The Democratic Party is continuing to weigh their path forward as some members of the party acknowledge a disconnect on cultural issues and other key voting demographics, The New York Times reported Sunday.
“Over a long period of time, our party overdrew our trust account with the American people,” Rob Flaherty, a former campaign manager for Kamala Harris, told the NYT.
The Times reported that Democrats are still figuring out how to move forward as the party remains unpopular among voters. According to an NBC News poll from March, just 27% of registered voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party, which is the lowest positive rating since 1990.
“We are losing support in vast swaths of the country, in rural America, in the Midwest, the places where I’m from,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., told the outlet. “People that I grew up with who now support Donald Trump, who used to be Democrats. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the support of these folks, other than we have pushed, in so many ways, these people away from our party.”
Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison said the Democratic Party needed to figure out how to compete in states “where they’re not.”
The New York Times reported that the party is engaging in one $20 million effort to win back young male voters online. The effort, which is named, “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan,” according to the outlet, will “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”
“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” the plan says, according to the NYT.
Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, warned that the Democratic Party’s brand is off-putting to many Americans and cautioned against taking the wrong message from any potential success in the 2026 midterms.
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“The 2022 midterms masked the Biden problem,” McCray said, referring to former President Joe Biden’s age. “A good 2026 midterm — we should not let that mask a deeper problem.”
He added that the party “lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.”
Democrats were told to “embrace patriotism” and “get out of elite circles” earlier this year during a retreat focused on how to regain the working-class vote.
Documents first obtained by Politico detailed a “Comeback Retreat” held by the center-left political group Third Way last month that sought “to deliberate on why Democrats are struggling with working-class voters around cultural issues, the nature of the economic trust gap with this critical group and ideas for how to address both problems.”
The documents, obtained by Fox News Digital, summarized key takeaways from the retreat on why Democrats have a “cultural disconnect” with the working class and why Democrats are “not trusted” when it comes to the economy.
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Most takeaways focused on Democrats’ “faculty lounge” problem of being seen as too judgmental and beholden to their far-left members.
“Democrats are often viewed as judgmental, out-of-touch, and dismissive of those without elite education or progressive views,” the documents read. “This makes the party seem disconnected from everyday people.”
Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
