ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Democrats have spent the last week pointing fingers, laying blame and second-guessing themselves. Now activists and strategists are looking ahead and asking, where does the party go from here? The so-called blue wall states went red. Democrats have no obvious leader. And many of the voter groups the party relied on shifted to the right last week.
Our next three guests have different ideas about the path ahead. They are Paul Begala, who worked on the Bill Clinton campaign and in the administration as a White House adviser, Adrianne Shropshire, executive director and founder of the political action committee BlackPAC, and Waleed Shahid, a senior adviser to the Uncommitted Movement, who was a previous spokesperson for the progressive PAC Justice Democrats – good to have you all here.
PAUL BEGALA: Thanks, Ari.
ADRIANNE SHROPSHIRE: Thank you.
WALEED SHAHID: Thank you.
SHAPIRO: Will you each begin by giving us a one-sentence headline of where to start? What is your top-line prescription for what Democrats need to do now? Who wants to take it first?
BEGALA: This is Paul. I’m the old guy, so I’ll start. Democrats have got to rebuild their connection to the working class. It is the most heartbreaking result of this election – is that the Democrats lost the middle class.
SHAPIRO: OK. Paul says middle class. What’s next?
SHROPSHIRE: I think that maybe a little bit of what Paul just said, but there is some party building that actually needs to take place. I mean, there are parts of the American working class that the Democratic Party lost, and there are parts that actually held strong. We need to have a conversation with folks – certainly the folks who did not – and understand that. But I just think there’s a lot of conversation to be had. I think the Democratic Party actually doesn’t understand its base.
SHAPIRO: Paul says the working class. Adrianne says the base. Waleed, what do you say?
SHAHID: I think most working-class and middle-class voters can’t answer the question, what did Democrats do for me in the last four years? And in that vacuum, you’re going to get far-right messages about migrants, trans people, conspiracy theories from the far right. And I think that’s the No. 1 question that voters had – is, in the last four years of Democratic rule, what tangibly improved my life?
SHAPIRO: So more than who does the party speak to – a question of what does the party stand for. Let me ask. For as long as I’ve been covering politics – 20 years or so – Democrats have preached demographics is destiny, believing that as the country gets less white, it will move left. This election showed that to be false. So what replaces that as the new paradigm, the vision of where the party goes from here?
SHAHID: So my parents and many people – pretty much everyone in my family has voted Democrat every single year since they’ve been citizens. My family is Pakistani American, Muslim American. And this was the first year that people in my family voted for Trump. People entertained the idea of voting for Trump. And it was largely about two things. One was the war in Gaza. Second thing was they didn’t feel like their No. 1 issue, which was the cost of living – that Democrats had done anything for them.
And so what they heard from the Democratic Party is, vote for us. We’ll protect democracy. But they don’t really believe that democracy is working for them. And in that vacuum, unfortunately, strongman authoritarians like Donald Trump who say, I alone will fix everything – it kind of works because the current system that the Democrats were defending, the status quo that they were defending just wasn’t the mood of the country and wasn’t the mood of a lot of Democratic voters.
SHAPIRO: So, Adrianne and Paul, what’s the new paradigm?
SHROPSHIRE: Yeah. I mean, this idea that demographics is destiny, I think, was never real. I think the challenge for us right now – I think I agree with Waleed about the sort of vacuum that has been left in communities in terms of that vacuum being filled with misinformation, disinformation, outright lies and propaganda. You know, when we think about what is the new paradigm, we need to have real conversations with people and not just sort of gloss over and have knee-jerk reactions. I think that we’re sort of seeing right now in the postmortem that’s happening about, you know, have we gone too far? Did we go too far left? I think the Democrats need to decide what they are fighting for, and they need to fight for those things.
SHAPIRO: I want you to jump in, Paul. I hear you, Adrianne, saying the messaging is important. What is the message, though, Paul?
BEGALA: We’re fighting for you. If you work for a living, OK, if you actually got to show up for work, we’re a friend of yours. You see; the Democrats have this huge, diverse, fractious coalition, which is a very good way to prepare to govern a huge, fractious, diverse country. So we need web issues, not wedge issues. The other side uses wedge issues ’cause their coalition is not as difficult to manage, and they want to divide ours.
SHAPIRO: But when you talk about…
SHROPSHIRE: I…
SHAPIRO: Go ahead. Yeah, Adrianne.
SHROPSHIRE: I mean, if there is a message that Democrats say, this is who we are, and here are the policies we’re going to put forward, it is those things, though, Paul. I mean, I do think that there’s – my concern is that the party does not lean too much into – it is just the economy. It is not economic anxiety that causes a woman to go to the polls in her state where there’s a ballot initiative for abortion on the ballot and vote to protect abortion rights and then goes to the part of her ballot where the man who is responsible for putting justices on the court that would eliminate Roe and vote for that person. That’s not economic anxiety.
BEGALA: I think it is. See; I think it is. I think she’s pissed that her carton of eggs is twice what it was four years ago. And while she stands for choice, she’s like, well, at least this guy is going to make my eggs cheaper.
SHAPIRO: Waleed, I’d love you to jump in here because Paul distinguished between web issues and wedge issues. If Republicans continue to lean into the wedge issues, should the Democrats run away from that? Should they ignore it? Should they talk past it? Should they lean into it? Like, what do you do when the Republicans say, on Day 1, we are going to address policy towards transgender people, for example?
SHAHID: I think that Democrats need a both-and approach around delivering real economic results to working-class Americans and not shying away from real societal changes that are happening around us that we can’t just pivot away from. We need to humanize trans Americans. We need to contextualize trans Americans. We need to do the same thing that we did in the struggle for gay rights, which is fight these battles and persuade not just in election season but in the years before election season.
And I think we lost to the oldest playbook in human history, which is divide and conquer. And one place I would push back on Paul is that Democrats also need – we’re too conflict-averse. We’re trying to be everyone – everything to everyone. We need to create villains. You know, part of the thing is that Democrats have gotten too close to the boardrooms of Uber and Facebook and Wall Street, some of the grocery companies. And we need to take on those villains. Otherwise, the Republicans will create and manufacture villains every single time.
SHAPIRO: The last time Democrats were in the wilderness for 12 years – Ronald Reagan for eight years, followed by George H.W. Bush – Bill Clinton got back into power by saying, it’s the economy, stupid. We’re going to tack to the center. Is the same answer going to work for Democrats four years from now, two years from now?
BEGALA: No.
SHROPSHIRE: I…
SHAHID: Yes.
BEGALA: Go for (laughter)…
SHAPIRO: We got a no, a yes and – Adrianne?
SHROPSHIRE: No. No. I don’t think that – we’re in a fundamentally different world than we were then. Again, I would say, to Waleed’s point, like, the country has changed – right? – not just in terms of its complexion. And we have to address the issues that are fundamentally dividing Americans. And that is not just the economy.
You know, we can’t – as a country, we are incapable, unable, unwilling to address the sort of central issues that have created our inability to get to a more perfect union. And that is absolutely racism. The Democratic Party absolutely cannot run away from that. And I know that for myself and my community, we’ve been dealing with this for a very long time. I think when we look at Black folks right now, the sort of general sentiment is like, OK, here we are again.
SHAPIRO: Paul, do you think the Democratic pivot looks the same as it looked 30-some years ago, when Clinton was running?
BEGALA: No. No. No. It’s not really – I’m sorry, Ari. Political journalists always think that lives move on a left-right spectrum. And in America, we see it move on a up-down spectrum, OK? So we’ve got to move to the middle, by which I mean the middle of the middle class. Why are we losing? I think because we’ve lost the middle class.
SHAHID: Yeah. I don’t think we’re that far apart as it may seem, but the thing I’m sitting with is, like, we do need to be able to speak to Americans to the mood that they’re in. And the mood that they’re in today is one of change, one of wanting to understand the cultural changes that are happening in the country around race and gender and sexuality and also their pocketbooks. Their pocketbooks are empty. Things cost too much. And so we need to do all of the things.
I think what I’m frustrated with is there’s been all this talk this past week about how Democrats need to abandon the woke part of their party and very little talk about abandoning the billionaires who are part of their party who are harming our ability to speak in terms of class warriors and not just cultural warriors. And…
SHAPIRO: The Republicans had Elon Musk, and they managed to do it.
SHAHID: But they are running a campaign based on, again, the oldest playbook, which is Elon Musk is somehow a victim of American democracy rather than a success story of how the economy and democracy works for people like him. And so I feel so ashamed that the Democrats were unprepared for the onslaught of what was going to be attacks on the lines of migration, the border, transgender Americans when we knew this was coming years ago. And yet we didn’t develop a strategy to explain to the American people what this was designed to do, which was to help elect Republicans and people like Elon Musk and get them more power.
BEGALA: I’m smiling, Waleed, because not only did we not explain it. We rubbed their noses in it if they dare use the wrong word. I’m sorry. There is a woke, censorious, preachy elitism in our movement, and we got to flush that. You don’t go to someone who’s busting his ass at seven bucks an hour and tell him he’s privileged just because his skin is white. I’m sorry. You don’t do that – not if you want to get his vote, OK? And I’m not naive. I understand there’s racism and prejudice in this country. I want to build bridges to those folks. I want to reach out to them. And the easier way to do that is on these economic crises that they’re all facing irrespective of race, gender and religion.
SHAPIRO: Three Democratic strategists there – Paul Begala, former White House adviser and now political contributor for CNN, Waleed Shahid, senior adviser to the Uncommitted Movement, and Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC. Thank you all so much.
BEGALA: Thanks so much.
SHROPSHIRE: Thanks, Ari.
SHAHID: Thank you.
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