At the White House and in a series of conference calls Monday, Democrats wrestled with the one question that preoccupies the party after Donald Trump’s stunning victory: What to do about the Obama coalition?

Neither President Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton explicitly framed it that way in their private and public conversations with party members Monday. But the looming question colored their remarks to shell-shocked operatives and activists, and it serves as the backdrop for the brewing battle over the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee — a fight that some Democrats are terrified will devolve into a three-month factional war over the party’s identity, rather than a difference of opinion over party tactics.


Speaking in terms of a Democratic Party at a crossroads during his news conference Monday, Obama said he would try not to “big-foot” the party’s conversation about the future. Later, in a conference call with Democratic activists, he didn’t address any second-guessing of his or Clinton’s strategy and again stopped short of dictating the path forward. The recently defeated Clinton took much the same approach in her own private discussion with House Democrats on Monday, speaking vaguely of the road ahead but stopping short of offering specific directions.

“Two things we can’t afford to be is discouraged or divided,” she said, according to a Democrat on the call. “We can’t be distracted or diverted in the fights ahead.”

Yet the issue of whether to re-engage the young voters and minorities who elected Obama to two terms but didn’t turn out for Clinton, or reach out to the disaffected white working-class voters who swung to Trump, is too pressing to be avoided.



In the wake of Clinton’s shocking defeat, there is widespread skepticism among Democrats about whether the voters who elected Obama will be enough to carry the White House for any future Democrat after an election in which Clinton lost by wide margins among white voters and in rural areas where Trump proved devastatingly popular.

“ We’ve started to lose touch with white voters. They’re still the majority out there, and we can’t claim to be a big-tent party if we lose touch with working-class voters, whether they’re black, white, blue or red,” said DNC member Boyd Brown of South Carolina. “When you have Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer making the sale for you, that dog don’t hunt. It’s time to reshuffle the deck and get some younger folks in there with some more diverse backgrounds. It’s time for a leadership shakeup.”

After party members are done surveying Democrats’ hollowed-out down-ballot landscape, and with the national party on the precipice of an all-out brawl for the central committee’s chairmanship, everything is suddenly on the table as Democrats try to determine whether the party chose the wrong messenger, the wrong message or the wrong audience.

Some are convinced that a tighter focus on a simple economic message would be an important start.

“Everything is so fresh; it’s been less than a week to analyze what we have here. I just know [zeroing in on jobs] is what the people of my state expect from me,” said Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat serving in her first term. “When I’m out and about talking to people, asking, ‘What’s on your mind, what are you concerned about, what can we do to make your life better?’ That’s the No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 thing. A good job with some security, and the confidence that my kids will be able to get a great job.”

Other top Democrats have zeroed in on the party’s narrow-casting approach to voters and an overreliance on modeled targeting of potential supporters.

“In this election, every key element of the Democratic coalition underperformed, and we need to do better,” said former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is considering a run for DNC chairman after he fell short in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. “The strategy of narrowly defining the base and then microtargeting it and texting it until it doesn’t turn out isn’t a winning strategy for the future.”

“We have to stop trying to microtarget very different messages for every demographic, and recognize that voters can disagree with you on specific issues as long as they genuinely believe that you want to do the best for every American,” added Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, who narrowly lost his race for the U.S. Senate last week. “It’s not about any specific type of voter or demographic. It’s about making sure we are being unapologetic and honest about what we believe. Voters are smart, and they know the difference. They know when you’re saying one thing to one group and another thing to another group.”

Already, such divisions are on display in the race for the DNC chairmanship — a proxy for the fight over the party’s general direction — with each candidate prescribing a different potential antidote to the party’s ills.

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean — an ex-party chairman and presidential candidate — and South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison are formally running. Others — including O’Malley and New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley, a DNC vice chairman — are still considering bids of their own. Labor Secretary Tom Perez is interested, said a Democrat familiar with his thinking, and Kander told Politico he’s open to it, though he’s not actively pursuing the role at the moment.

Ellison, the likely favorite due to his early support from a group of prominent Democrats and others including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, has spent part of this week speaking to attendees at a conference sponsored by the Democracy Alliance. The meeting includes major liberal donors plotting the path ahead. And the Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman’s formal announcement on Monday listed backing from establishment-leaning Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chris Murphy, reflecting party leaders’ wishes to avoid a messy fight.

But Ellison’s road to the chairmanship isn’t quite the glide path it seems. Some DNC members, like Brown, say they might be uncomfortable empowering someone who is so avowedly on the left side of the party spectrum and fear the potential message to voters of Ellison’s elevation — the election of a progressive African-American, Muslim-American from a blue state, might be viewed as a direct, confrontational response to Trump’s win.

“A knee-jerk reaction would be problematic: putting someone in a position of power just because he’s everything Donald Trump is against [would be the result of] misreading the electorate,” Brown said. “We saw the vote tallies we just had, they weren’t good. Putting Keith Ellison in charge would put voters across the spectrum the wrong way.”

The DNC’s electoral math is still up in the air: Ellison’s initial release announcing his candidacy included endorsements from multiple state party chairs, muddling the state-level Democrats’ informal agreement last week to vote as a bloc once the time comes. Two from their own ranks, after all, are still in the running.

Missouri Democrat Jason Kander says: “We have to stop trying to micro-target very different messages for every demographic." | AP Photo

Harrison, who announced his own candidacy Monday night, said the party needs to reconfigure how it connects with voters to appeal to a wider swath.

“If we talk about issues that are really important to people, we can appeal to rural working-class people,” he told Politico, mentioning the problem of securing credit as an example of an issue that resonates but has been out of the political discussion. “Figuring it out connects people, whether you’re a white person in rural West Virginia or a black person in New York or a Latino in New Mexico. Barriers to success. That’s what we have to be talking about.”

Explaining that his focus is on bolstering the party’s infrastructure at the local level — a message similarly pushed by Obama on Monday — Buckley said, “We can reach out to both the young African-American voters and the working-class whites as well. There’s nothing wrong with our message if articulated by someone they can trust: a neighbor or a local chair.”

O’Malley, a former Democratic Governors Association chairman, also pointed to the necessity of rebuilding the party down-ballot while formulating a believable economic message. “We need a 50-state strategy that’s mindful: We need to win back governors’ offices, we need to win back state legislatures. We lost a lot of seats in the last few years,” he said. “We need to start acting like a party again, and the leading edge of that needs to be an economic message that’s credibly delivered.”

“Others will parse and do the postmortem on this election,” he added. “But what became clear is that people did not hear, or did not believe, our economic message, notwithstanding 79 months in a row of positive economic job growth.”

Dean, the former party chairman, said much of the task lies in appealing to younger voters — leading him to “tentatively” rebrand his famous 50-state strategy as the “50-50 strategy: the 50-state strategy, the 50-year strategy,” he said, referring to voters younger than 50 who had voted for Democrats before and need to be wrapped up by the party.

Dean’s political considerations then swung to reckoning with the president-elect, a figure whom some party leaders hope will provide divided Democrats with opportunities to unite — against, for example, his new senior counselor Steve Bannon.

“What we need to do is what matters in people’s communities, and after a couple years of Trump, it’s going to be clear he doesn’t care about those communities,” he said. “It’s much more important for us to have a positive message. Republicans got where they got with a negative message, but they also got Trump.”

Even if it’s not as all-consuming as considering the Obama coalition’s future in the post-Obama era, the idea of providing an affirmative message in the age of Trump is ubiquitous among current and aspiring party leaders.

“Given the extreme, vitriolic, pernicious rhetoric of the campaign, the Democrats have an obligation to their constituents to prepare for anything that undermines the progress of America,” said Kevin de León, president pro tem of the California state Senate and a rising star within the party.

“I’ve said this within the context of California, but it’s the same thing for the direction of the Democratic Party: We can’t allow one election to reverse generations of progress.”

Heather Caygle contributed to this report.