Anand was on “Morning Joe” today to talk through the task ahead for the Democratic Party — turning its focus from simply broadcasting its inclusive platform to actually engaging with people to build an inclusive party. It’s the thing we’ve been talking about all week, and we encourage you to listen to the full conversation.
This is far more than a messaging challenge, and pulling it off means more than tweaking policy, moving a tad to the left or right to capture passing interest, or slicing and dicing performance among demographic groups in the loose but fractured coalition of voters that Democrats has depended on so far. And it doesn’t mean arguing against Trump’s worst attributes or diagnosing or debunking the worst proposals the Republicans have had to offer. None of that worked.
It does mean throwing out all the preconceptions and priors Democrats have been working with, and maybe rethinking the structure of the party itself. It means moving to a full understanding of what voters want and the stark reality of traumas they’ve endured over the previous decade, from inflation to loneliness to the opioid epidemic to the colossal impact of the Covid pandemic, in a real way. And it means an utterly revamped understanding of what media means today and how people make meaning from it.
It’s not that the Democrats don’t have good policy ideas. And it doesn’t matter that the economy is “good” in the aggregate. That’s all an abstraction. As Rev. Al Sharpton told Anand this morning (and he heard it from James Brown), “People feel you before they hear you.” And nobody felt the Democratic message, however solid its arguments, however well-intentioned it may have been.
The Democratic Party has failed to engage with people on a visceral level, to meet them where they live. The Republicans have. Now that the Democrats are in the wilderness, it’s time to set out on that path.
We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.