The impressive victory of incoming Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI) offers revealing clues about where Democrats went wrong in this year’s election – and she isn’t pointing the finger at “woke” politics, according to a new analysis.
McDonald Rivet, who outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in her Michigan congressional race, won her fiercely competitive district by nearly 7 points in a political climate that teetered toward Republicans. Voters in her district voted for her and Donald Trump by a margin of 7 percent.
And Democrats should take notes at how McDonald Rivet managed to pull off her decisive win, according to an op-ed by MSNBC opinion writer and editor Zeeshan Aleem, who said he conducted a “refreshing” discussion with the incoming freshman lawmaker about what she did right.
“We focused continuously — almost exclusively — on pocketbook issues, on getting more money in people’s pockets,” McDonald Rivet told Aleem. “I spent a lot of time on TV looking directly into the camera and talking about how I worry about the same things.”
In other words, she kept “a laser focus on people’s perceived experience of the economy,” Aleem told readers.
He added that the Democrat’s second piece of advice was to refrain from using “wonky language.”
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“Democrats need to get better at conceiving and delivering policies that have vivid, tangible payoffs for working people,” the columnist wrote. He wrote in his op-ed published Friday that he wished Harris “had taken that ethos more seriously.”
Instead, he wrote, the vice president “struggled to clearly answer questions about her vision on the election’s No. 1 policy issue in a way that made working people feel seen.”
Finally, McDonald Rivet’s electoral win offered one more key takeaway for Aleem.
“Defending democracy is important, but you can’t lead with it,” he wrote.
“I spent almost zero time talking about the state of the democracy,” she said in the interview. “Let me just be really clear. Of course it’s important. And there are things that we need to worry about. But the very first thing we have to do is to commit ourselves to an agenda that makes it so everybody can thrive.”
Aleem concluded his op-ed by writing that Trump’s economic record overshadowed any acts of misconduct and threats to democracy Trump was facing in the eyes of many voters. While it “says something frightening about the American public’s commitment to our founding ideals,” Aleem added: “You’ve got to read the room and you don’t win by complaining about the rules.”
