Democratic campaign contributors, according to a report from Amie Parnes and Hanna Trudo, have tightened their purse strings since the Kamala debacle. They may want to rebuild the party but there is no agreement about what they want to build it into— and feel uninspired by what they’re hearing. “‘I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is fucking terrible. Plain and simple,’ one major Democratic donor said. ‘In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.’ A second donor was equally as pointed. ‘They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking… The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?’”
That’s interesting because Roland— who only gave one political contribution in his entire life— called me yesterday and said he donated $27 to Bernie after seeing this. And over the weekend, we saw Annie Karni noting how Chris Murphy, a centrist former New Dem, is “shifting with the times. These days, he bemoans the fact that economic populists in Congress like Senators Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, are treated like radicals. He thinks their ideas have the best chance of crossing over and picking up voters who are currently in Trump’s camp. But in 2016, Murphy was an early and eager backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Sanders in what became a heated Democratic primary.”
It doesn’t look like The Hill is picking up on that yet. They spend too much of their time talking with way too many establishment corporate whores. It’s a very different perspective than the one I’m getting from Jackson McMillan, principal at KeyLime Strategies in Florida. He’s raised over $2 million for a little known progressive Bernie-style Democrat, Josh Weil, in a special election in an out-of-the-way red, gerrymandered district. “People are burnt out on giving money to the traditional avenues of fundraising,” he told me yesterday. “They are oversaturated, inundated with communications. The days of clickbaity headlines are over— people want to feel like they are giving to something meaningful, and see the story of how their money is being spent. People want to be a part of a movement with a corporeal goal that’s accomplishing corporeal things. In an environment where Meta is suppressing Democratic political content, and co-president Musk owns Twitter, Democrats need to rapidly master communicating AG Jeff Jackson and AOC style— a void that no elected has filled since Jeff Jackson left Congress. Just have your leaders talk to a vertical camera like a normal person, not like a press secretary. It’s not f-ing hard. I’ve raised nearly $8 million this way putting this strategy first for special elections in Florida, and $3 million for Florida clients the year before that. We have this massive SMS infrastructure, and yet Dems only use it to ask for money. The fact the DNC doesn’t have a ‘daily Dem’ subscribers can opt into where you get a text in the morning about what dems did for you today, with no fundraising link, is truly egregious to me. You keep running campaigns like it’s 2008, and you expect different results, you are gonna lose. And that’s true especially in fundraising.”
Leigh Ann Caldwell hit on one message all Democrats, from corporate scum like Adam Smith to dedicated FDR-progressives like Pramila Jayapal, feel strongly about: the South African Nazi running America for Trump. “Furious and fearful voters,” wrote Caldwell, “have been channeling their rage through the Capitol switchboard, jamming phone lines, desperate to get the ear of their representatives to vent about being fired from their government job, or the slashing of federal agencies, or the prospect of losing federal benefits… [T]he grassroots fury from activists and donors, alike, has finally started to break through to Democrats on the Hill. Members, however, are still trying to keep their voters’ expectations at bay until government funding runs out in a few weeks— their first real legislative chance to force Trump’s and Republicans’ hands. Interestingly, however, the pressure still hasn’t led to unity, and mistrust between the ideological wings continues to simmer.”
Yet there are indications that, for the first time in years, Democrats may at least be pulling together around a clear and concise economic message of the billionaires versus everyone else— the Bernie Sanders approach that has been shunned, and sometimes mocked, by the broader party [the corporate, careerist slime who have wrecked the Democratic Party brand] in the past. That line of attack never gained much traction during the 2020 race, in part because Trump’s focus on cultural issues kept his opponents off-balance. But Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, firing tens of thousands of civil servants is a layup for Democrats. The left couldn’t have dreamt up a better bogeyman than a billionaire laying off veterans while wielding a gold chainsaw at CPAC.
Sanders, the Vermont Independent who despises the Clinton wing of the party, has been preaching the same economic populist message since he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981. ‘It’s no great secret that for the last many decades, Democrats have lost the support of working-class people,’ he told me. ‘One of the reasons is that, in fact, the party has been increasingly captured by big money, by consultants and by policies that have not benefited ordinary people.’ But, Sanders continued, Trump’s unabashed embrace of oligarchs— and, frankly, the oligarchy’s reciprocal wet kiss— has provided an opportunity for Democrats to reengage their core constituency.
When I spoke with Rep. Greg Casar, the new head of the Progressive Caucus, he agreed that Musk’s ascension had created “a real opportunity” for Democrats to win back the “broad swath of working-class voters” that was once central to the Democratic coalition but has been inexorably moving away from the party. According to Faiz Shakir, who operated Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and briefly ran for Democratic National Committee chair, early signals do suggest Democrats are embracing Sanders’ message of economic justice for the working class. Still, he warned that it’s way too early to determine whether Democrats can be trusted as the pro-worker party. There’s a lot of culture war baggage that needs to be tucked away.
One Democratic strategist, who is still in the throes of conducting a review of the last election, said that the billionaires–versus–middle-class messaging is directionally right. I’m told, however, that Democrats still aren’t convening meetings between intraparty rivals, to talk and strategize, nor are those much-needed conversations happening in the weekly House Democratic Caucus meetings. Instead, the issues are broached in group texts, where a lot is left unsaid. “It’s easy to be in opposition to Trump and Musk, because it codes as partisan,” Shakir told me. “The real integrity is if you’re willing to take on the wealthy class, even if some of them might be supportive of you.”
And the aforementioned long shot special election Democrat in northeast and central Florida, Josh Weil, who is running on working class issues, told us that “One of my favorite experiences from speaking with Republican voters across the district is how many of them have a strong respect for Bernie Sanders. Over and over I hear them telling me that he is ‘the only Democrat’ they respect, or ‘the only one who isn't full of it.’ They truly believe that he represents something different from what the establishment Democratic Party as a whole is offering, and that he is genuine in his efforts to actually make things better for people. When we talk about Medicare for All, they are always surprised to learn that it is not a European style system where the government runs the hospitals, but an improvement to our current system where the government replaces the insurance companies, because nobody likes health insurance companies, not even Republicans.”
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