Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
WASHINGTON, DC – How President-elect Trump prepares to return to the White House, a prominent Democratic pollster and strategist is stressing that his party needs a new game plan to take on the former and future president.
“The playbook of 2025 cannot be the playbook of 2017,” stressed Molly Murphy, a top pollster for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, as she delivered a presentation at the first meeting of the Democratic National Committee executive committee since last month’s election.
Trump’s landslide victory over Harris – he captured the popular vote and swept seven key battleground states – as well as the GOP flipping the Senate and holding on to its fragile majority in the House, makes the Democrats look for answers as they now try to climb out of the political wilderness.
Murphy, pointing to post-election polls, said most Americans rate the president-elect on how he is handling his transition and that Trump will return to the White House next month more popular than eight years ago. when he won for the first time. the presidency
THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE EXPLAINS THE PARTY’S 2026 GAME PLAN
Trump arrives to speak at an election night celebration at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 6, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
And he noted that voters “give him a pass on the outrageous comments” he continually makes because they approve of his handling of the economy.
Murphy, in remarks Friday as DNC leaders gathered at a hotel near the U.S. Capitol, said Democrats’ mission going forward is to change that perception.
“We want to focus on this term … and tell the story about how this term is worse and things are not going to be good for the American people,” Murphy said.
The Democrats’ message should be “Donald Trump doesn’t care about you. He’s going to screw you over,” Murphy argued. “As the North Star, I think we need to focus on… the economy and costs.“
“A lot of people are waiting for the milk price to go back to where it was,” Murphy noted.
TRUMP’S ALLIES TURN UP THE HEAT ON HOLDOUT GOP SENATORS
He said Democrats need to borrow a page from the GOP 2024 campaign playbook: “We can do what they did to us…even if the economy is stronger, the costs will still be too high for people.”
And she added that Democrats need to highlight what she called unpopular parts of Trump’s agenda, including “tax cuts for the rich” and “allowing corporations to raise prices and make you pay.”
The executive committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) meets for the first time since the December 13, 2024 presidential election in Washington, DC (Fox News/Paul Steinhauser)
And he said the party must frame Trump’s proposed tariffs on key U.S. trading partners as “a sales tax on the American people that will drive up prices,” which was a line Harris used during the campaign
Murphy also noted that Trump and Republicans made gains with key parts of the Democratic Party base — younger, Latino and black voters — because of the economy, but also because of the “disturbed” messages of the democrats
“A lot of times we’re talking about policy,” Murphy said, while Republicans have “cultural conversations that create a connection between the party and the people that goes beyond policy.”
THE CHAIR OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY THE MAIN OFFERS ADVICE “INCOMMODIES”
Murphy argued that “these cultural conversations that conservatives have been able to have in an organic way have been able to make a connection that we know is not supported by politics … and we know that we have a lot of shared values with these working Americans and we have to find ways to have more authentic points of connection.”
Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance, Republican of Ohio, joins Trump during an election night celebration at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 6, 2024. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison applauded Murphy’s presentation.
But Harrison, who is not running for a second four-year term leading the party’s national committee, pointed to the upcoming race for the White House and offered that the party should also focus. Vice President Elect Senator JD Vance.
“I think it will be a big mistake on our part if we focus all of our attention on Donald Trump and not on JD Vance, especially as we start to look at the 2028 race,” Harrison said.
The DNC meeting came as Republican National Committee Speaker Michael Whatley said Trump would play a “significant” role in supporting Republican candidates.
Whatley argued that “as we move forward in this next election cycle, the fundamentals will remain the same” during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Thursday.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley is interviewed by Fox News Digital at RNC headquarters in Washington DC on December 12, 2024. (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
“We have to make sure that we’re building our state parties, that we’re building our ground game, we’re building our electoral integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get these candidates in the primaries the 26. , that we will be able to take them to the finish line”, he stressed.
But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the following mid-term elections. And Trump, who was a turnout mogul, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
Whatley said that while he won’t be a candidate, “President Trump will be a very important part of this because at the end of the day what we have to do is keep the House, keep the Senate so we can finish his term and his agenda.”
And Whatley predicted that “Donald Trump will be very active in the Republican campaign. And his agenda is the agenda we’re going to deal with.”
GO HERE TO FIND OUT WHAT RNC CHAIRMAN WHATLEY SAID ABOUT THE 2028 GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION
