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Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA): “There’s an appetite for the economic argument we’re making.”
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, usually more of a liberal than a radical, declared last weekend that the Democratic Party is “a pretty broken brand right now,” and suggested that the only cure was full-throated economic populism as the “tentpole.” Speaking in an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Murphy added that the whole party needed to sound more like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
A majority of voters agree that the Democrats are a broken brand. Recent polling shows that just 27 percent of voters polled have a favorable view of Democrats, a record low. Murphy, like Warren, Sanders, and AOC, contends that economic populism is the one theme that can both shame Trump and his billionaire allies and also bridge over the party’s other internal differences. He is worth quoting at length on this point:
We’re a pretty judgmental party, filled with a dozen litmus tests. We don’t let you in unless you agree with us on everything—from gender rights to reproductive rights to gun control to climate. We’ve got to be a party that invites people in as long as they agree with us on the basic economic message, and build our party with a little bit more acceptance of people who have diverging views on social and cultural issues.
This is a point that the Prospect has been making literally for decades. Don’t expect a hearing on tolerance issues, especially from socially conservative white men, unless you begin by being credible on their pocketbook issues. Getting in bed with billionaires while demanding loyalty tests on the cultural issues is the worst of all worlds.
It’s hard to know who disagrees with this within the party anymore. The centrist group Third Way released a memo last week about the “Trump Slump” economy that sounded like it was written by the Economic Policy Institute, arguing that Trump driving the country toward recession must be at the forefront of any political messaging, while highlighting credit card delinquency rates and working-class struggles.
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But there are some challenges to turning the ship around. The Democratic Party has become the party of a deeply corrupted status quo. Crypto is only the latest emblem of bipartisan corruption. And if both parties are corrupted, then the grotesque corruption of Trump seems less of an outrage.
Whatever else Kamala Harris did in the 2024 campaign, she failed to articulate the popular anger that the good life was getting away from too many Americans. So that fell to Trump.
The Democrats have another core challenge. With more than three years to go before the next presidential election, they are leaderless. Their nominal leaders are far from inspiring. Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries are not fighters.
In this context, leadership passes to whoever starts behaving like a leader. That starts with AOC and Bernie Sanders. By behaving like leaders, they get to define the message and articulate the latent populist anger against Trump, and bring others like Murphy along.
BUT FILLING THE LEADERSHIP VACUUM doesn’t end there. Last week, in a remarkable series of speeches on the House floor, a group of rank-and-file Democrats from different parts of the ideological spectrum challenged the party establishment to embrace economic populism, rather than begging for donations from the rich and participating in the corruption.
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) of the Pittsburgh area helped coordinate the speeches. He represents a working-class sliver of Beaver County, a Trump-friendly area that he won by significantly more than Harris. “This administration is wreaking havoc on this country of ours, and our party has not offered a strong enough alternative,” he said in his speech. “The era of a spineless Democratic Party must end. We have to go to the mat for an economy that works for people who work hard and play by the rules.”
What’s interesting about this is how it merges the near-term imperative to stand up and fight the oligarchic takeover of government with a long-term plea for a government that works for working people. Deluzio campaigned last week for upset winner James Andrew Malone, who flipped a heavily Republican state Senate seat in central Pennsylvania by running against Elon Musk. “Malone ran a great race [and] he wasn’t shy about calling out corruption,” Deluzio said in an interview. “If I were the Trump folks I would be pretty nervous at what we saw in Pennsylvania.”
Deluzio characterized his effort to center economic populism as an appeal to patriotism. “I think it’s patriotic to put the common good first,” he said. “We should put at the center of government economic justice. We have to fight against villains and bad guys who rigged the system. And we have to say who they are.”
One of the more interesting speeches was delivered by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition who has consistently beaten the top of the ticket in his races. He talked about how in his district, a division of insurance giant UnitedHealth called Optum has been taking over local medical practices. Ryan opened an effort to launch a “community inquiry” into declining care, inaccurate billing, and added fees, to inform his oversight actions. More than anything, economic populism involves taking the concerns directly from the people into the halls of power.
Other speakers included Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), the new chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), a former prosecutor in the Biden Antitrust Division who said that the “anti-monopoly spirit is as old as America.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who has been on a town hall tour of Republican districts and who also gave one of the speeches, said at a conference put on by Democracy journal last week that “we need to recognize that people are upset and they are legitimately upset … In losing our economic base, losing factory towns, we exploded inequality. Rep. Deluzio calls it spineless policy, it starts with the indictment of the status quo and that we need a new economic vision.”
This is a pretty bold challenge to the way the party has been run for the past few decades. You see it in the broad disappointment with Chuck Schumer for caving on the government funding bill. The situation calls for new leadership, whether Murphy or AOC or Deluzio or others, and that leadership is coalescing around an idea that returns Democrats to their ancestral roots.
“Seeing voices take to the floor was important,” Deluzio said. “It won’t be enough to earn back trust from folks who left the party if we don’t have a bolder alternative to what Trump represents … there’s an appetite for the economic argument we’re making.”
