Reid J. Epstein
Appearances
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And some of that is because of actions that Trump has taken has so offended people like Chris Murphy. But some of it is because only in recent days has there been any attempt to organize Democratic voters to call Senate offices and tell them vote no.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
It's also worth remembering that I think the protest in front of the USAID building was on Monday, and the members of Congress who were there were all from the greater Washington area. And so, but a lot of the people who work in that building who are shut out are the constituents of the members of Congress from Northern Virginia and Maryland who were there.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And so that was as much of a local concern for those members of Congress speaking to their own voters as it was sort of a broader national brand. By the time there was a protest in front of the Treasury building on Tuesday night, there were dozens of members of Congress from all over the country who were there. It was a much bigger, sort of broader protest than
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
The USAID one, which to me has not seemed to be in the mainstream of what most of these Democrats are pushing to the center. It seems to be sort of the most engaged and, frankly, online Democrats are talking about and some people in Washington whose constituents work in that building.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
It's important to note that when Shane and I talked with Ken Martin after he won— The things that he said to us were like the party doesn't need to change any of its policies. It doesn't need to change its message. It needs to change how it distributes its message and how voters hear its message, but not the core of what the party is about.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And on the what happened in the election, he promised to conduct an after action review and make it public. But when we asked him if that review would address the question of whether Joe Biden should have run, he said, no, it would not.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
You know, I had somebody before the election tell me that if Trump won, that Democrats would be way more effed than they were last time, to sanitize that phrase a little bit. Thank you. And when I checked in with her... Last week, she said that it was worse than she anticipated, even more bad than they thought.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
I think, to be honest with you, it feels a little bit like we're all in a listless ship, kind of just spinning about. As a Democrat, it feels a little frustrating. We are a bit of a punching bag at the moment. We've lost sight of our values, and sometimes we get so overinvested into the policy differences that we end up separating ourselves.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And I think there's a difference between the people who look at this and say like they only need to win two or three seats to win back the majority and the people who look at what has happened in Washington and the country over the last two weeks and change, right? Like Trump does not have a mathematical advantage in the government system.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
That's requisite to the types of actions that he's taken place since he's been president. And that's, I think, where some of this bifurcation has taken place. And because a lot of the Democrats came into this new Trump administration, I think, with an unrealistic anticipation of what he would do once he became the president.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And they were clearly ill-prepared politically, certainly, for the types of actions that Trump has taken.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And the people who are making the case for freaking out, frankly, have been doing more freaking out over the last couple weeks, right? They were freaking out from the morning after the election, right? And their case is like not without merit, frankly. We saw what happened in the election. We saw kind of all of these demographics moving away from the party.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
What none of the people who have been moved toward sort of what we would call an autopsy or a post-election review have wanted to discuss – has been kind of the origin of why all those things went the wrong way. And none of them want to talk about the idea of the fact or the reality that they all got behind a very unpopular president and basically told the American people that he wasn't too old.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
that he wasn't too frail, and on and on and on, and backed him until they didn't, by which point, you know, lots of these voters didn't believe them when they said anything else because of what they had said about Biden.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
I think the bigger issue is that it's a vibes problem and what people think of Democrats. And that really goes back— farther than Biden, it goes back to Obama, when the party was seen as college professors drinking wine, being in urban enclaves, where the Democratic Party of FDR and Truman and Kennedy was much more of a working class party.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And there are so many affinity groups, sort of to use a phrase in vogue in some of these circles, in the Democratic coalition at this point. They had a discussion at the Democratic National Committee meeting over the weekend about whether to maintain a gender balance among their vice chair positions because some people might not consider themselves men or women.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And so like those types of discussions – sort of percolate out into the broader culture of what it means to be a Democrat. Right. You know, nobody was actually watching the Democratic Party's meeting over the weekend. You were. You know, nobody who was not being paid to do so, I think, was watching it.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
But for people who are not engaged in one of those groups, like they can get turned off by that, even if Democrats think their issues and agenda are in the interest of these very people who are turned off by the way they present themselves. Right.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And when you look at the issues that sort of professional Democrats in Washington think of as their core issues – Like they're all very popular. Like abortion rights are popular. Raising the minimum wage is popular. Most of the economic agenda that they talk about, even if people aren't hearing them, is pretty popular.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
The problem comes in that the actual Democrats who run for office themselves are less popular because they have to accede to all these various things that different groups want. But when any of these issues have been put on the ballot as standalone referenda, they almost always pass.