ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On Monday, Donald Trump will be the president, and his party will control all three branches of government. That means Democrats are shut out. In two weeks, they'll elect a new chair, who'll try to help the party win back the working-class voters who used to be part of their base. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson talked with some Democrats who've been through this before. They say maybe the way for the Democrats to win in the future is to look to the past.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Take a trip in the wayback machine to the late 1980s. Non-college educated voters, white working-class voters were deserting the Democrats and voting for Ronald Reagan in a landslide. Democrats were in the wilderness. They had to figure out, just like today, how to come back. Enter Bill Clinton - a southern governor nicknamed Bubba.
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BILL CLINTON: I feel your pain. I feel your...
LIASSON: Pollster Stan Greenberg did a lot of research on the so-called Reagan Democrats. And later, he worked for Clinton.
STAN GREENBERG: He had a theory of the case. His - you know, his theory of the case was economic populist, but also conservative on values. That distinguished him from many other Democrats. And he felt it in his gut - the working-class discontent.
LIASSON: Fast-forward to 2024. For Greenberg, this is deja vu all over again. Democrats seem to have forgotten for a second time how to talk to working people.
GREENBERG: What we have found in our research is that undocumented immigrants, the border being out of control, the lack of regard for crime and police drove working-class Democrats to support Trump. The cultural, in some ways, more than the economic, tipped the election at the end.
LIASSON: So lots of similarities, says Bill Galston, who worked in the Clinton White House.
BILL GALSTON: When you add all of this up, the public charge against the Democratic Party is not all that different from what it was in the late '80s.
LIASSON: Back then, Democrats were slow to understand how voters felt about crime and welfare. In 2024, it was crime and immigration. But Galston says there are also differences between now and the last time Democrats were repudiated - differences that are much more ominous for his party, like the drop in support among Black and Hispanic men. And there's something else.
GALSTON: The other piece of it is the young-adult vote. The Democrats' share of the young-adult vote declined by 10 full percentage points between '20 and '24. Those voters are the future, and that's not a great sign for the future.
LIASSON: For those voters in particular, says Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, being a Democrat is just not cool right now.
CHUCK ROCHA: The first thing you have to do to climb out of any hole is show you can win. The question becomes, how do you do that? The way you start winning elections is fixing the brand.
LIASSON: And, Rocha says, in his focus groups, he can tell the Democratic brand is broken.
ROCHA: I wish I was making this up. In battleground states, when I said, what about the Republicans? They would say, strong and crazy, 'cause that's the way they think about their brand - that Donald Trump is crazy. They would openly admit that. But they would say they're strong. They're tough. Well, Democrats, they would say, are old and weak.
LIASSON: Old, weak and preachy - Democrats are seen as the party of the faculty club, not the factory floor, so out of touch with the concerns of ordinary working people that Donald Trump, with his cabinet full of billionaires and an economic agenda to help them, is seen as the candidate of the working class. So Democrats have to figure out what to say to non-college-educated voters, and then they have to figure out where to say it.
Political strategist Maria Cardona is a member of the Democratic National Committee.
MARIA CARDONA: The Republicans and Donald Trump blew us out of the water in terms of talking to the voters that he needed to talk to, making sure they came out to vote and speaking to them where they are in the forums and in the places where they got together.
LIASSON: That means podcasts, Instagram, Facebook - all the social media places the Harris campaign tried to compete in but lagged way behind the Trump campaign. And once Democrats get to those new media places, says Cardona, they need to talk about the economy the way Bill Clinton did a generation ago, when his slogan was, it's the economy, stupid.
CARDONA: We needed to do a lot more of Bill Clinton's I feel your pain. We did not feel the pain of the voters strongly enough, emphatically enough, credibly enough and soon enough.
LIASSON: At the same time Democrats are looking for lessons from the last time they were able to come back after a big defeat, they have to go out and win some elections. And they already have. This month, they won two special elections for state legislature in Virginia, hanging onto their majorities in the state Senate and House of Delegates. Small potatoes, maybe, but winning elections is better than losing them.
Mara Liasson, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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