Returning from my family’s annual vacation to the Jersey Shore last August, I was struck by the number of Trump flags and signs we saw driving north. If I had a nickel for every piece of Harris-Walz signage I saw, I’d be well short of the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike. All the enthusiasm was for MAGA.
As Democrats prepare to pick a Democratic National Committee chair early next year, they need to find a way to reclaim their hold on places like the small towns that dot the Jersey Shore and points north, not to mention the big cities the people who vacation there come from: primarily, New York, Philadelphia and Washington.
If I had a nickel for every piece of Harris-Walz signage I saw, I’d be well short of the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike. All the enthusiasm was for MAGA.
Trump did better in those and many other cities, which are usually blue redoubts. He did better in the suburbs, too. On the whole, Donald Trump only lost New Jersey to Kamala Harris by 6 percentage points — a stunning achievement, considering that in 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney here by 17 points. Trump also had a relatively strong showing in deep blue Maryland; he even won a (very small) swath of Manhattan.
“It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states,” Josh Barro wrote after the election in The Atlantic, after describing what he saw as a sad state of affairs in his home base of New York. “The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem.”
Cue the red siren emoji. Democrats have grown weak in the very places where they were supposed to be strongest: big, coastal cities and the suburbs that ring them. Which is why, as they prepare to select the next chair of the DNC, they should put aside worries about the Midwest and the Sun Belt and instead elect someone from one of those cities that suddenly got worryingly Trumpy.
I am thinking specifically of Max Rose, the former U.S. congressman whose district included Staten Island, by far the most conservative of New York’s five boroughs. Rose is reportedly looking to chair the DNC, which will hold an election on Feb. 1. There are several fine candidates already in the mix, including some likely with more institutional backing than Rose, who lost his seat to Nicole Malliotakis in 2020 and has been in private industry since. Still, his political outlook is one worth paying attention to, unless Democrats want Connecticut to go the way of Mississippi (yes, Trump did better across Connecticut, too, as well as 75 cities and towns in neighboring Massachusetts).
Rose is a combat veteran who went to Wesleyan University, arguably one of the most liberal of America’s elite schools. But he talks more like a Brooklyn native than someone trying to impress his postmodern theater study group. Short, bald and given to cursing, he looks like he’d have your back in a bar fight. That’s refreshing for a party that podcaster Mike Pesca has described as the electoral version of a human resources department.
During the presidential campaign, Harris put out a raft of policies to entice Black men, Latino men and other groups. She had fixes for housing costs and food prices. It was like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Warren Has a Plan for That” shtick, except less wonky and less ambitious.
Why didn’t it work? Because voters don’t care about plans. “One of the hopes is that the Democratic Party will begin to understand that voting is not always an act of self-interest, but also an act of self-expression,” Rose told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a recent interview. “And if we completely ignore that element of decision making, we’ll continue to fall short.”
Why didn’t it work? Because voters don’t care about plans.
Rose went on to diagnose what I think is the Democrats’ main problem: “We have the country largely unified around what we’re doing, but not feeling like they’re emotionally, culturally and psychologically aligned with where are as people.” Hence the huge “Take America Back” flags flying from the expensive, well-outfitted boats at the Stone Harbor marina, or the Trump-Vance bumper stickers on tank-sized SUVs barreling down the Garden State Parkway.
In 2018, Rose defeated Rep. Dan Donovan, a Republican, by casting himself as a practical centrist. “He didn’t fight a culture war; he talked about oppressively long commuting times and the opioid crisis,” The New York Times noted approvingly after his win. Imagine that: a politician who remembers legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local. No one cares about your plans to save democracy if you don’t have a plan to fix potholes.
Rose isn’t the only one who gets this. Last month, the Times interviewed Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who defended her seat in an otherwise red part of Washington State. “I just refused to let this race be nationalized,” Gluesenkamp Perez told The Times. “It’s not about the message. It’s about my loyalty to my community. The messenger is the message in a lot of ways. My awareness of my community has been durable, and it’s reflective in my vote record. That is a huge asset.”
Gluesenkamp Perez also recounted an episode when, during a party at the vice presidential residence, Harris brushed her off. Democrats would be wise to avoid the same mistake. “How Did Democrats Become the Party of Elites?” wondered the American University professor Leonard Steinhorn, and that was in 2017. Since then, Democrats have become ever more rarified in their thinking and messaging, in the issues they decide to highlight and the candidates they decide to boost. Too many of the party’s leading lights seem like they’d be more comfortable in a Princeton lecture hall than an Asbury Park clam shack.
In 2020, Rose faced a tough race against Malliotakis, a Republican member of the state legislature. At the time, New York was reeling from coronavirus lockdowns and months of protests. Rose cast himself as a pro-police, pro-order candidate, and it seemed to be working. “Run for f—ing mayor right now. Right f—ing now,” one Staten Islander urged him, in a reflection of how well he understood what ailed the city. But it wasn’t enough; Malliotakis won with surprising ease.
Still, Rose had the right idea then, and he has the right idea now. Democrats “have got themselves into a bubble where they’re pleasing varied interest groups and so that they think they’re doing a good job,” Rose told Palmeri. Catering to progressive activist groups has made the party “less electorally competitive,” he added.
Being a New Yorker is usually a disadvantage when it comes to national politics — but it could be an advantage in 2025, as the migrant crisis, policing and housing affordability continue to be at the forefront of the national conversation. Democrats need to show that they can drive that conversation, instead of merely playing defense against frequently dishonest but nevertheless effective Republican attacks.
Otherwise, Fox News will just keep running reels of homeless encampments in San Francisco and Los Angeles, making the case against Democrats without Democrats saying a word. The party does not need to abandon its compassion toward immigrants, transgender people and others. But it does need to show it can govern.
