POLITICO: Facing a Trump-y House battleground, Dems need to ‘quit talking to ourselves and start listening to people’
Democrats are only three seats away from taking back control of the House next year. But they face a major challenge: Their path runs almost exclusively through districts that Donald Trump won in November.
Thirteen House Democrats now represent seats Trump won, while only three GOP incumbents sit in districts won by former Vice President Kamala Harris. That’s in sharp contrast to the first time Trump won the presidency, when 23 Republicans were elected in seats won by Hillary Clinton and 12 Democrats won Trump districts.
Now, after years of harnessing anti-Trump anger and enthusiasm from their base, Democrats say they’ll need to expand their coalition and rebuild their proverbial big tent — including winning back as many Trump voters as possible.
Democrats who prevailed last year in districts that swung sharply to Trump say the party should learn from their successes. In interviews, several said a key to winning in Trump districts was to campaign with a kind of authenticity that allowed them to carve out their own brand. Connecting with constituents required getting past stereotypes about what the Democratic Party stands for, they said, and making sure voters knew they shared their concerns.
“At the top of the ticket, there was a lot of attention spent on talking only to Democrats,” said Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), who won reelection by just shy of three percentage points despite Trump narrowly winning her Las Vegas-area district. “And I say, quit talking to ourselves and start listening to people.”
The stakes are high. The dwindling number of crossover districts reflects increased polarization and the continued decline of split-ticket voting. And the crossover districts are different this time: they still include some predominantly white exurbs and rural areas, but also more diverse communities that saw among the biggest swings at the presidential level last cycle.
Whether other candidates can replicate battleground Democrats’ success could determine not just House control for the second half of Trump’s term — but the future of a party undergoing an identity crisis.
Speaking and listening
Battleground Democrats broadly acknowledged the party’s challenges were part policy, part messaging.
“It’s a matter of being able to speak the same language that our voters are speaking,” said first-term Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.), whose North Jersey district swung nearly 20 points toward Trump in the last election.
Pou — who ran an abbreviated campaign after Rep. Bill Pascrell, a Democrat who had represented the area in Congress since the 1990s, died in August — said her fellow Democrats were sometimes prone to speaking in overly academic language that doesn’t connect with voters. And Democrats need to do more to engage Latino voters specifically, she said.
“They’re concerned about their household needs. They’re concerned about the economy, inflation, education,” Pou said. “We just need to make sure that we’re reaching out to them, and also not taking Latinos for granted.”
Engaging with voters will also mean navigating sometimes complicated views on issues such as abortion rights, which have generally been a major electoral strength for Democrats since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
But some battleground Democrats have warned that their voters are not universally in favor of abortion rights, especially Latinos who are Catholic and socially conservative.
Lee, the Nevada congresswoman, recalled talking with a voter who was turned off by Democrats’ positioning on abortion, saying the party seemed to think abortion was good.
Lee said she explained her own experience as a woman brought up Catholic, who herself had experienced several miscarriages, to make the case that women should have the freedom to have an abortion based on their personal circumstances. That was more meaningful for the voter than a blanket statement in favor of abortion rights.
“We need to listen more and then understand where people are comfortable and uncomfortable, and be able to talk to that,” Lee said. “And we’re not going to have all the answers, but if they understand that, we understand their angst, that’s important.”