like, OK, here we are again. Paul, do you think the Democratic pivot looks the same as it looked 30 some years ago when Clinton was running? No, no, it's not really. Sorry, Ari. Political journalists always think that lives move on a left right spectrum. And in America, they mostly move on an up down spectrum.

Okay. So we got to move to the middle of, by which I mean the middle of the middle class. Why are we losing? I think because we've lost the middle class. Yeah. I don't think we're that far apart as it may seem, but the, the, the thing I'm sitting with is like, we do need to be able to speak to Americans to the mood that they're in. And the mood that they're in today is one of change. One of, uh, wanting to understand the cultural changes that are happening in the country around race and gender and sexuality. Um,

and also their pocketbooks. Their pocketbooks are empty. Things cost too much. And so we need to do all of the things. I think what I'm frustrated with is there's been all this talk this past week about how Democrats need to abandon the woke part of their party and very little talk about abandoning the billionaires who are part of their party who are harming our ability to speak in terms of class warriors and not just cultural warriors. I don't know. The Republicans had Elon Musk and they managed to do it.

But they are running a campaign based on, again, the oldest playbook, which is Elon Musk is somehow a victim of American democracy rather than a success story of how the economy and democracy works for people like him. And so I feel so ashamed that the Democrats were unprepared for the onslaught of what was going to be attacks on the lines of migration, the border,

transgender Americans when we knew this was coming years ago. And yet we didn't develop a strategy to explain to the American people what this was designed to do, which was to help elect Republicans and people like Elon Musk and get them more power. I'm smiling because not only do we not explain it,

We rub their noses in it if they dare use the wrong word. I'm sorry. There is a woke, censorious, preachy elitism in our movement. And we got to flush that.

You don't go to someone who's busting his ass at seven bucks an hour and tell him he's privileged just because his skin is white. I'm sorry, you don't do that. Not if you want to get his vote, okay? And I'm not naive. I understand there's racism and prejudice in this country. I want to build bridges to those folks. I want to reach out to them. And the easier way to do that is on these economic crises that they're all facing, irrespective of race, gender, and religion.

Three Democratic strategists there. Paul Begala, former White House advisor and now political contributor for CNN. Waleed Shahid, senior advisor to the Uncommitted Movement. And Adrian Shropshire, executive director of BlackPak. Thank you all so much. Thanks so much, Eric. This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez-Hance and Connor Donovan. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. Thank you.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.

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