Democratic strategists and politicians are beginning to warn politicos that President Donald Trump has a good chance of winning re-election in 2020 if the opposing party doesn’t focus on issues voters care about.
Democratic pollster and strategist Stanley Greenberg told The New Yorker that “the Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity.”
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign suffered from believing that she was running for a President Barack Obama’s third term, and that politics had changed significantly from when her husband Bill Clinton was in office. That assessment by Hillary’s top campaign staff was flawed, Greenberg said, and amounts to “malpractice and arrogance” that “contributed mightily to the election of Donald Trump.”
“The Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg, who served as Bill Clinton’s pollster, detailed his many attempts to get encourage Hillary’s campaign to focus on the economy in an article for The American Prospect in September. “Early on, I chided the campaign privately for starting every economic talk with dutiful praise for Obama’s handling of the economy, and later told them not to keep saying, ‘America is already great,'” Greenberg wrote.
The Democrats have not learned the lesson of 2016 yet, according to Greenberg. “We have a candidate running as Hillary Clinton,” Greenberg said referring to the Virginia GOP. “He is running on the same kind of issues, and has the same kind of view of the world. It’s the Republicans who talk about the economy, not the Democrats.”
Greenberg is not the only strategist to warn Democrats about changing their messages for the next election. “Trump is on track to win reelection,” Doug Sosnik, a senior advisor in the Clinton White House from 1994 to 2000, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Oct. 5. “It would be as big a mistake to assume that Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 as it was for those of us who never thought that he could become president in the first place.”
“Of course, Trump could win,” another unnamed Democratic operative told The New Yorker. “We’re the party that doesn’t have a message that speaks to the country or stand for anything other than being against Trump.”
Current Democratic Party leaders are also looking at how to focus more on issues, and less on being merely the anti-Trump party.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California has encouraged fellow Democrats to be measured in criticizing Trump, and instead talk about how a congress controlled by Democrats could improve economic policies for constituents.
“In my opinion it cannot happen fast enough,” Democratic Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos told Politico of the shift away from divisive identity politics. “If we get asked about Frederica Wilson or the NFL or Russia, we can answer that. But then let’s get back to what’s on people’s minds.”
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