KELLY: Hi. This is Kelly (ph) in New Jersey. I have reached the clean out the spice cabinet portion of unemployment. This podcast was recorded at…
ASHLEY LOPEZ, HOST:
1:06 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, December 3, 2024.
KELLY: Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully, I found a job. If not, it’s on to the linen closet. Here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIG TOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
LOPEZ: (Laughter).
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Lot of spices going in the garbage.
LOPEZ: Yeah, I’m crossing my fingers for you. But I do love just, like, deep cleaning every inch of my apartment. It is the best feeling.
DEIRDRE WALSH, BYLINE: Ugh (ph). No, thanks.
(LAUGHTER)
LOPEZ: Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: And today on the show, we’re going to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party after a pretty bruising election cycle. Deirdre, I want to talk about Congress first. First of all, let’s talk about the balance of power in each of the houses first.
WALSH: Right. Well, Republicans took control of the Senate. They flipped four seats in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Montana. So they will have, in January, a 53-seat majority, with the Democrats having 47 members in their caucus. In the House, Republicans will keep their super-narrow majority, but believe it or not, they are still counting votes in one race out in California. So it’s unclear if they will have 220 seats or 221 seats, which, as you can imagine, is a razor-thin majority with, you know, 218 being the magic number in the House.
The other challenge Republicans in the House are already facing going into January is that a couple of their members have been tapped to serve in the Trump administration. Another member, Matt Gaetz, who was initially tapped to be Trump’s nominee as attorney general, ended up withdrawing but does not plan to come back to the House. So House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing vacancies along with the narrow majority, which is going to just make his job that much tougher.
LIASSON: Well, are those seats expected to be filled by Republicans?
WALSH: They are. They are. These are all solidly Republican vacancies in Florida and upstate New York for Elise Stefanik, who is tapped to be ambassador to the U.N.
LIASSON: But still, Deirdre, what you’re saying is he only can afford to lose three votes, pretty much, I mean, if he gets the 221 seats.
WALSH: Right. But once those members leave, he might be in the position of only being able to lose one because – depending on what happens in this race out in California because if they don’t win that and Democrats take that seat, they could have potentially a 220-seat majority. And in the House, if there is a 216-216 vote, it’s a tie, and the majority loses. You know, it’s not really stopping Republicans from arguing that they have a mandate.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: And that’s one thing that Republicans in the House and Senate have been saying since Election Day despite their really narrow majority. I think they feel like Trump’s win and win of the popular vote gives them what they believe is a mandate, but executing the priorities that they need to do is really still going to be really challenging.
LOPEZ: So, yes, this was a loss, but it wasn’t a wipeout. I wonder what you’re hearing from Democratic members who won tough races about how they won in their districts.
WALSH: Well, I think the ones that won in places where Trump won are places where a lot of Democrats are trying to take some lessons right now – in districts where Democrats were able to keep their seats but Trump won at the top of the ticket. There are a couple of examples of those. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who’s a Democrat in a rural district in Washington State, is one who has been arguing that, look. She never let her race become nationalized. She always focused on local issues. She was mindful of the fact that her constituents were worried…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: …About immigration in the sense that fentanyl was an issue that was impacting constituents in her district. And high prices were something that people were talking about all along. She did not hesitate to break with her leadership on a lot of votes in the House. She got flak for it, and some folks worried she wasn’t going to win reelection because she had broken with some progressive priorities. But in the end, I mean, her message is, like, we have to represent the people that sent us here. She ran an auto shop, and, really, a lot of Democrats look to her example as somebody who can talk to working-class voters, which is something they really are admitting is a major problem for the party going forward.
LIASSON: Well, what’s really interesting for Democrats as they try to figure out what happened – why did they lose so badly, and what do they do as they move forward? – is that the election has two different stories for them. One is it was a sweep, not a wave. Donald Trump did not have coattails. They hung onto the Senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan, Arizona, Nevada. He was the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote. He is going to win it when all the votes are counted, by a tiny, tiny little margin.
But the other story, which is much worse for Democrats, is that he made gains with almost every voting group in America, including some very important constituencies for Democrats – Hispanic men, Black men, young voters. So they have to figure out why they lost among those groups and what they can do to get them back. And one thing that seems to be forming as a consensus, at least so far, is that the cultural left has to be not front and center, has to be pushed to the side. And an economic message for working-class people has to be more central.
LOPEZ: Is there, like, consensus on this within the party about, like, where they went wrong, or is this still something they’re sort of debating?
WALSH: I think there is some debate inside the party. It really depends on, you know, sort of where regionally you’re from, where on the ideological spectrum you’re from in terms of being a progressive or a moderate.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: But I think there is consensus on the issue of the working class moving away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was the party of the working class and the middle class for decades, and the shift was very significant to Trump and away from the Democratic Party. There’s consensus that that, at least, is somewhere they need to start. Even today, there is a move to do that. Senate Democrats elected their leadership for the next Congress. They reelected Chuck Schumer to be the top democratic leader in the Senate.
But they added some new positions to the Senate Democratic leadership table, including one for Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, focused solely on messaging for the working class. And they added another position for New Jersey Senator Cory Booker on strategic messaging. So there is a recognition that maybe they’re keeping some of their top leaders, but they need to sort of revisit how they talk about their issues. They’re not talking about changing their positions…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: …Like abortion rights, but they’re trying to figure out how to re-engage with voters in a way that’s not, Washington is telling you that they are right. Here are the policies that we’re right on and you’re wrong, or you’re not part of the party if you don’t accept this position. Look. Democrats passed a lot of policies under the Biden administration that were pretty popular in terms of the Inflation Reduction Act. But voters weren’t feeling them, and the idea that, well, we did this; just take our word for it; it’s going to benefit you, wasn’t what voters were feeling. They were still going to the grocery store and paying high prices.
LIASSON: Yeah. And there wasn’t a magic solution for that, either. But, you know…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
LIASSON: …What’s so ironic about this if we are in the midst of a realignment – because we don’t know that yet – where the Republican Party is going to be the multi-ethnic, working-class party that gives tax breaks to billionaires – that’s something that looks like it has some advantages in there that Democrats can work with.
LOPEZ: I do want to go back to the position that Democrats were in for the past four years, which is defending Washington and institutions. Things are very different moving into the new year, right? They are going to be in the position of opposition, which is a much more comfortable place for them to be. I mean, during Trump’s first term, the Congressional Democrats were very focused on being a check. And I wonder if that’s something, Deirdre, that we’re going to see again in this cycle.
WALSH: I think they’ll see some of that. I mean, there’s already some jockeying in the House Democratic caucus about trying to pick messengers in key committees, like in the oversight committee and the judiciary committee, that are effective messengers who can respond and push back when they think there is executive overreach. But this time around, there’s a real shift that I’m seeing because I did cover the last time that Trump had full control of both the White House and both the House and Senate, where there was this, you know, very focused Democratic sort of resistance movement. Now you’re seeing Democrats say – you know, people like John Fetterman in the Senate – you know, Trump won. He has the right to pick people for his cabinet, who he wants. You know, I’m willing to take a look at them.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: So you’re starting to see ideas come from Democrats to this proposed outside entity called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash federal government spending. People like Bernie Sanders says DOGE is right. I think the Pentagon needs some cutting. A Florida Democrat today, Jared Moskowitz, agreed to be part of a House committee that is going to work on this project. I mean, these are places where they’re proactively saying, like, these are things that we agree need to be tackled. And that’s a very different vibe from…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: …The full-on sort of, like, pushback we saw in 2017.
LIASSON: But, you know, that’s a different kind of resistance.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
LIASSON: In other words, that doesn’t equal capitulating.
LOPEZ: Right.
LIASSON: But I think that they’re going to use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, when they decide how to oppose him. And don’t forget. When is the time that Donald Trump has been the most unpopular? When he’s been in office. And he, all of a sudden, is now responsible for bringing prices down, securing the border, making sure that there’s peace in the Middle East and no more war in Europe. There’s a lot of things that he has to do that his own party is skeptical about.
LOPEZ: Yeah. OK, well, let’s take a break. When we come back, how Democrats plan to find future success.
And we’re back. Next, I want to talk about the Democratic National Committee. This is the group that runs the party, essentially, and helps set the party’s direction. Candidates are going to look to the DNC for guidance and support as they try to run and win in the future. The DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, is stepping down. Mara, there’s already a couple people who are vying for this position. Can you talk to me about who these people are and what they would sort of represent?
LIASSON: Sure. This is very inside baseball kind of election. Four hundred and forty-eight people vote, the members of the Democratic National Committee. And when the Democrats have the White House, you really don’t hear much from the DNC chair because you have the bully pulpit of the White House, and the president is the spokesman for the party. But when you don’t have the White House, who runs the DNC becomes more important because they are one of the most prominent Democrats, along with the minority leader in the House and the Senate, Jeffries and Schumer in this case.
So who’s running? Martin O’Malley – he is the former Democratic governor of Maryland and the Social Security commissioner. Ken Martin is the chair of the Minnesota State Democratic Party. Ben Wikler is the chair of the Wisconsin State Democratic Party. And Wisconsin, of course, was an important battleground state, and Ben Wikler’s claim to fame is that Democrats lost Wisconsin by the smallest margin of all the battleground states. And then there is a state representative from New York State, James Skoufis, who’s also running.
And it’s not like there’s an ideological battle among these people. It’s really who you want to be the face of the Democratic Party. You want someone who’s a good communicator. One of the things that Ben Wikler says is that the party has to figure out how to reach voters who get all their information about Democrats from Republicans – so how to compete in the new information environment.
LOPEZ: Yeah. How do you think this is going to change the vision for the party? I mean, do you think that’s going to change it all moving forward?
LIASSON: Well, I think the party is doing a lot of soul-searching, and I think the new chair of the DNC is going to conduct some of that. There’s going to be a lot of meetings about what went wrong. What do we do differently? We’ve already talked about some of that. How do we talk to the people who used to be our base – working-class people, non-college voters of every ethnicity? And there are two off-year elections in 2025 in New Jersey and Virginia, and they’re going to focus on that and then the midterms.
WALSH: I think the other thing that I’ve been hearing from Democrats as they contemplate, you know, the new head of the DNC but also sort of strategy going forward is this idea of, you know, should we be trying to compete in more places? A lot of DNC candidates come in with this so-called 50-state strategy. Like, we should be able to run everywhere, have resources everywhere.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: A lot of Democrats are saying the big problem this cycle was too much sort of Washington-focused ideas and not enough ideas connecting people who live in rural areas. There was this effort to, like, lose by less in rural areas, but that wasn’t a really, like, effective…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: …Strategy. And it wasn’t really putting the issues front and center that those people cared about. If you’re going somewhere saying, like, we’re just going to cut down the margin, but you’re not connecting with the things they care about, you can’t expect to win.
LIASSON: Why can’t you do both?
WALSH: I think that’s a big question for this DNC race, right?
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: I mean, how do you execute a 50-state strategy? Like, how do you bring all of those ideas under one tent where people felt, in this past election, that there were too many people dictating what they could and could not talk about?
LOPEZ: Yeah. Well, beyond the DNC, Deirdre, there’s – these groups that both the Democratic Party and Republican Parties have set up to sort of help their candidates in the House and the Senate. Do you get a sense from folks on the Hill that those groups are more important than whomever, like, ends up being in charge of the DNC?
WALSH: I mean, I think they’re more important when it comes to fundraising. Those sort of outside super PACs were a massive factor in the small number of competitive races we saw in both the House and Senate. Without the resources of those outside groups, I think a lot of these tight Senate races, these tight House races could have been a lot different. I don’t think that a lot of those candidates got a lot of money or direction from the national party apparatus. In terms of whether they’ll listen to the message of the new DNC, in terms of Democrats, I think it’s a little early to tell.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
WALSH: I think there’s still a lot of what they call sort of autopsy reports that both House and Senate Democrats are trying to take a look at. Like, let’s look at the results and sort of figure out, you know, how do we get back out there after losses in places that they didn’t foresee.
LOPEZ: All right. Well, let’s leave it there. I’m Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIG TOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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