'Condescending and even hostile': DC insider orders Democrats to get their act together

Pollster and political consultant Mark Mellman said unity in action was one of the most important goals the Democratic Party needed to seize in the months leading up to the mid-term election.

“[W]hatever (MAGA) may mean for a given voter, there's no question the Republicans have a much clearer brand than the Democrats currently do,” said Mellman, a CBS News consultant and a pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for more than 30 years. “… Your brand is what people say about your product when you are not looking — and the American people are certainly very negative about the Democrats. They're negative about Republicans, too, but they're even more negative about Democrats.”

The issue, says Mellman, is proving to voters that the Party is “for the average person.”

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“At present, the key association the public has with the Democrats is that they are for marginalized groups. There's nothing wrong with supporting marginalized groups. All Americans should have equal rights and freedoms. But the realpolitik is that by definition, marginalized groups are not the majority,” Mellman said. “If the public sees your party as primarily defending a minority of the population, then it is going to be very hard to craft a winning majority vote.”

“The Democrats need to 1) recognize people's economic pain points and 2) then offer ideas that connect directly with those pain points,” Mellman continued. “People have to understand how and why the Democrats' policies will actually help them.”

This means showing the American people that they care about them by speaking “directly, authentically, and sincerely to the American people.”

“Emulating the rhetoric of the Harvard Faculty Club is not going to win people over. Too often, Democrats are not speaking in clear and direct ways to the American people, and even worse, too many Democratic leaders and spokespeople sound condescending and even hostile to the needs, concerns, and worries of average Americans.”

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Additionally, waiting for President Donald Trump to implode and take the Republican Party with him, he said, is not the best strategy because the impatience of wait-and-see “leads Democratic Party voters to be angry with and attack their own party and its leadership.”

This could spur Democrat voters to “elevate more radical leaders” that do nothing to help the party’s branding problem. Mellman did not provide examples of any current “radical leaders.”

And while polling puts the party beneath a president “acting as the country’s first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator,” the good news in the next months is that there are “now more Americans who are planning to vote for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican candidate in 2026” thanks to the White House’s impact on the economy and the justice system among other things.

Read the full Salon article here.