Rep. Greg Casar:
I think the Democratic brand has been damaged.
In the past, people said that the number one thing they associated positively with the Democratic Party was that we are the party of working people. And that holds up in our data from the post-World War II era all up until close to around 2010, 2012.
And that’s when we started losing that part of our brand. And we have got to get back to that, because voters could disagree on a variety of cultural and social issues. I mean, we have got that in my own family. I’m sure you have got that in your own neighborhood around your Christmas or Thanksgiving table.
But back in the day, the way Democrats held the coalition together was to say, you might agree on this social issue or disagree on that one, but we’re all united behind a party that’s willing to stand up to the powerful in support of working people.
I saw this when I was a labor organizer before I was an elected official. I used to organize on construction sites, where you had immigrant Spanish-speaking workers on the same construction site as a fifth-generation Texan. We were bringing people together across race, across culture, across ideology, but everybody was fighting for a raise.
And when you have a Democratic Party that does the same thing, is fighting for a raise for working people, then people are willing, I think, to be a part of our big tent. And I think we have started to lose that, and we have got to regain that.
