A slate of national Democrats chided their own party for failing to serve and represent working-class Americans at the revived Steak Fry political rally in Des Moines on Saturday.

Event headliners U.S. Reps. Cheri Bustos, Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan each argued that Democrats’ disconnection with working people squeezed by stagnant wages, job losses and diminished opportunities has caused the party’s years of mounting losses in state legislatures and Congress and its struggles in the Midwest in particular.

“We let those people down. We let ’em down,” Ryan, an eight-term Ohio congressman, told the crowd. “We didn’t see them. We didn’t listen to them. We didn’t hear them. If we want to be a national party, not a coastal party, a national political party in the United States, we’ve got to get those workers back from Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky... Those are our people. We gotta go and get them.”

The event, a fundraiser organized the Polk County Democrats, was the party’s biggest of 2017, selling 1,500 tickets and featuring seven congressional candidates and seven gubernatorial candidates on a picturesque fall day in Water Works Park.

It comes as Democrats in Iowa and nationally are searching for new leaders and developing a message they hope will drive congressional gains in 2018 and ultimately the presidency in 2020.

In their tough-love rebukes and prescriptions for the party’s future, Bustos and Moulton even went so far as crediting Republican President Donald Trump for recognizing working-class frustration and resentment, even as they castigated him for “exploiting” it and breaking the promises he’s made.

“Frankly, my fellow Democrats, they don’t want resistance; they want results,” Bustos said of Midwest voters, twisting the “Resist” mantra often heard among liberals since Trump became president.

Bustos, a three-term incumbent from western Illinois, described winning in a district that contained nine of the 11 Illinois counties that flipped from backing Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, arguing Democrats could do the same across the region by meeting voters “off the interstate” and focusing on economic policy.

Moulton, a two-term representative from Massachusetts, noted that Democrats have lost more than 1,000 statehouse seats across the country since 2010.

“That means we’ve got work to do, Democrats. That means we’ve got change to make. That means we can’t just keep doing the same old thing and expect to win again. We’ve got to get back to our party roots. We’ve got to get back in touch with those voters that we’ve lost.”

The answer, he said, is investments in clean energy and infrastructure, which will create jobs and build new industries.

Before Bustos, Moulton and Ryan, the party’s seven gubernatorial candidates and seven 3rd District congressional candidates also addressed the crowd. Governor aspirants Nate Boulton and Fred Hubbell used the event as a show of force, each buying 300-some tickets for supports and marching their chanting, sign-waving crowds through the gates in matching T-shirts.

Before the speeches began, though, it was gubernatorial candidate Andy McGuire who made the real news, performing CPR on a woman in a health emergency. McGuire, a physician, described hearing shouts for a doctor and rushing through the crowd to the tent, where the woman was on the ground and struggling to breathe after apparently choking on her food.

“She was very tachycardic. She was hanging in there, but real thready,” McGuire recalled a few moments later, slipping into doctor-speak as she described observing the woman and performing CPR. “I was mostly just keeping her breathing. … You’ve just got to keep her exchanging air until they can get her oxygen.”

Shortly after McGuire’s intervention, an ambulance arrived and the woman was taken out on a stretcher. From the stage later, Polk County Democrats Chairman Sean Bagniewski suggested McGuire may have saved the woman’s life.

All three of the headliners filled their Iowa itineraries with events beyond the Saturday afternoon steak fry.

Ryan participated Friday in a “roundtable discussion” with state labor leaders about increasing employment and worker pay. Moulton met with a small group of veterans following the steak fry Saturday and held informal meetings with several party officials and activists throughout the weekend.

Bustos held a “Building the Bench” event Saturday morning — a get-together an aide described as “boot camp training” for “candidates running at all levels of government.” She’s held several such training sessions across the country.

And like a practiced national politician visiting the first-in-the-nation caucus state, she also noted her close connection to the state and Des Moines.

“Believe it or not, I can actually see Iowa from my house,” she told the crowd, explaining that she lives along the Mississippi River, on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities. She went on to play up her Des Moines townie bona fides, telling the crowd she once lived near Principal Park and enjoyed post-ballgame beers at the Highlife Lounge while working in the city as a health care executive.

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