More than six months after the Democratic Party suffered major setbacks in the 2024 elections, the party is seeking a path to escape the political wilderness.
Part of that effort includes a recent gathering by top party consultants and donors trying to figure out how Democrats can improve outreach to male and working-class voters.
President Donald Trump won back control of the White House while Republicans flipped the Senate and defended their fragile House majority in November, and the GOP made gains among Black and Hispanic voters, as well as younger voters – all traditional members of the Democratic Party’s base.
“Everything we’ve done up to this point has resulted in re-electing Donald Trump,” longtime Democratic strategist and communicator Joe Caiazzo told Fox News Digital.
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“If anyone tells you that we don’t have to course correct, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” added Caiazzo, a veteran of Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
In the face of Trump’s sweeping and controversial moves since his return to the White House in January, an increasingly angered and energized base of Democrats is pushing for party leaders to take a stronger stand in leading the resistance to the president and Republicans.
The anger directed not only at Trump and Republicans, but also at fellow Democrats, appears to be a factor in the party’s polling woes, with Democratic Party favorable ratings sinking to historic lows.
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Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin vows the party will compete in all 50 states going forward.
In an interview earlier this month on “Fox News Sunday,” Martin highlighted that the party’s focus right now is “squarely on making sure that we stand up for hardworking Americans who are being left behind in this Trump economy.”
A 2024 election DNC postmortem is currently underway, with the findings expected to be issued later this year. However, grabbing the spotlight in recent days was a gathering hosted by the Democrat-aligned super PAC Future Forward at a luxury resort along the California coast.
Among the strategy discussions at the gathering was a $20 million effort titled, “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.”
The recommendations of the effort, which is code-named SAM, included having Democrats drop what is described as a “moralizing tone” toward male voters, changing the party’s language used toward men and purchasing more ads on video games as part of male outreach.
Some former key staffers on the 2024 campaign of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden as the party’s nominee last summer, heavily criticized the effort, which was first reported by the New York Times and later confirmed by Fox News.
“Instead of studying working-class voters and men, why doesn’t the Democratic Party donor class go out and meet some? What the hell is this?” James Singer, a spokesman for the 2024 campaign, wrote in a social media post. “As a Democrat, it’s embarrassing.”
It was a similar message from Ammar Moussa, another veteran Democratic strategist and communicator who worked on the Biden and Harris campaigns.
“This is embarrassing. Truly,” Moussa wrote on X.
Democrats have long had a problem attracting male voters in presidential elections. Trump won the male vote by 12 points over Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and according to the Fox News Voter Analysis, that margin ballooned to 15 points among men 45 and older.
Fast-forward to this spring, and the Democrats’ ratings stood underwater in the latest Fox News national poll at 41% favorable and 56% unfavorable in a survey conducted April 18-21.
That is an all-time low for the Democrats in Fox News polling, and for the first time in a decade, the party’s standing was lower than that of the GOP, which stood at 44% favorable and 54% unfavorable.
The figures were reversed last summer, when Fox News last asked the party favorability question in one of its surveys.
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The Fox News poll was far from an outlier.
The Democratic Party’s favorable ratings were well in negative territory in a Pew Research national survey – 38% favorable, 60% unfavorable – conducted in early April and at 36% favorable, 60% unfavorable in a Wall Street Journal poll in the field a couple of weeks earlier.
Additionally, national polls conducted in February by Quinnipiac University and March by CNN and by NBC News also indicated the favorable ratings for the Democratic Party sinking to all-time lows.
However, there is more.
Confidence in the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership also sunk to an all-time low, according to a Gallup poll conducted early last month.
The confidence rating for Democrats’ leadership in Congress stood at 25% in the survey, which was nine points below the previous low of 34% recorded in 2023.
The semi-annual Harvard Youth Poll, which was released late last month, indicated that approval ratings for Democrats in Congress among Americans aged 18-29 nosedived.
An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-April indicated that more respondents trusted Trump (40%) than Democrats in Congress (32%) to handle the nation’s main problems.
Additionally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted late last month suggested Republicans hold a significant advantage over Democrats on two top issues: the economy and immigration.
“If Democrats want to be competitive in this country and build lasting majorities in both chambers and be competitive for the White House, we’ve got to broaden the tent,” Caiazzo insisted.
He lamented that Democrats have “become hyper-focused on a certain set of issues that only speak to a certain set of people while letting the most important issues of the day fall by the wayside. Every single day, Democrats should be focused on how we make things better for working people. And the way we deliver that message has got to meet people where they are.”
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