The 2024 election made it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is in need of reform if it hopes to compete in future elections.
More specifically, this must be a total overhaul of the party’s approach to how it campaigns, the candidates it recruits, the policies it advances, and importantly, who leads the Democratic National Committee.
Put another way, the party must break from its recent past, which saw power concentrated in progressives and the interest groups they dominate. That approach has steered the party too far left and out of step with mainstream voters, including core Democratic voters.
To be sure, the 2024 election was not just a blip, but the confirmation of a trend plaguing the Democratic Party for nearly a decade. Democrats have been hemorrhaging support among key voting blocs since 2016, particularly Hispanic voters, working-class, and non-college-educated voters.
Indeed, eight years ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won Hispanic voters by a 38-point margin (66 percent to 28 percent), voters making less than $50,000 by 12 points (53 percent to 41 percent), and lost non-college educated voters by 7 points (44 percent to 51 percent).
In the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris won Hispanic voters by just 5 points, while losing voters making under $50,000 (50 percent to 48 percent), and Trump expanded his margin with non-college-educated voters, winning them by 13 points.
Clearly, core parts of the Democratic base are abandoning the party. If Democrats hope to stem this outflow of support and remain politically viable, a good first step to take would be selecting Rahm Emanuel to lead the party into the future.
Emanuel is reportedly considering a run for the DNC’s top spot. He has previously served as an advisor to former President Bill Clinton, an Illinois congressman, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, chief of staff to former President Barack Obama, and Mayor of Chicago. He is now Biden's ambassador to Japan.
It may seem counterintuitive to elect a DNC leader who has spent the last four decades in Democratic politics at a time when the party needs true change. But Emanuel has repeatedly proven that he can usher in turning points.
He has a history of building coalitions from the center and running effective campaigns. Emanuel’s “aggressive, methodical, operational” style, in the words of former Rep. Steve Israel, would be a significant boost to the Democratic Party.
Further, Emanuel has done this before. He successfully rebranded his party as DCCC chair from 2004 to 2006, and under his leadership, the party delivered Republicans what then-President George Bush called “a thumping” in the 2006 midterms.
Reflecting on his time working with Emanuel in Congress, Israel noted that in 2004, he watched as Emanuel developed a strategy and recruited candidates geared to address voters’ concerns.
By 2006, Emanuel had built such an impressive operation that in that year’s midterms, Democrats made a net 31-seat gain, flipping the House of Representatives.
As Israel, Ezra Klein and Nate Silver all noted recently, 2004 is in many ways a perfect parallel to 2024 in that it finds Democrats at a crossroads following brutal electoral losses and the party needing to reinvent itself in order to win in the future.
Speaking with the New York Times’ Brett Stephens recently, Emanuel recognized that former President Clinton was successful largely because he moved to the center to take back the issues of crime, immigration and welfare back from Republicans.
Stephens noted that this approach “required Clinton to pick at least as many fights with his party’s left as he picked against Republicans.” This is exactly what the larger Democratic Party must do, and what Emanuel would bring to the role as DNC leader.
Emanuel can be aggressive at times according to Israel, who described him as, “bare-knuckled, sharp-elbowed.” Then again, President-elect Donald Trump has won two elections campaigning as a bully, and Israel — correctly — believes Emanuel’s style is perfectly suited to “unsettle” Trump as head of the DNC.
And yet, for now, it's not Trump and Republicans who are unsettled by Emanuel, rather it’s the left wing of his own party. Progressives have mobilized against Emanuel and his brand of pragmatic — winning — politics.
Prominent progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) chief of staff, have slammed even the notion of Emanuel leading the DNC due to his “neoliberal centrism” and status as part of the “elite.” And Jonathan Cohn, policy director at one progressive interest group, derided it, asking “How is this not a sick joke?”
These criticisms are sorely misguided, and putting leftist ideological opposition over political pragmatism is a significant reason Democrats are in the situation they now find themselves in.
In his closing statements to Brett Stephens, Emanuel quipped, “I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.”
That attitude is currently lacking — and sorely needed — within a Democratic Party that finds itself at a monumental crossroads.
Its defeat in the 2024 elections and continued erosion in support among the party’s base can rightly be called a crisis, and to paraphrase Emanuel himself — by way of Winston Churchill — you never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Electing Emanuel to lead the DNC would be Democrats’ best bet to take advantage of their current crisis, to break from their recent past and rediscover their winning ways.
Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant and the founder and partner at Schoen Cooperman Research. His latest book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”
