Lawmakers seek to retool message to draw lost voters back in while trying to fight Trump’s agenda – and intraparty communication will be critical

In Baltimore, familiar faces stood at a podium, presenting a familiar slogan. In a stab at increased relevance, the slogan had acquired a hashtag: #FightingforAll. In the age of Donald Trump, House Democrats were seeking to frame their core message.

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“We believe in an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few,” said Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader. She paused, perhaps thinking to have caught herself repeating a platitude of the kind expected from those who work in Washington.

“It sounds like a cliche, but it is a fact,” she said, with a shrug.

This is a moment of reckoning for Democrats, who were in Baltimore for an annual retreat to discuss strategy and vision. They had expected to start the year working with President Hillary Clinton and a Senate majority. Instead, for the first time in a decade, they were without control of the White House or either chamber of Congress.

They must therefore defy President Trump with limited tools, while seeking to recapture the working-class voters who helped keep Clinton out of the White House. It will not be easy. The three-day Baltimore retreat exposed discord within the ranks, but largely the same leadership espoused trite slogans that long predated Trump. It was clear that senior Democrats see little if any cause for major change.

“We are not irrelevant at all,” Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No2 Democrat in the House, told reporters on Wednesday. “This conference is a misnomer,” he added, referring to the use of the word “retreat”. “No one in America ought to think this party is in retreat. This party is energized.”

California representative Linda Sanchez, one of the newer leadership members, said the conference – whose official title was Fighting for all Americans – was “aptly named”. She had but one suggestion, quipping the slogan ought to be: “Kicking a little ass for the working class.”

The moment was emblematic of how the party sees its defeat in 2016. They won the popular vote, Democrats say. It’s not a question of message, but of communication.



Pelosi compared the failure to connect with working-class voters to a marriage in which a husband sends his wife flowers every month. “He thinks he’s communicating and you don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that he thinks he is.”



‘His populism is bullshit’

In a political landscape often shaped by the tweets of a twitchy-fingered president, the Democrats must find a message that resonates.

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“Donald Trump is a master marketer and that is what we are up against,” Cheri Bustos, an Illinois representative who co-chairs the House Democrats’ messaging committee, told the Guardian.

“We have been drowned out by this overly simplistic message that Donald Trump delivered very effectively for over a year and a half, which was ‘make America great again’.”

That message resounded in the election, in which the president won a razor-thin victory thanks to working-class white voters in so-called Rust Belt states: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. In such states, formerly home to heavy industry, many counties won by Barack Obama swung in favor of Trump.

In a phone interview, Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter from 2007 to 2013, said the Democratic message should center around exposing the president as a false prophet.

“There is a case to be made against Trump that his populism is bullshit,” Favreau said, citing the nomination of billionaires and former Goldman Sachs executives to cabinet positions, which will be the wealthiest in US history, and moves to unravel the Dodd-Frank reform in a boon to Wall Street.

“The biggest challenge is maintaining focus on one or two issues. Trump gives you 100 targets every day.

Build the message that Trump is screwing the very people he said he’d fight for Jon Favreau

“It’s very easy for all of us to go down the rabbit hole … then you waste all your time and energy on the Trump tweet of the day, and you don’t build the message that Trump is screwing the very people he said he’d fight for.”

In Baltimore, between closed-door panel sessions, Democrats milling about the lobby of the Hyatt Regency were mindful of the constant media churn surrounding Trump. Members repeatedly emphasized to reporters the importance of the free press and its task of holding Trump accountable.



Many of their own cues on where to engage, they hoped, would arise from the public resistance that has been expressed since 20 January, when Trump took the oath of office.

Fueled by women’s marches and airports packed with protests against Trump’s travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, they said, an opportunity had arisen to build a liberal equivalent of the Tea Party movement that swept Republicans into control of the House in 2010.

The comparison seemed apt. In 2009, Democrats recalled, they faced angry constituents opposed to Barack Obama’s healthcare law. In 2017, Republicans who have long promised to dismantle the Affordable Care Act at the first opportunity are contending with opposition from those who found coverage under it.

Last weekend, for example, Representative Tom McClintock, from California, had to be escorted by police officers as he left a town hall event. Gus Bilirakis, from Florida, was also grilled by constituents for hours. In Baltimore, Democrats saw an opening.

“As time goes on, it gets better for us,” said Richard Neal, from Massachusetts and the ranking member of the House ways and means committee. “As time goes on, more people apply for insurance. From a net benefit, all of a sudden you’re going to tell the American people you’re going to take something away.”

On the campaign trail, Trump said he would repeal the ACA “on day one” and replace it with something “terrific”. In office, he has lowered expectations, saying a replacement will be delivered “within the year and the following year”. Even congressional Republicans have modulated their ambition, from “repeal and replace” to “repair”, rather than start from scratch.

“If they had done this quickly – first day, do it while no one’s looking ― they might have gotten away with it,” said Bobby Scott, from Virginia. “Now, just too many people, including too many of their members, recognize the chaos that will be caused.”

‘Members walk out for a variety of reasons’

At the Baltimore retreat, assurances that Democrats were unified were sometimes betrayed. Progressives, for example, reportedly walked out of a presentation hosted by the centrist thinktank Third Way on Wednesday evening.

“I didn’t notice that,” Pelosi said on Thursday morning. “Members walk out for a variety of reasons – some of them relate to personal hygiene.”

Was she saying there were no divisions in the party? “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” Pelosi answered, through a mouthful of cookie from Vaccaro’s bakery in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where she grew up.

Pelosi, 76, has led her party for 13 years. After November’s election, she faced her most significant challenge yet, from a younger bloc frustrated by repeated losses.

Though Pelosi was re-elected by a comfortable margin, the unusual drama surrounding the leadership contest suggested the extent of discord in the ranks. This weekend, also in Baltimore, the Democratic National Committee will hold its fourth and final regional forum, showcasing the candidates vying to lead the party’s internal organization.

The race for DNC chair has evolved into a proxy battle between the Clinton and Sanders wings of the party. The leading candidates are Tom Perez, labor secretary under Obama and a top surrogate for Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign, and Minnesota representative Keith Ellison, a progressive organizer who was the second member of Congress to endorse Bernie Sanders in the primary.

In Congress, meanwhile, the Democrats lack an obvious standard bearer to channel the energy of resistance to Trump into victory in the 2018 midterm elections.

Elizabeth Warren was elevated once more this week when Senate Republicans voted to silence her during a debate over the nomination as attorney general of Jeff Sessions. But one House Democrat at the Baltimore retreat questioned whether the firebrand from Massachusetts was the answer to the party’s problems.

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“I would be curious to see if her appeal extends to the midwestern counties we just lost,” said the member, who requested anonymity to speak more freely. “We can’t keep focusing on winning reliably liberal areas.”

Marcia Fudge, a representative from Ohio, one of Trump’s key wins, warned that her party risked drawing the wrong conclusions by crediting his victory solely to an economic message.

“What Donald Trump did was address [voters] at a very different level, an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level, an anger level,” Fudge, a recent chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at a roundtable with reporters on Thursday. “Just dog-whistle politics is what it was.”

But even Democrats from the country’s most liberal enclaves concluded that the party had lost its way with blue-collar voters, and not just in post-industrial areas.

“The next Democratic nominee has to be someone who has gutted a deer,” Brad Sherman, a representative whose district includes Los Angeles, told the Guardian.

“Or someone who at least shows respect for rural values.”