A former Democratic senator has issued a warning to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President Joe Biden that the Democrat brand has become “toxic.”
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota admits that brand in rural areas is “so toxic” that any Democrats that are left have given up trying to fight for the party.
Some Democrat voters say they have even removed bumper stickers and other political signage from public view that identify them as supporters of President Biden.
“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Democrat voter Tim Holohan, an accountant from rural Pennsylvania.
“I feel like we’re on the run.”
Heitkamp said: “Democrats have the House, they have the Senate, the presidency, but it’s an unstable majority.
“By that, I mean, the narrowest kind, making it difficult to advance ideas and build coalitions.
“We’re letting Republicans use the language of the far left to define the Democratic Party, and we can’t do that.
“The trend lines in rural America are very, very bad.
Now, the brand is so toxic that people who are Democrats, the ones left, aren’t fighting for the party.”
Retiring Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee said earlier:
“It’s hard to sink lower than we are right now.
“You’re almost automatically a pariah in rural areas if you have a D after your name.”
The national Democrats are well aware of the problem because their own polls show how unpopular they are.
From Politico:
Democrats’ own research shows that some battleground voters think the party is “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
And the party’s House campaign arm had a stark warning for Democrats: Unless they more forcefully confront the GOP’s “alarmingly potent” culture war attacks, from critical race theory to defunding the police, they risk losing significant ground to Republicans in the midterms.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is recommending a new strategy to endangered members and their teams, hoping to blunt the kinds of GOP attacks that nearly erased their majority last election and remain a huge risk ahead of November.
In presentations over the past two weeks, party officials and operatives used polling and focus group findings to argue Democrats can’t simply ignore the attacks, particularly when they’re playing at a disadvantage.
A generic ballot of swing districts from late January showed Democrats trailing Republicans by 4 points, according to the polling.
It wasn’t all bleak, though: The data showed that Democrats could mostly regain the ground lost to Republicans if they offered a strong rebuttal to the political hits.
Democrats aren’t just losing votes in rural areas. They’ve been effectively ostracized from rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the nation’s political landscape. My story: https://t.co/Hsrfs49Q0p
— Steve Peoples (@sppeoples) February 17, 2022
‘The Brand Is So Toxic’: Dems Fear Extinction in Rural U.S. https://t.co/MLMjXlyf8w Workers, truckers, farmers, dairy people, forestry, blue collar hard working Americans realize that now Dem Party is simply Pravda West+East. And Hil is a shill while Joe is a puppet.
— Kenneth Glenn Koons (@KoonsGlenn) February 17, 2022
