Democrats need to stop playing a timid game. They must lean into their values, and this Democratic strategist clearly states that.
Democrats need to step their game
Recently, Bill Clinton‘s neo-liberal adviser/pollster Mark Penn co-penned an op-ed where he told Democrats that Joe Biden’s presidency needed a move to the center to survive. Penn tried to mislead Americans by stating the wrong analysis from the Virginia and New Jersey election results.
Swing voters in two blue-leaning states just sent a resounding wake-up call to the Biden administration: If Democrats remain on their current course and keep coddling and catering to progressives, they could lose as many as 50 seats and control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections.
That is a false assessment. Terry McAuliffe was fighting against Trump and not offering bread and butter solutions. New Jersey was a 3 point win in an off-year election with an amped-up Republican base, a good win.
Penn’s solution is pretty much Republican orthodoxy. Help the rich and screw the poor.
There is a way forward now for President Biden and the Democratic Party: Friday’s passage of the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill is a first step, but only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022 and a shot at holding on to the presidency in 2024. …
This would mean meeting the voters head on with stronger borders, a slower transition from fossil fuels, a focus on bread-and-butter economic issues (such as the price of gas and groceries), fixes to the supply chain fiasco that is impacting the cost of goods and the pursuit of more moderate social spending bills. Nearly three in four voters see the border as a crisis that needs immediate attention.
In other words, support businesses so they will then treat the poor and middle-class well. It is what continuously has left most behind, even as some have had the semblance of success.
“What Democrats need to do,” said Political Strategist Michael Starr Hopkins. “They need to do a better job messaging. If you take the labels off a lot of these policies, they have insanely high support. But once they get labeled as Progressive or Republicans label them as socialist, the numbers start to fall. And so Democrats need to start using biographies. They define Americans and tell those stories of how the policies either will benefit them or how their lives are better because of them. This isn’t a tough thing to do, but for some reason, Democrats are insanely bad at messaging, and things haven’t gotten much better.
Democrats need to first point out to all Americans effectively that Republicans will take away all of their gains since the pandemic. More importantly, as the strategist said, they must clarify how the policies will make every American’s life better.