New Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez spoke Tuesday about the party’s plan to regain the voters it’s lost as the party plans for the 2018 and 2020 elections.
First and foremost, he said, “The Democratic Party has to do a better job of making house calls, we need to listen to people. … People felt like they hadn’t been heard.”
Perez’s strategy isn’t exactly ground-breaking or advanced. “A big part of what we’re trying to do at the Democratic Party is make sure we get back to basics: organizing, persuasion, talking to people.”
Perez didn’t spurn the use of big data in campaigns, but suggested that it should be less of a priority than it has been for Democrats. “Frankly, we hadn’t been in some places. You can’t show up at a church every fourth October and call that an organizing strategy. … I’m a big believer in data analytics. Data analytics are important, but data analytics cannot supplant good old-fashioned organizing and persuasion and talking to people,” Perez said.
Since Obama won the 2008 election, Republicans have gained almost 1,000 state legislative seats, and went from nine states with full Republican control to now 25 states. Only six states have full Democratic control. As a result, the Democratic Party has often been accused of focusing too much on national politics.
Perez hopes to turn that focus around, saying, “We need an every-state strategy, an every-zip code strategy.” He didn’t, however, go into detail on how to accomplish that, other than saying Trump’s actions alone have already been a great motivator to get Democrats to run for office.
Will Democrats ever work with Trump? Later in the interview, Dan Balz of the Washington Post asked if Democrats risked becoming the new “Party of No” by resisting everything Trump tries to do. “We’re very supportive of infrastructure done right, we’re very supportive of immigration reform,” Perez responded.
In short: Democrats will work with Trump, but only in the instances where Trump adopts their positions.
As for beating Trump, Perez said the party hopes to “demonstrate the wide gulf between the rhetoric and the reality.” Perez gave a few examples from early in Trump’s administration, like Trump’s promise that new pipelines would be made with American-made steel. The Keystone XL Pipeline was promptly exempted from that executive order because much of the steel has already been purchased and was already lying along the pipeline’s route.
How will that playbook work out for Democrats? It probably needs to be fleshed out more, but they have plenty of time before 2018 and 2020 to get everything in order.
Jason Russell is the contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
