Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

The bitterness of Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victories in two of the past three presidential races have Democrats seriously questioning their policies and their message.

They’ll be re-examining their messengers, too, and 2024 will haunt 2028, determining who’s in contention for the party’s presidential nomination and upending the Democratic bench as it existed before Nov. 5.

Trump beat two women — Harris this time, Hillary Clinton before — and many Democrats partly blame sexism. That could make them reluctant to pick another woman, even one as compelling as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

The party’s struggles with working-class voters could point it toward someone positioned to attract them. Keep an eye on a comer like U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego, a former Marine who just won his Senate race in Arizona as Trump beat Harris there by more than five percentage points.

But I think an even bigger dynamic should — and could — come into play. The party ought to rethink its allegiance to tradition and etiquette, creating opportunities for candidates who aren’t obvious choices, who don’t fit any mold, whose résumés (here a lawyer, there a lawyer) don’t read like anagrams of one another’s.

Clinton was a proper choice, her long history with the party and her formidable C.V. overriding concerns about how well she connected with voters. That didn’t pay off.

Democratic leaders let President Biden’s re-election dreams go unchallenged for so long because that was the respectful, decent course. It was also the foolish one.

By the time Biden bowed out, a real primary was impossible, and Democrats once again traveled the polite path, anointing Harris because she was next in line and her selection promised to ruffle the fewest feathers. That didn’t end well.

And she lost to someone who blithely junks tradition, gleefully jettisons etiquette and went through none of the usual paces en route to the presidency. While her failure was chiefly a function of many Americans’ economic frustrations, overall discontent and impulse to punish the party in power, Trump’s triumph nonetheless demonstrated the degree to which many voters feel that institutions aren’t working and business as usual no longer cuts it. Perhaps conventionally polished institutionalists aren’t the best candidates for this angry age.

“Trump has fundamentally changed the way that we campaign and govern in America,” said Rebecca Katz, the chief strategist for the successful Senate campaigns of Gallego and, before him, John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat. She told me that a candidate’s ability to communicate with voters on their own terms, in relatable language, is crucially important. And that skill and sensibility have nothing to do with how much political experience the person has.

State Auditor Rob Sand of Iowa, where he’s the only elected Democrat who holds statewide office, told me: “Our party has been too deferential to its establishment, and the establishment has been too deferential to its own wisdom. We should be more open.”

Other young Democratic officeholders — Sand is 42 — expressed similar views. “There’s a possibility that folks who have been in the inner circles and the backrooms are too tainted to be able to speak with any authenticity about what’s next and what’s new and what’s different,” Illinois State Representative Kam Buckner, 39, told me.

It’s worth remembering that the Democratic Party’s last two-term president, Barack Obama, wasn’t at the center of its conversations four years before his commanding victory over Senator John McCain, a longtime fixture on Capitol Hill, in the........

© The New York Times