'Our brand sucks': Dem reveals how party became 'a shell of itself' — and how to fix it

The Democratic Party not only lost control of the White House and the U.S. Senate in 2024, but also saw its advantage in traditional Democratic strongholds erode. One veteran Democratic operative is offering several explanations, and solutions for how to rebuild.

In an essay for the Bulwark, longtime Democratic campaign operative Steve Schale wrote that his party has now become "a shell of itself" in the wake of its 2024 loss. He specifically lamented that his home state of Florida has gone from a battleground state that Democrats carried in 2008 and 2012 to a Republican vote sink, with even the bluest counties trending increasingly Republican. He also pointed out that Iowa and Ohio have morphed from competitive swing states to safe GOP states since Barack Obama's presidency.

"That’s not just a canary in a coalmine. It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home," Schale wrote. "Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is. We can no longer do that or we will find ourselves in an even worse situation than we do following the 2024 election. Now is not the time for quick fixes. We must make real structural changes."

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Schale argued that there are four ways Democrats can rebuild their party to once again have a 50-state presence. He proposed that Democrats should spend money earlier before voters' opinions can "harden" on contentious issues like crime, immigration, transgender rights and the economy. He called for more groups to be involved in helping candidates and campaigns make decisions, as opposed to one super PAC or group serving as a bottleneck. He also said Democrats should be smarter about using data rather than using it as a crutch, and that campaigns should make data work for them, rather than the other way around. And he pointed out that the far right has a "tremendous advantage" in delivering its ideas compared to Democrats.

"After 2020, I had a billionaire ask me what I thought would be useful going forward. My advice was to spend a billion dollars building out an ecosystem like the right to deliver information to not only our base but persuadable voters. There was an acknowledgement of the problem, but that was all," Schale recalled. "I worry that coastal Democrats don’t fully grasp just how much of a disadvantage we face on the news consumption front—especially podcasts and social media—and that to solve it, we need a donor or two willing to invest significant capital."

The Floridian said Democrats' pattern of gradually losing its base should be particularly alarming to party leaders. He noted that in the three predominantly Hispanic counties of Miami-Dade, Hendry and Osceola, Democrats went from having a 324,000-vote margin in 2016 to President-elect Donald Trump winning those counties by a total of 133,000 votes just eight years later.

"The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets—black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.—and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other," he wrote. "At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate."

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Click here to read Schale's full essay in the Bulwark.