Fight, Fight, Fight

Kamala Harris lost because Democrats have no idea how to communicate their victories effectively and spend most of their time in a defensive crouch.

by Julie Roginsky

Hi, Banter family! I am so grateful to be a part of this community as we kick off 2025. I’m writing here twice a month and over at my own Substack newsletter, Salty Politics, at least five days a week. I look forward to getting to know you in the months ahead and welcome your thoughts/comments/complaints.

The first thing I want to share with you is that if Democrats want to compete, they need to learn how to fight.

I have been involved in countless campaigns over the past thirty years, so believe me when I tell you that there are two types of winning candidates: the ones who win because their supporters will follow them to battle and the ones who win because the other side has really messed up. A win is a win but one kind of victory brings the ability to shift our culture in meaningful ways, while the other is a short-term fix that can be easily reversed when a stronger opponent shows up the next time around.

Joe Biden won in 2020 because Trump really messed up. By November of 2016, 1,200 Americans were dying from COVID every day, the economy was in the tank and the sitting president was more unhinged than ever. Still, Biden did not create a movement that transformed his presidency into a cause, the way Trump has for Republicans. So, when the pandemic receded and the nation’s fiscal health improved, voters did not credit Biden for the win — or for the many ways in which he set the economy on course to thrive long after he departs the Oval Office. Instead, they went back to the guy who promised to upend the status quo — again.

Trump will, of course, not upend the status quo in ways that will benefit anyone but himself and the billionaires who have been flocking to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee. But he is a master communicator who does not care about norms or feelings, so he manages to convince enough voters that he is fighting the system on their behalf.

To win again, Democrats need to learn how to fight smarter and harder than Trump.

I don’t mean that we need to emulate the juvenile taunts, the threats, the lawlessness. I mean that we need to stop the Kumbaya sing-alongs and talk of bipartisanship. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) had it exactly wrong when he wrote in The New York Times last week that, “Only by working together to find compromise on parts of the president-elect’s agenda can we make progress for Americans who are clearly demanding change in the economy, immigration, crime and other top issues.”

Nope.

It is actually Democrats who have succeeded in improving the economy, immigration and crime. Under Biden, the United States had the lowest unemployment rate and highest real hourly wages since the Johnson Administration. Unlawful border crossings dropped to a level lower than they were when Trump left office, while deportations last year were higher than they were under Trump. It was Trump — and not Democrats — who killed a bipartisan immigration bill that would have addressed the crisis at the border. In 2024, violent crime again saw record decline.

Kamala Harris lost because Democrats have no idea how to communicate their victories effectively and spend most of their time in a defensive crouch, afraid to shatter the norms that voters repeatedly signal they want tossed out the window. She lost because for many decades, Democrats have let Republicans gaslight voters into believing that up is down and down is up, without effective pushback.

Why do Suozzi and some other Democrats harp “comprise” and “bipartisanship” and, worst of all, extend a hand to help a man who refers to his political opponents as “the enemy from within", “evil,” and “demonic?” Because it’s easier to do that than to learn how to fight.

Here is what a fighting Democratic Party looks like: it identifies our political adversaries, it calls them by their proper names, and it hammers them relentlessly until voters understand the contrast.

Do you write flowery op-eds or give anodyne floor speeches about “working together,” even as Trump and his band of billionaires works to hollow out the middle- and working-class in this country? No. You fight. That’s how you build a movement and a political party that is sustainable, that stands for something that voters want to get behind, that wins elections.

I, for one, am not inspired by politicians who talk about “working together to find compromise on parts of the president-elect’s agenda.” Politics is a zero-sum game, which means that someone has to lose for someone else to win. You don’t get a participation trophy. That may sound harsh but it is the truth.

Republicans get it —which is why they have won over and over again, why they were able to elect a twice-impeached felon whose election was certified on the fourth anniversary of a violent uprising he fomented, why this felon’s enablers are now chairing House and Senate committees in the majority.

Say what you will about Trump (and there is a lot to say) but he has built an effective movement. Tens of millions of Americans don’t just choose Trumpism as the lesser of two evils at the ballot box. They are believers and they have done such an effective job that in 2024, they turned the GOP into the big tent party, bringing in not just the white working class voters who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party for decades but an increasing number of Latino, Asian, Native American and Black voters.

For Democrats to become a party that can inspire a broad coalition to follow them to victory once again, they need to stand for something more than just compromise with a party that understands politics is a zero-sum game.

Julie Roginsky has spent decades in the political and media trenches where she has learned that the most important thing you can do is to communicate your position — authentically and forthrightly. She is a Democratic political consultant, former Fox News and CNBC contributor and now the editor of Salty Politics on Substack and the host of the Salty Briefing on YouTube.

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