Where do Democrats go from here? Washington’s congressional delegation has some ideas

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Since Republicans won control of the House, Senate and White House in last month’s elections, Democrats in Congress have embarked on a series of public and private debates over what went wrong for their party.

The election result was hardly a blowout, with President-elect Donald Trump winning 49.9% of votes and Democratic wins in the House leaving the GOP with a mere five-seat majority in that chamber. But the reality of a Trump victory – aided by significant gains among working-class voters of all races – has Washington’s congressional delegation focused on returning to what they see as the party’s roots.

“I think the most important thing to do right now is to take a pause and listen,” said Sen. Patty Murray, cautioning her fellow Democrats against letting the election outcome reinforce their existing ideas.

“I think that there are people rightfully frustrated about where we are right now – with our economy, with all the global things that are happening – and they only had one way to make their voices heard,” she said in her Capitol office. “So we have to understand that frustration, deal with it the best we can, but not lose what our basic values are.”

Other members of the delegation, however, want to do more than listen. In a brief interview at the Capitol on Nov. 14, Rep. Adam Smith of Bellevue blamed his party’s losses on “the undue influence of extreme elements that are occasionally part of our coalition.”

“The radical left has come to have veto power over far too many things that your average Democratic candidate does, so that our brand is poisoned,” said Smith, adding that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris “tried to duck and hide” rather than explicitly repudiating what he called “radical identity politics” and calls to defund the police or abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Murray said she understands Smith’s point but emphasized that both parties are subject to the same kind of forces pulling them toward more extreme positions.

“The question isn’t just, ‘What do Democrats do?’ ” Murray said. “It really is, ‘What do we do as a country to make sure that we aren’t just absolutely catering to the person that’s screaming the loudest in the room?’ ”

Smith, the state’s longest-serving House member and the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has been targeted at home by protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. He said that by taking positions to avoid alienating left-wing groups – such as being open to decriminalizing crossing the border illegally – Harris and other Democratic candidates in the party’s 2020 primary “alienated the whole rest of the country.”

“I’m a progressive,” Smith said. “If I may be blunt, I think the communists are the problem. And we need to draw that distinction. If you’re in favor of abolishing the criminal justice system, you’re not a progressive. We need to reclaim that label.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who represents most of Seattle and leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she completely disagrees with Smith’s critique of the party.

“We have talked down to our base of voters who no longer feel connected to us,” she said. “They don’t feel like they need to come out, because they’re always being told they’re far left, or they’re crazy, or they’re not a permanent part of our coalition. That is the part of the coalition that is growing the fastest, and you ignore them to your detriment.”

Jayapal said she believes Democrats have lost ground with their traditional base – poor and working people of every race and ethnicity – because those people feel that “the system has been rigged against them” and saw Trump as the one who would blow it up.

“The core issue, to me, is that people are very angry,” she said. “And they have a right to be, because even while the economy has grown and the wealthiest 1% have gotten wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, their wages have stagnated at where they were 30 years ago. People feel like they haven’t been able to see enough of a difference between Republicans and Democrats on these issues that affect working people.”

Rep. Marilyn Strickland of Tacoma said the debate over whether Democrats should move further to the left or to the center on specific policies could miss a bigger point about how they relate to voters.

“I ask myself sometimes, was this election really about issues?” she said. “Sometimes we forget that this is a communication business as much as anything else. For us as a party, we have to constantly communicate with voters and tell them what the value proposition is, and we have to do it in terms that you can put on a bumper sticker.”

Rep. Kim Schrier, whose district stretches from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, handily won re-election by outperforming Harris in Washington’s most purple district. She also warned against jumping to conclusions about the election results but said she has built trust with her constituents just by showing up and working on issues they care about.

“The extremes in both parties have the loudest megaphones,” she said. “And that’s very destructive, because most of us, like most of the country, are right around the middle – left of center, right of center, but very pragmatic. Real people with real families.”

Despite their disagreements, the Washington Democrats all voiced the idea that their party needs to do a better job of listening and focus on the issues that matter most to voters. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who leads the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said the “megaphone” for Democrats needs to be all about the economic concerns that drove voters to change the party in control of the Senate and the White House.

“We might have had job growth in the economy, but the price economy was the real issue,” she said. “I think you have to show people that you’re fighting on their side and that you really are working on policies that really could help the underlying condition.”