Columnist shares advice to address Dems' big talent pool weakness: Break free from D.C.

Much of the post-election analysis centers on what Democrats might have done better in messaging, organizing, or holding onto blocs of voters that seemed to splinter away.

A less-discussed issue Democrats need to look hard at, wrote Matt Bai for The Washington Post, is how dependent the party has become on Washington, D.C. for its talent pool.

"It has now been 28 years since Democrats last nominated a presidential candidate who hadn’t first served in the U.S. Senate," wrote Bai. "In the past 60 years, only four Democrats have won the office. Two of them (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) were governors who won by campaigning against the system, and another, Barack Obama, ran as an outsider who had barely served in Washington. The other is Joe Biden, who won at an extraordinary moment, mid-pandemic."

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As long as Democrats remain a "Washington-centric party," Bai argued, they can't run as outsiders, dramatically limiting their ability to shape effective narratives. Rather, "the party has to look away from Washington and get back to the states, where most successful reform movements have always been born."

"Sure, it’s harder in these celebrity-obsessed times to get a hearing as a relative unknown, the way Carter and Clinton once did," he continued. But one person who managed to do this was Pete Buttigieg, who rose rapidly from a little-known mayor of a college town in Indiana to the Secretary of Transportation who implemented some of the nation's largest infrastructure investments in over half a century — largely achieving his rise by speaking directly to voters, often in hostile forums like Fox News.

So it can be done, Bai concluded — and Democrats with ambition out in the states should get started building their brands now.

"If I were a younger, ambitious Democratic governor who thought I understood where the country was going, I’d hit the road and start making my case before President-elect Donald Trump had finished unpacking his boxes," he wrote. "Outsider movements win. Washington parties don’t."