Sez Us

Susan Estrich on Nov 14, 2024

Sez Us is a new social media platform founded by long-time Democratic strategist Joe Trippi. It's an alternative to "X" and Truth Social, which are of course now wholly controlled subsidiaries of Donald Trump Inc. Trippi, who recently appeared on my podcast, "No Holding Back," is as smart as any Democrat I know and has been around the block even more times than I have. While it's too soon to understand everything that happened last week, this much is clear: Donald Trump did a better job of communicating with his voters and reassuring them literally on a daily basis that he was on their side than we on the Democratic side did with ours. As president, he was on Twitter every day and night interacting with them; once banned from Twitter, he created Truth Social and kept talking to them. It's what Howard Dean, whose campaign Trippi ran, did every day when he was running for president, and built what was then an impressive grassroots network.

Of course I received emails almost every day from Kamala Harris and her team, because I'm on lists of Democratic donors. They did not invite me to have a conversation with Harris. They did not ask me what I thought of anything. They did not involve her telling me how and why she was on my side. They just asked for money.

Every two years, we go knock on doors in October of what are supposed to be Democratic voters. We did a better job of door-knocking than the Republicans. It didn't matter.

If you ask Democratic leaders whose side they're on, they'll tell you that Democrats stand for average Americans, working-class voters, the people, as Bill Clinton used to say, who go to work every day and play by the rules. But if you ask those people who stands for them, it's not us. Working-class voters, especially men, told us last week that they think we stand for the elites, the identity caucuses, "they/them."

It's not a coincidence that the most successful ad the Trump campaign ran was the one attacking Kamala for supporting a law that Trump himself enforced providing gender-affirming care for incarcerated prisoners. The tag line was the winner: "Kamala Harris is for 'they/them.' President Trump is for you."

Harris never responded to the ad. Maybe they believed, rightly, that transgender rights was not a voting issue in this election, and it wasn't. But the economy was; it was, as always, the biggest issue, and the economy is always an issue of whose side you are on. Trump succeeded in no small part because he convinced working-class voters that he, not Harris, was listening to them, understood their anger and frustration with Bidenomics, which didn't work for them, and would respond to them.

He won't, of course. Tariffs will unfairly burden working-class voters. Tax cuts for the wealthy are not going to help working-class voters. Mass deportations will cause havoc. Do they understand this? Did Harris effectively explain this? No. Maybe her campaign was too short. Maybe the "happy warrior" was not the right message for an angry and dispirited electorate. Maybe she didn't do enough to separate herself from Biden. Almost certainly, he dropped out too late: Harris would have been a stronger candidate if she had actually "won" the Democratic nomination, as opposed to inheriting it, and if she couldn't win it the hard way, then someone else would have been a stronger general election candidate.

But just looking backward won't solve the problem. Neither will tinkering with the rules for the nomination process, which is what Democrats tend to do (I've been on two of those commissions) when we lose presidential elections. We've lost touch with our base. Our base doesn't think we stand with them. That's what we need to work on for the next two years before the midterms, and the next four years before we can win the presidency. Sez US is a first step in that effort.

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