Democrats who overcame GOP tide urge party to focus on ‘kitchen-table issues’
Democrats who won major Senate races have a blunt message for their party: Get a better economic message or keep losing.
From Elissa Slotkin in Michigan to Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Adam Schiff in California, these soon-to-be senators took to the Sunday television shows to answer what they did right that other Democrats failed to do. It all came a week after many other Democrats hid from the networks last Sunday, in the aftermath of the election loss.
“Any party — and I can only represent the Democratic Party — needs to focus on the things that keep people up at night. That’s their pocketbooks and their kids,” Slotkin said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.” “There are a lot of issues out there. But you’ve got to start with what keeps people awake, and that is kitchen-table issues, economics.”
Like Slotkin, Gallego is a member of the House who won a promotion to the Senate on Election Day — even though Trump carried Arizona at the top of the ticket. He agreed that, broadly, Democrats did not connect with Americans on the issues that mattered to them, especially on the economy.
“You can have all the graphs you want,” Gallego said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “If you open up your checking account, and you see that you’re making less, and there’s not enough coming in, it doesn’t matter what the GDP growth is.”
Gallego also noted that Arizona had more registered Republicans than Democrats and said he knew voters from both parties were struggling economically — and could relate to them as someone who grew up poor. [Continue reading…]