Unless Democrats want to see eight years of J.D. Vance in the White House, they'll need to "pick a lane and stay in it like grandma white-knuckling her way" down the highway, writes MSNBC politics reporter Alexander Nazaryan in a new opinion piece.
In other words, Democrats need to get over their identity crisis and come up with a platform that's more thoughtful and relatable than "MAGA."
Democrats lost the presidency, Nazaryan writes, "because normal people had no idea where they stood on any of the things that normal people care about. Instinctively, Americans understood that the Democrats no longer knew who they were. Democrats were awkward, seemingly unable to say if they were the party of billionaire donors or middle-class normies."
According to the Brookings Institute, Donald Trump was able to turn Kamala Harris' talking points on transgender rights into "the Willie Horton of 2024," successfully weakening "Harris’ effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate."
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Nazaryan argues that while Democrats focused on abstract culture issues, MAGA stuck to "an almost absurdly simplistic set of ideas that are often contradictory and in some instances truly bizarre." Take Trump's push to invade Greenland, for instance.
Donald Trump "knows that his 'ideas,' such as they are, tend toward the preposterous. But every time he repeats them, they become a little more real. He understands marketing, knows that you won’t sell much by turning your political platform into a graduate seminar," Nazaryan writes.
Nazaryan urges Democrats to pick something — anything — that will appeal to the average American voter, like tax reform, cutting government waste, promoting green infrastructure, and even traveling to Mars.
"It literally does not matter," Nazaryan writes. "Democrats just need to pick a small set of coherent ideas and then stick to them like barnacles to a ship’s hull."
Nazaryan concludes that, "Trying to be all things to all people is a sure way to ensure that J.D. Vance will enjoy eight years in the White House, and probably Ron DeSantis after him."