Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), the new chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged colleagues to move away from “preachy” politics that he worried cost the Democratic Party the election.
Casar was elected to lead the group of progressive House lawmakers on Thursday. This week, he became the latest in a host of prominent Democrats calling for sweeping reforms to how their party communicates to voters following Vice President Kamala Harris’s bruising loss to President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month.
The Texas Democrat said his party should focus more on kitchen table issues, such as the economy, than cultural policies often criticized by Republicans as “woke,” during an NBC interview.
“It’s less of a left-right fight and more of a getting back to a Democratic Party that’s for everyday people, no longer being seen as preachy or disconnected,” Casar told the outlet. “The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.”
Casar’s comments follow data showing working-class voters, a reliably blue Democratic demographic, switched allegiances to the Republican Party this election cycle.
The news comes after one of Trump’s most successful ad campaigns in the weeks leading up to the election tackled the Democratic Party on its support for liberal transgender policies, including sex changes for children. One ad in particular targeted Harris for caring more about niche transgender agenda items than working-class voters. Featuring the vice president pledging support for providing sex change operations to prison inmates, including illegal immigrants, the ad said: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” and added that “Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class.”
The branding worked. A post-election analysis by Blueprint found that 25% of voters across swing states Harris needed to win believed she was out of touch, seeming “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Some Democrats have subsequently called for the party to stop using identity politics, including targeting LGBT issues. While he still supports liberal transgender policies, Casar still criticized the Democratic Party for how it messages on cultural issues, saying Harris lost the election mostly because of “where our entire Democratic Party brand has wound up.”
Top Democratic strategist James Carville also said the party was “killed” during the elections due to “the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era” during a recent episode of his Politics War Room podcast. He continued to criticize Democrats’ messaging on identity politics surrounding transgender issues during an interview with the New Republic, questioning, “Why should it be the lead issue?”
“This identity s**t was a disaster,” Carville added during another recent Politicon episode.
Carville received pushback this month from outgoing Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, who said identity politics “cannot be the excuse for why we win or lose.”
However, Harrison’s close colleague, Ken Martin, the vice chairman of the DNC, has called for a “massive narrative and branding project” for Democrats because “the majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) has also pushed back, particularly against unbridled Democratic support for liberal transgender policies such as allowing biological men to compete against women in sports. He said following the elections that the Democratic Party’s focus on such issues was costing them support from voters more concerned about other policies.
“[T]he trans movement has gone too far. It is imperiling the progress we’ve made,” Moulton said.
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However, Casar suggested Democrats could make a comeback on transgender policy by reframing the issue.
“When we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim. A big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away, while Republicans pick their pocket,” he said.
