MSNBC's Morning Joe: You know, Democrats really haven't moved beyond 2006

On Monday night, Congressional Democrats held a rally to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The Capitol Hill gathering was a tad embarrassing since the microphone at the podium didn’t work. MSNBC’s Mike Brzezinski said she agreed with what these Democrats were saying (she’s a liberal), but felt like this was not “where we needed to be.” She asked Politico’s Jake Sherman is there anything that could be gleaned from this? Sherman noted that these antics are more or less pretty tiring. The Democratic Party is in shambles and in the deep minority in Congress, and they’re operating from a 2006 playbook that he described as “frayed and tattered.”

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“I think we saw that last [Monday] night,” he said. “This party has not really moved on from 2006 and I can’t tell you how many Democrats that I talked to on Capitol Hill want change and want it now in the leadership on Capitol Hill,” he added.

Brzezinski’s Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough, brought it back to winning elections, noting that we’ve seen the Left go bananas over the Trump administration’s agenda. How does that help the Democrats come out of the wilderness? In other words, do these protests help them win back counties that went to Obama, but flipped for Trump in 2016? Brezeinski added that watching the protest, she felt Democrats were overreaching.

Former Vermont governor and DNC chair Howard Dean, who crafted the Democrats’ 50-state strategy, deflected from his party’s woes by focusing on the spike in young voter enthusiasm, along with an increase in awareness of the importance of institutions. Dean was alluding that while this isn’t an organized movement, it could bode well for Democrats in future elections.

Brzezinski asked Dean, “Were any future leaders of the Democratic Party on that stage last [Monday] night?”

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“Um—I think there probably were. I think where there’s a lot of younger—we need—the other problem is we need a whole new generation to come up and there’s a lots of good candidates out there,” replied Dean.

That’s not the most confident answer, Mr. Dean. And just say there were no future leaders on that stage. That was self-evident.

With over 1,000 Democratic seats lost at the state and federal levels under the Obama presidency, it’s safe to say that the Democratic Party is not in good shape. The sad thing is the road out of the wilderness is not hard to find. They just need to talk about job creation, pension protection, and lay off the political correctness and identity politics advocacy. That means talking to white working class voters again. Winning larger shares of the cities will not yield the dividends that the Democrats are looking for that are necessary to retake Congress. The GOP reigns supreme in the rural areas. That’s where the path out of the wilderness rests, but that also means talking to white working class voters again. People who like to hunt and shoot guns, are not college educated overall, and worry about paying the bills, not whether transgender Americans feel triggered about public restrooms. Given how the urban elite has taken over the agenda of the Left–and the inability to come to grips with why they lost in 2016–I doubt this outreach operation is on their docket.

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