A leading House Democrat called on his party to reconsider its political strategy ahead of the 2018 elections and praised incoming president Donald Trump for making a “smart” political decision by convincing an American manufacturer to keep some jobs in the United States. Adam Schiff, an eight-term congressman from California, told reporters at a Tuesday breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that Donald Trump’s high-profile effort to persuade heating and cooling manufacturer Carrier from shipping nearly 1,000 jobs from its Indianapolis factory to Mexico was good politics.
“This was the smartest thing they’ve done,” said Schiff, who otherwise criticized the Trump transition for its policy pronouncements and personnel decisions. “I’m not sure that it’s replicable.”
Schiff suggested Democrats could learn from the Carrier move and the results of the November election in general about ways to bring blue-collar workers back into the party’s fold. “We were not competing everywhere on the playing field,” he admitted about Democrats.
Schiff said that while he believed the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had the demographic advantage to win the election, he added that in retrospect, the party did not do enough to reach out to voters who have drifted from Democrats in the last several years. Schiff commented that the way Democrats ran the 2016 campaign was not the same way he ran his own first campaign for Congress in 2000, when he faced off against a Republican incumbent in a district that was more friendly to the GOP than it currently is. “It was not the race I would have run in that district,” Schiff said of the 2016 strategy.
“We need to have a national campaign,” Schiff added, speaking of the 2018 midterm elections. Schiff was supportive of his fellow Californian Nancy Pelosi for Democratic House leader, who received an unsuccessful challenge last week from Ohio congressman Tim Ryan for the top leadership position. Ryan posed his candidacy as a response to Democrats’ inability to win back a majority under Pelosi, who has led House Democrats since 2002. Schiff, who formally nominated Pelosi, said she was the “very best” to lead the party.
