Jess Bidgood, NY Times - Ever since they lost big in November, Democrats have talked about how much their party needs to change.Representative Greg Casar is living it.
Last week, Casar, a 35-year-old Democrat from Austin, Texas, was elected as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, becoming the youngest person ever tapped to lead the group of liberals at a moment when his party is struggling with younger voters. He’s also the first leader from Texas, a state Democrats find perennially vexing.
Casar, a former union organizer, will be tasked with leading progressives through a challenging period, one that has some Democrats blaming them for tugging the party too far to the left. He believes it was centrists like Joe Manchin, the former Democrat and departing senator from West Virginia, who caused the party to water down policies that could have galvanized working-class voters. But he says progressives need to shift their message, too.
I spoke by phone with Casar this week....
JB: Why should somebody from a red state lead progressive Democrats?
GC: Right now, the Democratic Party is doing really important soul-searching. As we work to regain working-class voters’ trust, as we work to bring Democrats back into the fold that decided to vote for Trump this time, I think it’s really important that progressives build a big tent.
It is important for the Democratic Party leadership to be as diverse as the voters that we’re trying to bring in. We need older leadership. We need younger leadership, leadership from the South. We need leadership from the coast, but we can’t have it all from the coast.
Let’s talk a little bit about that soul-searching. What do you think went wrong in November?
Ever since 2012, the Democratic Party has been losing working-class voters across races and across geography, and we just can’t let that happen.
Democrats need to rebrand and reform our party to much more clearly communicate to working people that we’re in it for them, and that we’re willing to take on the powerful interests that are screwing them in this economy. And if we don’t tell that last part of the story, if we don’t acknowledge that working people are struggling and that they’re feeling screwed over, then we can sound preachy or policy wonky or disconnected or like institutionalists. That certainly doesn’t work, especially when you’re up against Donald Trump.
You use the word “preachy.” Do you think the Democratic Party was too preachy during the campaign?
We have to have a big tent that includes people who may not agree with us on every single social issue, but who are with us on fighting for the economic interests of the everyday person. I do think it’s also incumbent on progressives to make sure our message is focused on winning rather than on just playing to our existing audience.
I think that this will require reform in all different parts of the party. Some of the institutionalist and corporate parts of the party that wanted to explain to people that inflation wasn’t as bad in the United States as in other nations — that’s not a winning message.
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