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By Emily Suttle-Braun
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I worked on Joe Biden's campaign in 2020. I believed then, and still believe, in the version of this party that shows up, does the unglamorous work and governs like it actually matters more than it performs. That's the party that passed the Affordable Care Act and clawed its way back from a financial collapse under Obama. It's the party that rebuilt roads and bridges and brought manufacturing jobs home under Biden. It's the party that delivered budget surpluses and lifted people out of poverty under Clinton. We know what this party can do when it governs instead of just posturing. So I've watched the last two years of internal argument with more frustration than most, because from where I sit, we keep having the wrong fight.
We didn't lose the 2024 election because we lacked a message. We had one. It was written by a committee, for an audience that doesn't exist, and it landed exactly like that sounds. Voters weren't puzzled about what Democrats believe. They simply didn't buy that we were talking to them, specifically, about their actual lives. Those are two separate problems, and only one of them gets fixed by sharper copywriting.
Republicans, meanwhile, have built something more durable than a policy platform: a pitch built on certainty and grievance, aimed with real precision at people who feel unseen. They are not winning young men on the merits of their agenda. They're winning because they show up sounding sure of themselves, tell those men who's to blame for what they're missing and never let the facts slow the pitch down. Democrats keep answering an emotional appeal with a spreadsheet. You cannot out-cite a story that tells someone he's been wronged and hands him a villain. If we want those voters back, we have to stop treating culture and identity as a distraction from the "real" economic argument and start recognizing they're the argument, whether we like it or not.
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That same instinct, meeting people where they actually are instead of where a memo says they should be, is exactly what's fueling the energy inside our own coalition right now. I think what's behind candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is real, and I think it's largely good for the party. They're talking about rent, groceries and corporate power in language that lands with people the old playbook lost. That's not a threat to the Democratic Party, it's a signal about what's actually resonating.
That also doesn't mean every new candidate deserves a free pass. The lesson isn't to fear new voices, it's to do the hard work of vetting them. For example: Maine, which I've written about elsewhere at length. Graham Platner's Senate campaign didn't fall apart because he sat somewhere left of the party's comfort zone. It fell apart because nobody did the basic work of knowing who they were putting in front of voters before the cameras did it for them. That's not an ideological failure, it's a vetting failure—and it's the same failure that keeps recurring whenever we confuse a compelling story with a vetted candidate. Voters forgive a party that argues with itself. They don't forgive one that keeps skipping its homework.
So, where does the party actually go from here? I'd point to the governors, because they are the strongest proof of concept we have as Democrats. They can't tweet their way through a job. They have to fix roads, balance budgets and answer for outcomes, and that's precisely why they keep outperforming the national brand almost everywhere. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro is governing a state Donald Trump won twice by fixing things people can see, not by relitigating 2024. Kentucky's Andy Beshear has spent years proving Democrats can win and govern in deep red territory without pretending to be something he isn't. Illinois' JB Pritzker has shown you can be unapologetically progressive on the fights that matter and still run a boring, competent government the rest of the time. Wes Moore is doing the same in Maryland while telling his own party, bluntly, to show results instead of vibes. None of them are trying to win an argument online. They're trying to win a budget fight, a reelection, a pothole repair. If Democrats want to know what rebuilding trust actually looks like, it isn't a sharper tweet. It's the pothole that got fixed.
Two years after Biden's exit, the honest answer to "who are Democrats now?" is that we're still deciding. We've spent far too much of that time arguing about labels instead of vetting our candidates, telling voters the truth about why we lost, and letting the people who actually govern well lead the conversation about where we govern next.
The party doesn't need a savior in 2028. It needs the discipline it kept skipping in 2024 and to become the party that does the unglamorous work again of earning trust one result at a time. That's what won before. It's what will win again.
Emily Suttle-Braun is a Democratic strategist and CEO of Doodle Mom Strategies. She has over 15 years of experience in campaigns, advocacy and political tech highlighted by her work on the 2016 Hillary Clinton and 2020 Biden-Harris campaigns.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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