The Daily - Where Are the Democrats?

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

How is the Democratic Party navigating the dominance of President Trump — and reckoning with the reality that more and more voters have been souring on its message?The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Shane Goldmacher, Reid J. Epstein and Annie Karni discuss the state of the Democrats.Guests: Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times; Reid J. Epstein, a New York Times reporter covering politics; Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent at The New York Times.Background reading: “We have no coherent message”: Democrats have struggled to oppose President Trump.Democrats chose a political operator from Minnesota as their new leader.The House Democratic Super PAC created a $50 million fund targeting the working class.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hi, my name is Anna Foley, I'm with the New York Times. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Okay. How does it feel to be a Democrat right now? That's an interesting question. I feel like Rocky Balboa. We just got punched, we just got knocked down. We got knocked down really hard and it hurts.

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 over invested into the policy differences that we end up separating ourselves But I also think it's important to note that we're not completely in the wilderness, right? This was not some election where Trump won by 20 points. It was a close election. I think we missed the mark somewhere. And if there was ever a time, if there was ever

an inflection point, it is now. So we've got a lot of work ahead of us. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today. How the Democratic Party is navigating the dominance of President Trump and reckoning with the reality that more and more voters are souring on its message. I spoke with three of my colleagues, politics reporters, Shane Goldmacher and Reed Epstein, and congressional correspondent, Annie Carney.

It's Thursday, February 6th. So friends, welcome to the roundtable. Reed and Annie, thank you for making the trek over to the Washington studio. Good to have you. Hi, Michael. Can I quote Galinda from Wicked? It's good to see me, isn't it? Yes, you can.

That was great. Shane. Hello. Yep, sorry, Reed. I was also gonna say hi to Shane. Oh, yes. Well, Shane, thank you for being here with me in the New York studio.

All three of you have been very closely covering the story of the Democratic Party in this moment. And you know this well, whenever a party loses a presidential election, we speak of it wandering through the wilderness. When a party loses a presidential race and both chambers of Congress, we speak of that party as being in an especially dark wilderness. And when you lose the presidency and both chambers

of Congress and the new president of the opposing party takes 300 executive actions that undo everything your party has ever stood for, I don't really know that there is a phrase for it. Do you have one in mind? Deep in the wilderness. Existential crisis? 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. Even more effed than the previous F'd.

Okay, so I want to start by talking about the kind of soul searching that the Democratic Party is doing and whether that soul searching has started to arrive at any kind of consensus about what exactly the party's problems are and how systemic and deep those problems are. From a distance, it doesn't look like there's a consensus. So let's talk about that, Shane. I want to start with you. Yeah. I mean, I think the question of how deep in the wilderness is the Democratic Party is

when I asked a whole bunch of Democrats in the last couple of weeks. You literally burned up the phone lines of the Democratic Party. Yeah. I called basically as many people as I could to say, just how deep is this hole? And actually the answer was really surprising to me, which is that there is not at all an agreement on the size of the hole that the Democratic Party finds itself in. And the reason is that, yes, they've lost the White House and the House and the Senate, and they're watching all these things erode faster than imaginable.

But they also have watched wipeout elections in their lifetime. Senate and they're watching all these things erode faster than imaginable. But they also have watched wipeout elections in their lifetime. In the 1980s when Democratic Party won a single state in a presidential election, that this doesn't look like that. This is not in fact a wipeout of the Democratic Party. And so if you don't think the party is in as deep of a hole, you're not looking to make that kind of big systemic change. And I think that disagreement on just how screwed the party is, is central to understand

what they're going to do to get out of the hole. If you think that they're pretty close, then you're not going to make big changes. You're going to wait for Trump to overreach and you're going to hope to pick up a few seats and you get a foothold in the House of Representatives in 2026. It sounds like Shane's describing a split between those who think, look, the math, look at the House, it's tactical. Our message couldn't have been that bad if we almost retained control of the House of Representatives.

Yes, I've heard that argument a lot from DNC people, especially after the election, were kind of saying, look, we actually outperformed in a lot of these districts. We did really well this cycle. And that was like a hard argument to take seriously. Like they lost the house and they're saying like, no, we actually won. Nancy Pelosi was a proponent of that argument. They did outperform like in a lot of districts

where they should have done worse than they did, they outperformed the top of the ticket. So, and like if they are not, if they can't win back the House in two years, then I would say there's no coming back for this party ever. And I think there's a difference between the people who look at this and say 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 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.

And they were clearly ill-prepared politically, certainly, for the types of actions that Trump has taken. Reed, I want to put something to you since both Shane and Annie have been giving voice to the let's not freak out democratic point of view in this moment. I want you to contemplate the case for a freak out, okay? This was something written by one of the three of you and here's what it says. Democrats who share the bleak outlook for their future see statistical signs of the party's decline everywhere.

Blue states are a seeding population to red states. Voter registration figures are mostly headed in the wrong direction for the Democrats. More Americans are identifying with the GOP than with Democrats. And Democrats lost ground in this last election among core constituencies including lower income, Latino, and younger voters as President Trump swept every battleground state. That's the case for freaking out. And Shane, that was your sentence, your paragraph.

It seems like a pretty strong case for freaking out if you're the Democratic Party. 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. And their case is, like, not without merit, frankly. You know, we saw what happened in the election. We saw kind of all of these demographics moving away from the party. 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 that or the reality that they all got behind a very unpopular president and Or the reality that they all got behind a very unpopular president and basically told the American people that he wasn't too old, that he wasn't too frail, and on and on and on and backed him until they didn't. By which point, lots of these voters didn't believe them when they said anything else because of what they had said about Biden. I mean, let's talk about that point you're raising, the origins of the Democrats' problems.

If you're inclined to think that this is an existential crisis moment for the party, it makes sense to ask the question, what exactly went wrong? Reed, you're pointing to the observation that Biden's weaknesses as a candidate and party leaders' decision to not ask him to step aside earlier might be a factor. But when we ask the question of what went wrong, it seems like that might be a very narrow reading of things. And Shane, I want to ask you about something that Congressman Pat Ryan from upstate New York says about the Democratic Party.

He's not talking about whether Joe Biden stayed in the race too long and Democrats, you know, weren't eyes wide open about his health and his various problems. He says that the democratic brand overall is so weak at this point that the only way democrats like him can win is by running against the democratic brand, which of course is not a great strategy if you're a democrat. So I want to broaden the conversation to what someone like a congressman, Pat Ryan says are deeper problems with the party's identity, ideology, and its relationship to the voters. I mean, I think Pat Ryan's putting his finger on this fundamental problem that's facing the party that's beyond Joe Biden.

It's a structural problem about the democratic brand, which is if you look at the House of Representatives, more Democrats need to win Trumpy districts to get a majority. And the same is true for the Senate. And so you need the brand to be such that you can win the majority by not having to run against the brand. Republicans hold a majority with basically no one. There are arguably two House Republicans who run against the National Republican brand. And they still have a majority, right?

There are a dozen Democrats who try to distance themselves from the national brand in the way that Pat Ryan is describing. The optimist case for Democrats around, okay, the hole's not that deep, the concern really is that that means the party's missing an opportunity for introspection. Somebody else said to me, one of the only advantages of losing is getting to think about how you reset and rebuild. And if you're not going to actually do that rethinking about what the party stands for, then you're unlikely to end up succeeding over the long haul.

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 like 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. Another person making that same argument is Congresswoman Marie Gluzincamp Perez from Washington State. She owns an auto shop with her husband. She's been making the case that the Democratic Party does not respect the working class and

that they need more working class people in Congress. That all these progressive policies like student loan forgiveness, she voted against it. Why? Because no one in her district went to college. So she's saying that, like to Reid's point, some of this is for urban educated people and is leaving out large swaths of the country that Democrats aren't speaking to. That's what people like Perez are making. And there are so many affinity groups, sort of to use a phrase in vogue in 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. 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. I, you know, nobody who was not being paid to do so, I think, was watching it. But for people who are not engaged in one of those groups, 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. And when you look at the issues that professional Democrats in Washington think of as their core issues,

they're all very popular. 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 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. What you're pointing to read is what I think explains why the party can't quite make up its mind as it does this soul searching and thinking about the nature of its problems

about whether this is a moment for revolution or caution because it looks at what happened in those congressional races and says we didn't do horribly and it looks at these issues sometimes in isolation and says they stand up okay on their own so maybe we're not a party in crisis. And so that debate has not been resolved. And we're gonna go take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about the next important debate

that flows very naturally from this one, which is what should the party's tactics be in this moment, especially if it hasn't made up its mind about its soul searching. So we'll be right back. Okay, welcome back. Annie, Reid, Shane. Where we left off was with a Democratic party that has not firmly established the nature of the problem, which in theory makes it pretty hard to come up with a set of tactics for how to

conduct itself. But the president and his blitz of activity has required the party to make a set of decisions about how to respond. So I want to talk about that. It feels like the party is having a split personality on the question of whether to be a party of protest in this moment or a party of waiting and seeing what the country's reaction to Trump will be. So I want to first play a clip from Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House, who is taking the don't overreact approach. Let me just play that for you guys. We understand that extreme ag Republicans have a strategy. They want to flood the zone

with outrage, but we can't chase every outrage. I'm a Yankee fan and Aaron Judge is my favorite player. One of the reasons that he's a great hitter is that he does not swing at every pitch. We're not going to swing at every pitch. We're going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people. Then there's a contrasting view articulated by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut who says, right now, you have to swing at every pitch. He said, Trump floods the zone every hour of every day.

We have to do the same thing. So those seem like the two contrasting arguments on tactics. And I want you all to help me understand the basis for both of those and also which one seems to be prevailing in the first two weeks or so of the Trump presidency. Well, I'm just excited to talk about baseball with Reid on the podcast. I mean, I think it breaks down to the question of is less more or is more more? And that is one that is really gripping Democrats, especially having watched Trump flood the zone in 2024 in the media, right?

He was an omnipresence in the campaign trail in a way that a more cautious Kamala Harris picked her spots and often performed in those spots. And it wasn't quite enough. And so there are a lot of Democrats saying, get out there and respond to everything. And that is the Chris Murphy School of Thought saying, it's not that all these fights are winners.

In fact, some of them might not be winners, but the act of opposing is powerful. Those two sides are just like pulling at each other each day. And because Trump is making so much news, every day the Democrats have a new opportunity to either respond or not. Andy, you're watching that debate play out in Congress, which you cover really closely, and where it would seem Democrats have one of their major levers of power, which is the bully pulpit of Congress, opposing cabinet nominees from the president if they want to, or deciding that the right move in this moment is to work with Trump on issues like immigration.

So what are you seeing? I'm seeing a huge shift in real time. So I think when Trump was elected, Democrats really wanted to show part of our brand is that we honor free and fair elections. He won. He won the popular vote. You know, we're not going to just be opposed to be opposed. We're going to go to his inauguration. we're going to consider his nominees, like on his

or her merits. That started to shift with some of the actions the Trump administration was taking. Federal funding freeze was the most obvious place where Democrats could stage on the merits a huge protest. Also cutting off USAID, letting Elon Musk plug in his personal hard drive to the entire Treasury database. Metaphorically speaking. Yes.

So these are actions that now they feel differently. It's moving, and it's moving under pressure from outside of Congress. Reid wrote a really good story about Democratic governors calling Schumer and saying, oppose all of them, and him and him saying no it's better to pick our spots. That has already shifted. As of yesterday Chuck Schumer now told his caucus I'm voting against everyone now and I urge you to do the same. Even someone like Chris Murphy, the Mr. Swing at Every Pitch, he started out voting for some and he said to us, I changed my mind.

Interesting in real time. I no longer think that we can have any leg to stand on if we're saying yes to some of this stuff. 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. I want to talk for just a moment about the message that these Democrats now determined to swing at more pitches are articulating. This week we saw them try to pick their first real foil. And as you're starting to hint at, folks here,

it wasn't as much Trump as it was Elon Musk. And in some of the protests that democratic lawmakers held across Washington over the past few days, they decided to train their fury at him. Let me just play a clip from somebody whose name has come up in this conversation, Senator Chris Murphy. We don't pledge allegiance to the billionaires. We don't we don't pledge allegiance to Elon Musk. We don't pledge allegiance to the creepy 22 year olds

working for Elon Musk. We pledge allegiance to the United States of America. Why approach this torrent of activity from the White House through the person of Elon Musk, Shane? And does that seem effective? I'm not sure if it's going to be effective yet, but the big soul searching that the Democratic Party has been going through since the election is how did they lose ground among working class voters? In Musk, they have a billionaire foil, as you heard Chris Murphy just say, and they

can say, nobody voted for this guy, so we might be willing to give Trump some leeway, talking about those voters in the middle, but we're not giving this guy any leeway. Right now, the party is debating not just do you take on Elon Musk, but do you support particular programs that he's targeting? USAID is something he said he wants to dismantle, unravel, get rid of, right? This has not been a kind of thing with broad popular support in the United States, but it is part of the kind of agenda the Democrats have. What do you do?

Well, you pick the fight with Elon Musk instead of the defense of USAID. Right. You mentioned USAID. Reid, when I think of USAID and Democratic lawmakers standing in front of it and saying that something is wrong when the Trump administration cuts spending to the United States Agency for International Development, it makes me wonder if the Democrats do need to resolve that debate over what went wrong in this last election because foreign aid, which is what USAID is most known for, is not a top priority for

voters. And so it looked to some like the party was doing what it did over the past few years and not in a good way. It was speaking to its progressive base, defending the status quo on foreign aid. That is perhaps how you get the activists left motivated, but those images circulate across the country. And do they not do the party any favors? 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. 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 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. I wanna now turn to something that was happening in Washington that I believe one of you raised a little bit earlier in this conversation

that seems extremely well-timed. The Democratic National Committee met just outside Washington to make what feels like one of the most important big decisions about the party's identity since the election. And it feels like that would be very informed by the conversation we're having here. It was gonna choose its next chairperson. My question to you, Reid and Shane,

because I know you were both there, was did it reveal anything about these debates we've been discussing here about nature of the problem, nature of the solution for Democrats? The short answer is no, it did not. Okay. Shane, why does Reed say that? Let's tell you who the person they selected was to tell you why the answer is no.

The person they picked is a guy named Ken Martin, who is the chair of the Minnesota State Democratic Party, and he has been in that position for years, and he won the national party chairmanship by coalition building inside the party. The party picked, in a choice of insiders, perhaps the most inside candidate. Now, he's promising some potential changes, but that is not what he ran on.

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's about. 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. It feels like the question of the party's identity so clearly not being resolved in

this moment in a major way is likely to be resolved most clearly when the party's identity so clearly not being resolved in this moment in a major way is likely to be resolved most clearly when the party begins to coalesce around a future leader. I wonder how much we're getting a feel for who the party's next avatar might be in the crucible of this Trump blitzkrieg moment. I think the history has told us the ideas and people who look like they're popping out of this moment prove to be exactly not who ends up being that person. In 2004, the last time Democrats had really lost

at the same level, there was a big discussion of should the party again move to the middle and find a moderate white candidate in the era of George W. Bush. But by 2008, it was a totally different candidate. It was Barack Obama who came about. So I think it's too early to even have a sense of the kind of Democrat who is going to help them get out of the wilderness. But the person needs to inherit a party brand that isn't so broken that you can't run ahead of it enough to win. Hmm. Annie, what are you seeing?

Because it seems like the loudest voices are in Congress right now, even if the next Democratic nominee might not be someone in Congress. Well, there's a lot of younger senators who definitely see an opportunity to be the future leader of their party. The clip you played of Chris Murphy, like that sure sounded like someone campaigning for president. And there's a lot of younger, by Senate standards, lawmakers who probably look in the mirror and see an opportunity in 2028

to be the future of the party. I have one final question. Does the future of the Democratic Party at this moment mean or even require former Vice President Kamala Harris standing up and saying, it's not me? No, I don't. I think that it's not central to the party's conversation. She will be, if she chooses to run again, one of multiple candidates. She might start ahead in the polls, but she's one of multiple at this point.

If she's running, that's not deterring anyone else from running. The Democratic Party doesn't typically go back to the well again for a person who's lost before. The Republican Party has this long history of picking somebody who was a nominee or almost was the nominee. Democrats have traditionally won, and Joe Biden is the exception, by finding a fresh face. Not since Adlai Stevenson has somebody had the nomination twice. All right, well, with that incredible, obscure,

helpful bit of historical context, I'd like to thank the three of you, Annie, Reid, Shane. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to nerday. In a few moments, I'll sign a historic executive order to ban men from competing in women's

sports. It's about time. President Trump signed an executive order seeking to ban transgender women and girls from participating in women's sports by denying federal funding to any schools that allow it. Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat our women and our girls.

From now on, women's sports will be only for women. And the White House walked back Trump's surprise proposal to seize control of Gaza and permanently relocate the two million Palestinians who live there, after it was forcefully rejected by the Arab world. What President Trump announced yesterday is the offer, the willingness of the United States to become responsible for the reconstruction of that area. And while you are rebuilding… Instead, White House officials, including Secretary of State

Marco Rubio, reframed Trump's offer as a plan for the U.S. to merely oversee Gaza's reconstruction, and insisted that he would not commit U.S. troops to the territory, as his original plan seemed to require. Finally, she will lead the Democrats. You know where they're going to, she's going to lead them right down. At the White House, the president showed up for the swearing in ceremony of his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, and suggested that in her role as the nation's top law enforcement official and leader of the Justice Department, traditionally

a nonpartisan job. Bondi would take a dim view of Democrats. I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats. And I think she will be as impartial as a person can be. I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally, but she's going to be as total as you can get. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Anna Foley, Diana Nguyen, and Olivia Natt. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Lexi Diao, contains original music by Diane Wong,

Marian Lozano, and Rowan Numisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wunderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Boboril. See you tomorrow. Music