Hill Democrats say their warnings about the party’s shortcomings at the border were ignored

CNN
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Frustrated Democrats in the Swing District say they have warned for years that the party risks losing working-class voters, thanks in large part to Republican Party attacks on the border.

But they say they were ignored by others in their party — and now the dam has broken with Donald Trump’s second White House victory.

“It’s just gone bankrupt this year,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a South Texas Democrat who outraised Vice President Kamala Harris by double digits in key parts of his district, told CNN, saying that “the Democrats have lost the working class ”, and even “little old ladies” in church push him to the limit.

“I felt something after the 2020 election. I said, ‘Guys, something is going on,’” Cuellar said, describing private conversations he had with fellow Democrats about the potential of the border crisis.

The Texas Democrat has personally warned members of his party that they are heading for major losses if the party does not convey its message to working people, including on immigration and the economy.

And he wasn’t alone: ​​Senior Democrats in the House of Representatives, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, had been urging Biden-Harris administration advisers for months to deliver a stronger economic message, according to two people familiar with the discussions .

Cuellar and others believe their pleas, especially at the border, have gone unanswered, according to interviews with nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and senior aides.

In the November elections, Democrats lost the majority in the White House and the Senate. CNN has not yet predicted which party will control the House of Representatives. Republicans are increasingly optimistic about holding on to the House, although Democrats in the House of Representatives still believe they have a chance of gaining the majority.

Many battleground Democrats are now furious because they believe the The party has failed to speak clearly on the issues that matter to the working class – the voting bloc that once formed the core of the party’s base. CNN’s exit poll data shows that Trump won voters without a college degree over Harris by 14 points, 56% to 42%. Four years earlier, he won the group with a 2-point lead over Biden.

Some Democrats have criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy.

“Biden has mismanaged the border,” Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat who outperformed Harris in her rocking chair in Las Vegas, told CNN.

In Congress, Lee was among dozens of centrist Democrats who repeatedly spoke out against Biden’s border strategy and pushed through their own immigration reform bills. But Biden, she said, “kind of ignored it until this summer.”

Now Lee said Democrats need to think deeply about how to convince people in districts like hers to return to the party: “We need to have a fair reckoning.”

Senate Democrats, with Biden’s support, tried to pass a border security measure this year as part of a broader foreign aid package. The bill was negotiated on a bipartisan basis, but Trump attacked the measure and it failed on the floor. Still, swing district Democrats say any push for a border bill needed to happen well before February, just months before the election.

In Michigan, where Trump won the state by more than 79,000 votes and Republicans flipped a key House race, Rep. Debbie Dingell told CNN she knew Democrats were struggling to get a breakthrough economic message .

“I wasn’t as stunned as everyone else because I work in my district,” Dingell said. “I think we all need to do some soul searching.”

While Democrats struggle to understand the magnitude of Harris’ loss, there are some bright spots for candidates who have worked hard to distance themselves from the top. According to a party official, the Democrats in the House of Representatives performed five percentage points better than Harris in the toughest twenty races.

In New York, Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi — whose campaign focused heavily on overhauling the U.S. immigration system — held on to his rocking chair on Long Island even as voters in Nassau County switched 15 percent from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024.

In one district in western Wisconsin, Trump won the seat by about 8 points, while the Republican incumbent, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, only survived re-election by 2.7 points. Democrats believe that if Harris had simply performed as well as Biden in 2020, Democrats’ nominee Rebecca Cooke would have allayed the concern.

But Democrats say there is only so much they can do to address the immigration problem in their districts if the national party doesn’t make it a priority. And they say it’s not just about an inability to respond to attacks at the border: These Democrats argue the party has also failed to adequately respond to voters’ deep concerns about skyrocketing costs and cultural issues.

Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips faced scorn across the party this year when he tried to force a last-minute conversation about Biden’s unpopularity a year ago.

But within the party, he has long expressed concerns about the party’s weaknesses, including a trip to the border in 2019. In his first year in Congress, Phillips took a trip to McAllen, Texas, where he recalled was ‘shocked’ by the conditions of the storage facilities there.

“I remember trying so hard to draw the attention of my colleagues to that. But it was completely dismissed and irrelevant at the time,” said Phillips, who is retiring from Congress after his failed primary against Biden.

And it’s not just battleground Democrats who say they’ve sounded the alarm.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, the first gay Afro-Latino member of Congress, has watched Trump gain support among Latinos since 2020, even in his deep-blue district that includes the Bronx, amid public backlash against the rallying cry “defund the police ‘ of the extreme left. that summer.

Torres said the megaphone from the party’s left wing hampered Democrats’ ability to craft an immigration message that countered Republican attacks. He said it was “political malpractice” that the Biden administration was taking too long to respond to the migrant crisis.

“My main concern is that we as a party should stop listening to the extreme left, which is more representative of Twitch, TikTok and Twitter than of the real world. And start listening to the working class of color who feel increasingly alienated from the party,” he said.

Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long been a leader of the progressive movement and caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement after the election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has failed the working class would discover that the working class has abandoned them.”

To be clear, most Democrats in the House of Representatives remain committed to their party’s legislative priorities. Besides the border, there were few other areas that Democrats who spoke to CNN were willing to label as a policy failure. Instead, they said it was a failure to communicate their victories and prioritize the issues voters cared about most.

One major problem, several Democratic lawmakers said, is the widespread perception that the national party was more concerned with “culture war” issues than raising salaries.

As Trump and the Republican Party flooded the airwaves with anti-trans ads targeting children’s sports, national Democrats focused heavily on the issue of abortion, which remained popular with women across the country. But in many cases, there was no specific message for men flocking to Trump.

“We really have to be sensitive about how we approach the culture wars. We’ve taken out a lot of people that we can’t take out if we expect to be a national party,” said Rep. Scott Peters of California, who flipped a Republican seat to come to Congress and has long warned of Democrats’ losing message. in swing states.

Democrats in Congress have seen other warning signs that Trump is pulling working-class voters away from their party.

Former Congresswoman Cheri Bustos led the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2020 and saw firsthand how Trump lost, but the Republican Party still retained dozens of battleground seats in the House. Republicans once captured blue seats made up of mostly working-class voters and captured seats in South Florida.

With that in mind, Bustos went to a group of national Democrats this year with a plan to win over some of those voters in 2024.

“I had, in my opinion, a great proposal that I presented to, dare I say it, the national Democrats on a rural strategy,” Bustos said. She wanted to go to small towns in the middle of the country that had been ignored for years. But it never happened.

As for the Democratic Party’s reckoning this year, Bustos was blunt: “I honestly think it has to be a deep, deep, deep dive for the entire Democratic Party. I almost think we have to start all over again.”