Stateside's conversation with Phil Angelides, a former chairman of both the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and California's Democratic Party

Across the country, Democrats are asking how to come back from their 2016 losses. One California party leader has a proposal: move the party’s headquarters to Michigan.

Phil Angelides is a former chairman of both the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and California's Democratic Party. In an article in Politico, he urged the party to “rebuild from the ground up.” Detroit, Angelides believes, is the best place to begin that process.

“We’ve got to be in the heartland,” Angelides told Stateside’s Lester Graham. Many states in the upper Midwest, which Democrats used to consider their “big blue wall,” voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2016.

Detroit is located within driving distance of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, all of which are states the Democrats hope will remain competitive.

“Logistically, it makes sense,” said Angelides.

Yet, Angelides emphasized that changing the party’s “perspective” is about more than just convenient geography. Moving the Democratic headquarters to Detroit, he argued, would signal loud and clear that the party was ready to “fight for the votes of the workers in the Midwest who have really been the bulwark of our party.”

Detroit is poised for a comeback, Angelides said, and he wants the Democratic Party to make a comeback along with it.

“Starting now,” he said, “we’re going to rebuild in the neighborhoods and cities and counties of the heartland of this country.”

Hear more about the proposal to move the Democratic headquarters from Washington to Detroit above.

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