After enough Senate Democrats caved and put an end to the pointless federal government shutdown that Chuck Schumer seems to have orchestrated to save his own skin as a party leader, the consensus – even among Democrats – is that the party is in shambles. It is without a message, without a clear leader, without a face, and without a voice.
While Boomer lurkers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still refuse to leave the stage, younger members of the party have had enough of them and are no longer paying much attention. Like it or not, this is the party of Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Jasmine Crockett. They’re younger, they’re more radical, they don’t respect history or tradition, and they’re better described as “influencers” than serious governmental leaders.
Texas has a term for people like this: “All hat, no cattle.”
But if you’re a Democrat, have no fear. Democrat strategist Joe Caiazzo has a plan, and he shared it in The Hill this week. Caiazzo’s bio on his firm’s website says he has 15 years of experience in politics. He worked on the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders twice, along with the failed 2016 presidential run of Hillary Clinton.
Don’t worry about all that losing. He did help on a couple of winners. I mean, if it wasn’t for Caiazzo, you may not have the opportunity to watch senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Elizabeth Warren talk down to you.
The title of Caiazzo’s manifesto – “How Democrats can rebuild a party worth believing in” – is telling in what it doesn’t say. In order to rebuild a party worth trusting, you’re admitting that no one believes in it now. To get to this point, the party has to have made many serious mistakes along the way.
But if you don’t point out the mistakes, you don’t have context, you don’t have a common understanding of the problem and the cause of the problem, and you don’t give yourself credibility on your own recommendations for going forward.
Of course, we know why Caiazzo may have skipped this critical step in any planning process. We all know who’s to blame. They are still powerful. They are still very vindictive.
As any political operative worth his salt would, Caiazzo believes in the power of threes, so his plan is a three-step one. First, he says, “No retreads. When trying to rebuild a party, we must look beyond Washington insiders and has-beens.”
He uses the elections of Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992, and Barack Obama in 2008 as cases where an outsider came in and saved the Democrat party from itself.
“In short, distance from a deeply unpopular Washington is a clear historical ingredient for Democrats to find success,” he writes.
Caiazzo’s second step to right the Democrat ship is to “Simplify the message and have an agenda focused on economic opportunity.” In other words, it’s still the economy, stupid.
If that’s the case (and honestly, when is it not?), then Democrats and their allies in the media and throughout society have a huge incentive to try to tank the economy in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. We’ve already seen multiple times that the left is not above instigating a summer of riots, the denial of constitutional rights, and the constant misuse of data and information to convince Americans that a good economy is a bad one.
Caiazzo says he’s talking about a message here, but really, it’s about something more. It’s about trying to convince the blue-collar voters, particularly men who migrated to Trump, and trying to win them back by trying to convince them a Democrat would put more money in their wallets.
When Democrats are faced with a good economy, their strategists like to talk about “message,” when what they’re really talking about is deception. Even in a good economy, everyone is always concerned about their pocketbooks. So, what the Democrats like to do is try to legitimize that concern by blaming Republicans for the possibility that the economy could turn, and it probably will turn at any minute. Blame Republicans as the imaginary cause for an imaginary problem, you see.
Caiazzo’s third step is an interesting one because it provides a rare glimpse into the cracks in the Democrat party and why it really has no hope in the near future of returning to the mainstream.
The Democrat strategist calls for a “shift change,” before relaying a conversation he had with a “high-ranking Democratic Party official about child care costs.” Caiazzo said he “explained that my total for part-time care for my two daughters was a staggering $730 per week. This person responded by telling me ‘That’s why I adopt dogs.’”
Caiazzo writes, “We simply cannot build a national coalition and lasting majorities with this type of delusional, disconnected leadership that seemingly disdains working families.”
He then points to some Pew data, which isn’t good news for the Democrat Party: “75 percent are frustrated, only 28 percent say the party makes them feel hopeful, and a pathetic 16 percent say proud. Republicans are better positioned in every one of these questions.”
It’s kind of a shame that a smart guy like Caiazzo can so clearly see at least a part of the problem, but he can’t see the full picture and truly get why, during the Biden term, his party lost “2.1 million registered voters while the Republicans gained 2.4 million.”
What he can’t see, or he won’t say, is that the Democrat Party’s problem is its people. They lie, they make up imaginary problems. As Dilbert creator and podcaster Scott Adams likes to say, they blame Republicans for those imaginary problems, and they offer imaginary solutions. I mean, one of their main themes is Republicans are destroying democracy and Democrats will save it. Is that your unique selling proposition? It’s not specific enough to be either proven true or not true. So it’s imaginary.
The larger issue for Democrats is that they sold out for a strategy built on identity politics. It did so on the theory that there was strength in numbers if you could cobble all these competing factions together and hope they get along just enough to take power.
I mean, right now, you have long-time feminists playing nice with men who want to dominate women’s sports and everything else in women’s culture – as women! It’s pathetic, it’s not credible, and it’s not sustainable. Sooner or later, that coalition will fall apart due to the natural divisions built into the system itself.
How long can true feminists put up with gender-confused men destroying everything they’ve worked for since the 1960s?
It takes some real idiots, or sellouts, or both to buy into any and all of this. That’s how you end up with a Gavin Newsom or an AOC as your Democrat Party standard-bearer. If you want working-class men to join the club, you’re doing everything you possibly can to drive them away.
I suspect Caiazzo knows some of this, even if he won’t admit it to himself. To be fair, one thing is true. He can’t admit this to his party. Otherwise, they’ll kick him out.
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