The blue wall broke. Every swing state went red. And the entire country, barring a few exceptions, shifted rightward. In Minnesota, where I’m serving my seventh term as the state leader of our Democratic Party, we managed to buck the trend and hold our ground yet again.
But since the election, part of my mind has been focused on another state – Missouri.
On Election Day, voters across Missouri passed ballot measures to guarantee paid sick leave for workers, protect reproductive rights and raise the state minimum wage. These are policy ideas straight out of the Democratic agenda – and yet, in the same election, Missouri Republicans again swept all statewide races by wide margins.
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What should we make of this?
To me, it’s a stark example of the central lesson for Democrats this year: our policies are popular, good for working-class families and winners on paper. But too many voters don’t connect our ideas to our party – a party that has always stood for the worker, the farmer, the family trying to make ends meet, the small businessperson and those who feel politically voiceless.
What will it take to repair the connection between our values, our policies, and our candidates?
That’s what we need to figure out – and fast – because the reality of a second Trump administration is that the same families who are rightfully fed up, angry and struggling to get by will be the ones cast-off by his schemes to enrich millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the American middle class.
I know firsthand what it takes to turn things around for Democrats. When I started my job as chairman, our party in Minnesota was in deep debt and struggling to regain its identity. We had just lost the state house, a 40-year state senate majority, one of the longest-held Democratic seats in Congress and, after a tight recount, barely managed to seat our state’s first Democratic governor in nearly 25 years.
Since then, Minnesota has stood out as one of the country’s most steady, successful and effective Democratic states – and is regularly lauded as one of the best places to do business, raise a family and live a healthy and happy life.
The policy agenda that we’ve accomplished in Minnesota – including paid family leave, free school lunches for our kids, middle-class tax relief, lowering childcare costs and a $1 billion investment in affordable housing – is one of the reasons we have maintained a hold on our part of the blue wall every four years. It’s one of the reasons we have won every single statewide election in the last 14 years. We have made it easier for the working class to afford their lives.
But broadly speaking, at the national level, we as Democrats have not been able to effectively make the same progress. And unfortunately, there is no quick fix that will bridge the deep divides in America.
We need to regain the trust of the families and communities that have given up on us. We need to address people’s pain head-on. And we need to stop abiding by an outdated media bubble and meet folks where they are.
In the waning days of the presidential election, Donald Trump threw on an apron, staffed the French fry station, and posed for a light-hearted photo op at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
"When I’m president," he later posted, "McDonald’s ice cream machines will work great again."
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Clips of the visit spread like wildfire across social media.
At virtually the same time, the Biden-Harris administration finalized a crackdown on anti-competitive behavior that, until now, prevented McDonald’s franchisees from more easily fixing those machines. Yes, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did something concrete – through boring old regulatory action – to solve the problem.
But it’s not connecting.
Our mission now is to reconnect with the working-class voters of America, regain their trust, and remind them that we – as a party – have always stood for and will never give up on their families.
It’s time to speak normally, directly, and concisely about the issues that families and communities care most about. Many people around the country don’t know what we stand for, which means they don’t trust us to advocate for them. Even worse, we too often allow Republicans to falsely and negatively define us.
In 2017, we found ourselves in an era of resistance. In 2025, we need to counter the excesses and extremes of the new Trump administration while also defining a clear agenda which centers on the struggles of everyday Americans hoping to get ahead, not just get by. Because when the Trump agenda fails Americans, as it certainly will, they need to know we have their backs.
