A Democratic strategist who helped President Obama wins Florida in 2008 says his party needs a major overhaul if it wants to win future elections.
“IT’S 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 about how my party went from having the broadest electoral mandate in the last twenty-five years, with the largest Senate majority in the last thirty years, to a shell unto itself – a political organization that can hardly be classified as not national entity anymore,” he continued.
The Democratic Party suffered major electoral setbacks in the 2024 elections, as newly elected President Donald Trump retook the White House and the Republican Party flipped the Senate and clung to their fragile majority in the House of Representatives.
Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on stage during the final day of the Democratic National Convention. (Getty Images)
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Shell warned that Democrats were losing in Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and that if they didn’t make “real structural changes” to the party, things would only get worse.
His suggestions include spending more money sooner on ads that tackle crime and the economy and addressing the right’s ‘advantage’ in podcasts and social media by ‘building’ their own ‘ecosystem’ to provide information to their supporters and convincing voters.
But Schale said these strategies wouldn’t work if the party didn’t also change its message to broaden its coalition.
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris (left) and President Joe Biden attend a campaign event at the IBEW Local Union #5 union hall in Pittsburgh, on September 2, 2024. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)
“The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters into different categories – black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc. – and treat these groups as if they are more progressive than they actually are, and somehow unique. At the same time, we have decided to stop talking to large parts of the electorate,” he wrote.
The party should return to investing in all fifty states, he argued.
“But we have a bigger problem,” Schale continued. “Of course we can win elections under the right circumstances, but we don’t have anything even close to one anymore winning coalition in the long term.”
The Democratic Party needed to win back the Latino voters it had lost over the past few presidential cycles, Steve Schale argued. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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He pointed out how the Democratic Party had been losing white working class voters and all that for several election cycles Spanish voters was turned off by the party’s ‘socialism talk’ in 2020.
“Yet, even as many people shouted from the rooftops, the Biden campaign largely ignored the growing problems associated with the far left’s rhetoric. By doing this, it allowed the story to sink in,” he claimed.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party needed to reach the “median” voter who is not a party member in future elections, he argued.
“We’ve seen what happens when we don’t listen to voters — when we focus on strengthening our tent rather than expanding it, and when we take our message outside the mainstream,” he said.
“This is an opportunity for my side to redefine our values to voters who are no longer listening. If this is good, we will have prepared ourselves well for the next decade. If this is wrong, we could live in the wilderness for a very long time.” ‘, Schale concludes.
Paul Steinhauser of Fox News contributed to this report.
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