A pollster for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials on Friday that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump much differently than they did during his first term, pressing them urgently not to focus on every outrage, but argue that he is suffering. the pockets of the voters.
Molly Murphy’s speech, which was delivered during one of the first post-election meetings of her Democratic National Committee leaders, amounted to a silent indictment of much of the party’s long-standing approach to Trump. It also marked one of the most candid conversations senior party officials have aired publicly since Trump won.
“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” he said.
Speaking at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, D.C., before the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee, he said that most Americans support Trump’s transition and that voters “don’t care who he puts in cabinet positions.”
He said Trump will take office more popular than when he began his first term, though not as beloved as President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama were when they took office. He emphasized that Trump’s strength for years has been that voters approve of his handling of the economy, and that Democrats should aim to change that in his second term.
“These voters are saying, ‘I’ll let the outrageous thing slide if my costs go down,’” he said.
He noted that key sectors of the party’s base, including young people, Latino and black voters, drifted away from Democrats in this election. And while he said this was driven by high prices, Murphy argued that working-class voters have been steadily drifting away from Democrats for several election cycles, suggesting it wasn’t just inflation to blame.
He argued that Democrats have focused on the wrong issues. For young people and voters of color, he said, “institutions have failed them” and “they may not accept Trump for wanting to dismantle these institutions, but they certainly don’t hold it against him.”
He also warned Democrats to be “cautious” about attacking Trump for breaking the rules, arguing that while Democratic donors and the primary electorate care about such issues, the voters the party lost in November do not.
“The rules haven’t worked for them, so we certainly shouldn’t ask them to clutch their pearls,” he said. “We run the risk of looking like hall monitors.”
Murphy’s talk also highlighted that Democrats are betting that Trump will not deliver on his promises to quickly cut costs and that this could help them regain power. He said Democrats should reorient their messaging around Trump’s plans to cut taxes for the wealthy, implement sweeping tariffs that could result in higher costs for consumers and offer “giveaways” to large corporations.
Murphy’s filing is the latest sign that many Democrats across the party, from strategists to elected officials, are planning a new approach to Trump than the one they used when he first took office and the “resistance” flourished.
