A Democratic strategist who helped President Obama win Florida in 2008 says his party needs a major overhaul if it wants to win future elections.
“IT IS TIME TO STOP talking about 2024,” Steve Schale, CEO of the super PAC Unite the Country, told his party in a Substack post for The Bulwark on Wednesday.
“The real conversation is how my party went from the broadest electoral mandate of the previous twenty-five years, with the biggest majority in the Senate in the previous thirty years, to a shell of itself—a political organization that can hardly be classified as a national entity anymore,” he continued.
The Democratic Party suffered major setbacks up and down the ballot in the 2024 elections, as President-elect Donald Trump recaptured the White House, and the GOP flipped the Senate and held on to their fragile majority in the House.
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Schale warned that Democrats were on a losing streak in Florida, Ohio and Iowa, and it was only going to get worse if they didn’t make “real structural changes” to the party.
His suggestions included spending more money earlier on ads addressing crime and the economy and dealing with the right’s “advantage” in the podcast and social media sphere by “building” their own “ecosystem” to deliver information to their base and persuadable voters.
But Schale said these strategies wouldn’t work if the party didn’t also change its messaging to broaden its coalition.
“The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets—black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.—and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other. At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate,” he wrote.
The party needed to return to investing in all 50 states, he argued.
“But we have a bigger problem,” Schale continued. “Sure, we can win elections under the right circumstances, but we no longer have anything remotely close to a long-term winning coalition.”
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He pointed out how the Democratic Party had been losing blue-collar White voters for several election cycles and that Hispanic voters had been turned off by the party’s “socialism talk” in 2020.
“Still, despite plenty of people screaming from the rafters, the Biden campaign largely ignored the growing problems associated with the rhetoric of the extreme left. In doing so, it let the narrative settle in,” he claimed.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party needed to reach out to the “median” voter who is not a partisan in future elections, he argued.
“We’ve seen what happens when we don’t listen to voters—when we focus on reinforcing our tent instead of expanding it, and when we move our message outside of the mainstream,” he said.
“This is an opportunity for my side to redefine our values for voters who have stopped listening. Get this right, and we set ourselves up nicely for the next decade. Get this wrong, and we could be in the wilderness for a very long time,” Schale concluded.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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