Kamarck: Well, I think that the new emergent issue is the transgender rights issue. And I think there the party needs to look for a way of doing both things that Clinton did with welfare. On the one hand, saying we get it to the public — you think this is very strange, you think this is frightening, you think that people, maybe children, are going to be hurt. We understand your worries. And yet at the same time they have to say: Look, there are people out there who are really hurting because they’re born gender dysphoric. You cannot abandon your base. You can’t stick a needle in the eye of your base. But you also have to say to the broader public: We understand your fears.
Marshall: Through four years of President Joe Biden, we spoke to white college graduates incessantly on almost every dimension: economic, cultural, foreign policy. We stopped talking to the 62 percent of the electorate that doesn’t have a college degree. I think this is the hardest cultural challenge for the party right now. We don’t know how to address their economic aspirations in a way that doesn’t sort of throw government benefits at them. We’re terrified if we do we’ll somehow be crossing the line, becoming racist or nativist or xenophobic. We are now in this class configuration that was mercilessly revealed by this election. We have lost the knack of hearing, listening, going to working-class people and speaking the language that they understand. So you see the party retracting geographically, demographically. We’re a shrunken party now.
From: You know, there’s just something about having paid for two daughters to go through college — my view is that it’s just wrong to ask the three-fifths of the country that doesn’t have a college degree to pay for the tuition of those who do. If they would’ve just said: OK, we’ll give a certain amount of forgiveness, but in exchange you have to spend a year or two in national service. It goes to that free lunch. And the problem is now the free lunch is often for this very small, highly educated class. I mean, it’s us, too, but it sure doesn’t represent a majority of the country.
Healy: I think about when Bill Clinton talked about shared sacrifice and national service in a sense of: We’re all in this together. We’re all giving and we’re all receiving. What are the things now that Democrats need to speak about to voters who might be skeptical or don’t see the party as credible?
Kamarck: Well, the first thing is immigration. I mean, we were simply on the wrong side of this issue. The country was being overrun and the interest groups — who did not have the backing of their members — were saying something that was easily translatable into open borders. So Democrats have to get right on immigration. They’ve got to figure out the cultural issue. And then inflation — they just didn’t get it because, again, it goes to the class bias.
