Aaron Zitner
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Well, that's right. Democrats have a very restive liberal base. We've seen people showing up at town hall meetings. In fact, so many That House Republican leaders said, hey, we don't want to have any more town hall meetings. Too many angry people are showing up. Whether that's organic or driven by Democratic groups seems irrelevant.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
People are getting out of their houses and going to these town meetings. And they've been flooding the hill, the members of Congress, with phone calls. But there are centrists in the party who say, wait a second.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Our path back to winning the House of Representatives and having any hope in the Senate depends on moving to the center and winning those swing voters who swung toward President Trump in 2024. And they don't like this performative stuff. They don't like partisan politics. In our last poll in January, Democrats had the worst image ratings.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
that we have ever found in Wall Street Journal polling in three decades. This is a party that voters do not trust, and it's not enough to protest. This is what the centrists say. Democrats have to make sure that voters understand what they would do with power if they got it back. And the way to do that, they say, is not through protest.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Instead, focus on how you would handle power differently than President Trump if voters gave power back to you.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Well, that's right. The confrontation crowd, they think they're having an effect. They think that by showing up at all these town meetings and by showing that they have some fight, they've spooked Republican lawmakers. And now you're seeing Republican lawmakers push back in some ways against President Trump and saying, look, you got to rein in Elon Musk.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
You made us nominate all these cabinet members and we can't even go to these cabinet members to ask what's going on in our home districts and home states with these layoffs. because you've created an alternative power center with Elon Musk. And maybe these tariffs aren't such a good idea.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
You're seeing Republicans speak up a little more, and the confrontational Democrats say that's partly their doing. And also, when you get someone to make a phone call, when you get them to show up at a meeting, they've taken an action. They've become engaged. And if they're going to show up at a meeting, they're also likely to vote when it's time to vote and to get their friends to vote.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
So it's engagement. One problem for Democrats is that Trump is doing so much stuff. And Democrats risk putting out a kind of diffuse and unfocused message if they react to everything. Rahm Emanuel was most recently ambassador to Japan, which has a big USAID installation. And he says, I would not die on the hill of USAID.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
If you're going to protest something, go out and get the governors, Democratic governors, to hold a meeting about why eighth grade reading test scores are so low. Protest that. Make it a contrast with Trump. You're not going to build housing in Gaza. We're going to build housing right here. So make sure that whatever you do comes back to pocketbook issues.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Democrats are going to be a cacophony of voices for a few years. The party will not really have a single voice guiding it until the next presidential election. But the question is, what should the party do in the interim? And we are seeing different points of view out there.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Gavin Newsom very prominently said he thought that trans athletes should be barred from women's sports, breaking with the liberal wing of the party on that. And he criticized the use of terms like Latinx and defunding the police. That's part of the effort among some Democrats to show that they understand that voters don't want that liberal point of view and they want it to be more centrist.
WSJ What’s News
Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back
Alyssa Slotkin gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union and gave a very centrist, Midwestern-focused kind of meat and potatoes speech that was immigration, national security, basic economics. It was an unfancy statement of core values. Nations should be secure, the border should be secure, and we should focus on your pocketbook. That's what the centrists think is the way forward.