Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Tim Ryan, a former representative from Ohio; Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political researcher, a campaign adviser and the host of the podcast “Words to Win By”; and Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist and the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.” They discussed the future of the Democratic Party and its leadership.
Frank Bruni: Lis, Tim, Anat, in about a month, Donald Trump will be inaugurated and Republicans will control both chambers of Congress. Happy Holidays! Judged by the sheer volume of words that have been written and spoken since Nov. 5 about their party’s comeuppance, Democrats have gone beyond soul searching to soul spelunking — they’ve descended into whole new subterranean caverns of analysis. But what they’re seeing and saying is all over the place.
In your opinion, what’s the one biggest reason behind — the key factor explaining — what happened to Democrats in 2024, and tell me why it, er, trumps all the others?
Lis Smith: The Democratic brand is in the toilet. Many of the Democrats who succeeded this cycle — our best over-performers in House races, for instance — are people who ran against the Democratic Party brand. Trump tore down the blue wall in the industrial Midwest, but he also expanded his vote the most in our bluest and most urban areas.
Bruni: “The toilet”? Yikes, Lis, that’s severe. Do you really think it’s that bad?
Smith: When the best way to win as a candidate is to run against your own party, it’s that bad. Our candidates down ballot are good. It’s what the “D” next to their name means (the status quo) that people don’t like.
Bruni: Do you also think it’s that bad, Tim and Anat?
Tim Ryan: The Dems got pinned as the status quo party on inflation, instability, insecurity and every other issue facing working people. Trump was the change candidate in a year when 65 percent of people thought we are on the wrong track. And they failed to redefine themselves on the culture issues on which they were on the other side of 60 percent to 70 percent of Americans.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: Well … toilets have clear utility, so perhaps the comparison is even “generous.” But I think it’s bigger than Democrats. Voters, outside of hard partisans, think most politicians lie at least some of the time. I know — we just asked them in a survey. Seventy-two percent of them said this of Republican leaders and 70 percent said this of Democrats. This is astonishingly good for authoritarians. What it means, and we hear this in nearly every focus group we do, is that they discount the threats of MAGA. It sounds like this: “Well, Trump’s just saying things. He doesn’t really mean them.” So, he gets to keep his base engaged and enraged, while also seeming like the guy who’s just going to give you a personally signed check.
Meanwhile, it’s absolutely detrimental to Democrats because their purported achievements, desirable agenda and dire warnings are all not credited as real. Nationally, extrapolating from AP VoteCast data, 19 million Biden 2020 voters sat it out this time. This was mainly a lurching couch-ward, not rightward. Why? Voters here and around the world are looking around at what there is on offer and saying: not this.
Bruni: How did it end up wherever it is — toilet, urinal, bucolic outhouse — and, most important of all, can you give me the script for brand redemption? Which leaders in the foreground? What message and language? What policies? Tim, you recently wrote in Newsweek and said on “Morning Joe” that the Democratic Party should move its headquarters to Youngstown, Ohio. I get that you were speaking somewhat metaphorically, but round out that plan. What does the sign outside headquarters say? Do they prohibit a Starbucks from opening beside the lobby?
Ryan: The sign outside HQ now should say “Beware: Entering an Echo Chamber.” I said move to Youngstown, but it could be Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Toledo or Detroit or Milwaukee. But I am dead serious that it should not be in Washington or anywhere on the coasts. We need to send a bold signal that we are committed to reconnecting to people out in the real world.
Smith: I agree with Tim that our party has fallen victim to its echo chamber. If I were going to make a requirement of anyone working at the Democratic National Committee or on a presidential campaign, it would first be that they have at least one cycle of experience on a campaign in a red-swing area. You’re less likely to use terms like “justice-involved individuals” and embrace policies like the Green New Deal if you’ve spent a day or two talking to people who aren’t 100 percent down-the-line progressives like you.
Bruni: All of you are basically saying some version of: Voters do not want the status quo, do not want politics as usual, don’t trust veteran politicians. It’s not so much about left-right; it’s about insider-outsider, establishment-anti-establishment. If that’s the case, should Hakeem Jeffries, a New York liberal, really continue as House minority leader? Should the candidates for chair of the D.N.C. be a whole different lot?
Ryan: Hakeem is a bright light in our current predicament. He is very savvy and pragmatic. He can help us rebrand because he’s not been defined yet.
Shenker-Osorio: I think Jeffries has done a consistently good job of drawing a clear contrast and casting himself and the party as on the side of working people. But, as a “messaging person,” I’m the first to say some things are just not a messaging problem. First, what people believe about Democrats isn’t made out of what Democrats say. It’s made up largely of what people say about them. Second, if both sides are, in fact, beholden to billionaires, then it’s extraordinarily difficult to make the case that you stand with and for working people.
Bruni: Should Democrats for once and for all stop mooning over Hollywood celebrities and tugging them en masse onto the stage?
Ryan: Yes, we need to move away from the celebrities. Look how Trump campaigned: He went to a mixed martial arts match and brought Hulk Hogan and Dana White to speak at his Madison Square Garden rally. I have a picture in my office of Bobby Kennedy with dirty coal miners. We’re a long, long way from that.
Smith: We need to look to who succeeded and overperformed this cycle and why. Some of the top overperformers in House races couldn’t have had more disparate profiles — Pat Ryan, Jared Golden, Tom Suozzi, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Angie Craig. What they had in common was that they were willing to run against the party brand, they met voters where they are on their frustrations with the border and public safety issues, and they talked more about their vision for the future than how bad Donald Trump is. I’d also throw in another thing — these members largely were among the first to call for Joe Biden to step down as nominee. They weren’t in the crew of Democrats who told voters not to believe what they’d seen with their own eyes in that first debate.
Shenker-Osorio: If you want to look at successes that seem to defy “conventional wisdom,” to me that’s Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. He has consistently run on, not from, his values, mixing economic populism with a clear and powerful explanation for the siren song of the right wing: scapegoating, hate peddling and fear mongering. Beshear creates the biggest possible “we” and then conveys why right-wing attacks on groups that have been intentionally “othered” are Trojan horses to enable widespread harms, from taking away our freedoms, to controlling our lives, to screwing over our livelihoods.
Bruni: Lis just brought up a bunch of names and, Anat, you just mentioned Andy Beshear. Who else are the Democratic voices — maybe they’re candidates who just won, maybe they’re people not even in office — we should be listening to? The ones who, in your opinion, are finding a language and symbolism that reach out to the voters the party needs to be winning? And what can we learn from them? I guess I’m inviting you to sing the praises of your heroes, but from the present, not the past.
Ryan: I like Ro Khanna, Ritchie Torres. We need someone who can take on the extreme views in the party. The main message has got to be reform, à la Teddy Roosevelt. We need someone with the guts to take on the monopolies, Big Tech, Big Agriculture and our broken health care system, which are squashing working people.
Shenker-Osorio: Here’s where I will let my Wisconsin bias show: Ben Wikler. Full disclosure, I’ve known Ben — who is running to be chair of the D.N.C. — since high school, and he has consistently demonstrated an ability to make the choir want to sing from the same songbook and to convert the conflicted. Wisconsin is, of course, the canonical swing state.
Ben is excellent at bringing folks together. At the same time, there is absolutely not enough of the base, so we must also bring people to our cause. And that requires, as Tim has said, true economic populism — not some vague gesturing toward an “opportunity economy,” but rather a return to Franklin Roosevelt and a taking of sides.
Bruni: Tim, I hear you on Khanna and Torres. Listening to them, I sometimes nod so much and so hard that I strain my neck. But Khanna, Torres, Wikler, whom Anat mentioned — those are all names already very much out there. I find myself wondering if the Democratic Party, when it comes to new faces and a changing of the guard, isn’t going far enough. Maybe this is relevant, maybe not, but the selection of Representative Gerry Connolly, 74, over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, to be the top Democrat on the influential House Oversight Committee hardly heralds an openness to generational change. Or to big change, period.
Smith: People are thinking way too hard about a committee post. A.O.C. has plenty of firepower to get her message out there with or without a gavel in the minority. I would point out, however, that for the first time I can remember we did see some real generational change in those committees: Jamie Raskin over Jerry Nadler on Judiciary and Angie Craig over Jim Costa on Agriculture.
Ryan: The House of Representative is a different animal. It makes glaciers look like a NASCAR race. But members of Congress like Connolly become subject matter experts and that is, and should be, valued. If you want to reform, you have to be a master of the material.
Shenker-Osorio: A.O.C. is a once-in-a-generation political talent. We’ve done over 220 focus groups with conflicted voters since October 2020. “Conflicted” meaning disaffected Democrats and swing voters. And the one consistent refrain we hear from them is that “Democrats don’t fight.” A.O.C., Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, State Senator Mallory McMorrow of Michigan — there’s a reason they have standout moments that go viral. They are speaking truth not merely to power but to all of us.
Bruni: I think President Biden damned the Democratic Party by ignoring polls that made voters’ doubts about his fitness for a second term clear and by cutting off any possibility of a real contest for the Democratic nomination. I also think Democrats have been inept at repelling charges — some fair, some not — of elitism.
But I’ve also been impressed by analyses that chart the prevalence and intensity of anti-incumbent, anti-establishment passions worldwide. Is it possible the results of Nov. 5 really come down to that? Was my Times colleague Nate Cohn on to something when he recently questioned the necessity and value of postmortems and wrote that “losing parties haven’t needed to make brilliant changes to return to the White House?” In other words, is there a real danger here that the Democratic Party overcorrects, and if so, what would the most foolish overcorrections be?
Smith: No. My biggest fear is that Trump overreaches, Democrats win big in 2025 and 2026, and nothing changes. This is our best opportunity in 20 years to fix our party.
Ryan: I agree with Lis. We just lost to Trump for the second time. Dozens of charges, lies more than most people breathe, and yet he won. That’s our fault for letting that happen. Trump didn’t win, Democrats lost.
And until we face that very difficult truth we will not be able to rebuild and rebrand. We are seen as so out of touch it’s hard for some in the bubble to imagine. Come to Ohio and it is very apparent. The Democratic brand took down Sherrod Brown here and he has done so much for Ohio.
Shenker-Osorio: The largest voting bloc in the United States is almost always voter-eligible nonvoters. Folks are opting out of participation for a reason — and it’s feeling as if neither party is actually focused on making life better for working people. Democrats cannot be running as the protectors of norms and institutions, and yes, that includes democracy, because democracy never bought anyone dinner.
Bruni: Let’s just very quickly travel the arc of Kamala Harris. Days before Biden withdrew from the presidential race: Please, no, not Kamala Harris! Days later: Our savior has arrived, and her name is Kamala! Then we had Kamala the dispenser of all joy, Kamala the evader of all questions, Kamala being unable to connect, Kamala being dealt a hand so bad that no politician could play it successfully. Put all those contradictory takes in a blender, hit frappé and give me a blunt, unsentimental, two-sentence or three-sentence report card on Harris and her candidacy.
Smith: Multiple things can be true at once: Kamala Harris was dealt a bad hand, she was a much stronger candidate than Joe Biden and also she wasn’t quite able to meet the moment. After the “anyone but Joe” elation faded, she wasn’t able to deliver a message that connected. The country wanted change, and she couldn’t do enough to be that candidate.
Ryan: The original sin of this entire debacle is Biden saying he was going to run. She did get dealt a terrible hand; we all did by Biden. But she failed to become the change candidate and separate from Biden on the most relevant issues.
Smith: Ask anyone what her message was, and they’d struggle to tell you. Opportunity economy? Prosecutor? Trump is a fascist? From a tactical standpoint, she really ceded earned media to Trump. She didn’t make news. Candidates need to show up and say something interesting enough to carry a news cycle. Trump does that every day. She didn’t.
He was also just dominant on podcasts and in the new media and she was sort of invisible and irrelevant. When she did do newer alternative media — like the “Call Her Daddy” podcast — it just fell flat. You can’t go on a pod like that and deliver rote policy talking points. The party really needs to prioritize better communicators and communications skills and identify people who can break out of the traditional media and liberal echo chambers.
Shenker-Osorio: Which candidacy? The one from nomination till the Democratic convention or from the convention till the final week? In the first part of the sprint, Harris was largely demonstrating that if you want people to come to your party, you need to throw a better party. And, yes, that means both attracting your base to you so they can act as the choir to bring in new believers but also understanding that you’re going to repel those who fundamentally disagree and will never vote for you in the first place. After the convention, her message fell prey to the “please all, please none” approach — watering it down and the policies in a way that left the base cold and let Republicans determine the terms of debate.
Bruni: I’m encouraged, in a way, that I don’t sense Democrats spoiling to fight Trump on every initiative and at every turn. Democrats cannot live on a diet of sour grapes, and that kind of blanket resistance could look less like principle than like reflexive obstructionism and haughty dismissal of election results, and could doom Democrats to failure in the fights that count the very most. Which are those? Which of Trump’s proposals must Democrats do all in their power to defeat and — maybe just as important — are there proposals or general priorities of his that aren’t awful and that Democrats should try to find ways to work with him on?
Ryan: We should be all over the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. food reform initiative. We don’t have to agree with him on everything and we can fight him on other things. It is criminal what we have allowed to happen. We are basically poisoning our own people, driving up health care costs, lowering productivity while it’s all being subsidized by the taxpayer for American farmers to grow crops that go into fake food.
We should put forward a dozen recommendations on the “department of government efficiency” effort. Our federal government is so wasteful and bloated that we should be able to come up with major reforms to save money and help government provide better services.
Smith: We don’t actually know what Trump is serious about doing as president yet. Unlike Tim, I don’t think Kennedy was picked to take on Big Ag and Big Food — I think all of that is being used as a smokescreen for his truly dangerous views on things like vaccines. We should fight Trump and Kennedy tooth and nail if they sow doubt about lifesaving vaccines for polio and M.M.R., because that will actually have life-or-death consequences for Americans (see what Kennedy did in Samoa).
But broadly, we shouldn’t just oppose things because Trump supports them. If he really wants to build more American manufacturing or cut taxes for the middle class we should be for it.
Bruni: Let’s finish with a lightning round — quick answers. If you could personally ax one of Trump’s nominees for the cabinet or a top administration job, who would it be?
Smith: I’m a newish first-time mom. My son’s health and safety matters most to me. So, Kennedy. Beyond that, he’s just patently unfit in terms of character.
Ryan: Pete Hegseth. The Pentagon will swallow him up in less than a week.
Shenker-Osorio: One? This is like a reverse Sophie’s choice. I’ll say Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, if only to offer variety, because I agree that the others selected here are just absolute dangers to all of us.
Bruni: I’m going with Kash Patel. Sorry, I mean K$h Patel. Anyone who brands his name with a dollar sign replacing one of the letters must vault to the top of the list.
Which if any of Trump’s most controversial nominees is actually most likely not to be confirmed by the Senate?
Ryan: Tulsi Gabbard won’t make it. Too many ties to the bad guys.
Smith: It’s too early to say — but Gabbard has some obvious vulnerabilities that have come to light.
Shenker-Osorio: I feel like predicting anything MAGA and Trump-related is a fool’s errand. Too many rounds of “oh, but surely this is a bridge too far.”
Bruni: Rank the following men in the order of the influence they have over America right now, from most to least: Mike Johnson, JD Vance, Jerome Powell, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk.
Smith: Musk. Rogan. Vance.
Ryan: Musk. Musk. Musk. Rogan.
Shenker-Osorio: Musk. The rest of this crew are background singers.
Bruni: Fifteen years from now, what is Matt Gaetz doing?
Smith: Calling up Rudy Giuliani for legal advice.
Ryan: Caddying at Mar-a-Lago.
Shenker-Osorio: Operating an A.I.-generated porn aggregator?
Bruni: I agree with Tim that he’s at Mar-a-Lago, but as a janitor. What was President Biden’s single biggest success?
Smith: Defeating Donald Trump in 2020.
Ryan: Tie: Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, and the CHIPS Act. They are all reindustrializing America.
Shenker-Osorio: I agree with Lis that defeating Trump in 2020 is the most important thing that Biden was involved with, but I credit that success to voters. So, I would say the same bills that Tim lifts up. And add to it — though I think this ultimately came to hurt Democrats because of loss aversion — cutting child poverty so significantly for the time that the expanded child tax credit was in effect.
Bruni: What was his biggest failure?
Smith: Deciding to run again in 2024.
Ryan: Not communicating his wins. He left the entire field open to be defined by the opposition.
Shenker-Osorio: Not doing as he said and passing the baton to the next generation from the get-go.
Bruni: Lastly, and on a note of holiday-season cheer, what one result from the 2024 election or what one development right now gives you the most hope?
Smith: Our party’s newfound openness to change. We’re ready to break out of the echo chamber and stop listening to the voices and forces that led us so far out of the mainstream with normal voters. For Democrats to win sustainable majorities, we need to be a party of political heterodoxy, not purity.
Ryan: Democrats can finally stop putting Band-Aids on our problems and actually rebrand and rebuild an innovative, modern party.
Shenker-Osorio: An emerging awareness among working people in states that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for and Democrats are not — at least as currently constituted and compensated — coming to save us.
Bruni: Dozens of House Republicans just defied Trump’s command and voted against a bill with a debt-ceiling suspension that he ordered them to support. It is a fresh lesson in what the past eight years have taught us again and again: Do not make assumptions. Politics will surprise you. Lis, Tim, Anat — thank you for your wisdom and your wit, which are no surprise at all. A bit prematurely, Happy New Year.
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