For years, the Democratic Party has been in a rut. It just can’t seem to connect to the working class. Protecting workers is the solution. Not rolling back protections on queer people, and glorifying war criminals.

Few college students today remember the rural heartland of America turning out in droves for Obama in 2008, winning states like Indiana and Iowa. What did Obama do differently that in the past few years that newer candidates just can’t seem to replicate? 

Some hardline conservatives and moderate Democrats blame the rise of the “woke Left,” “the dangers of D.E.I.” and the infiltration of our school system.

The party seems to be in a bit of an identity crisis right now, for some reason, every time the conservatives say “You hate Israel, you’re poisoning us and flooding our borders.” The mainline Democrats go out of their way to either prove the Republicans wrong by agreeing on issues such as Israel and immigration, (Obama deported people, too) or dodging the questions, casting the concerns of queer voters, youth voters, and people of color to the side.

(For the record, there are hundreds of thousands of youth, queer, college age, Arab-American, and other POC voters who would appreciate a harder stance against Israeli war crimes.) 

Appealing to some imagined moderate, independent voter who would surely vote for the Democrats if they just weren’t so radical, but has no issue voting for an increasingly radicalized Republican Party isn’t working.

Since 2016, three presidential elections, and five midterm elections we have been in the same spot. Somehow, after all this time of appealing to this imagined moderate, the Democratic Party just can’t seem to get a grip on what really strikes at the core of America.

But it wasn’t always this way.

A time long before living memory prevails, when the economic state soared, the Democratic party passed measures in droves to provide stable, fixed income, ensure employers paid a decent wage, and as the decades went on, “tax-and-spend liberal” was the playbook of Democrats on the national stage. 

Even Republicans, such as Eisenhower, increased and maintained taxes on the wealthy, and spoke of a strong, progressive Republican Party, and that when the free market lets you down, Ol’ Uncle Sam will help you get back on your feet, after all, what’s the point of government? 

If not to act as a counterforce to companies whose main goal is profit, we need something that puts people first at the sake of profit, as opposed to the other way around.

But then, as any economist will tell you, there are good times, and there are bad. After decades of growth and prosperity in the wake of the Second World War, the 70s hit America like a phone book to the face. Suddenly, everything was slow. 

Over 40 years since the Great Depression. Who could even remember? 

The ones who caused it were all gone, the ones who endured it as adults were aging out of the voting pool, and the ones who grew up in it weren’t old enough at the time to know who to blame. 

In the midst of this, President Jimmy Carter, a hard working, honest, Christian Southerner, wound up the first president to have to tackle a truly struggling economy since before we had televisions, microwaves, and less than 20 constitutional amendments (We have 27 now. 28 if you count the ERA, but that’s a story for another time.) 

Farmers and Southerners aren’t famed for asking for help. It’s almost against their nature, so Carter asked Americans to take this economic stress in stride, use less gas, put on a warm sweater, and we can bear any storm if we continue to work, and learn to be okay with being uncomfortable. 

He lost the next election.

We have never learned to live with being uncomfortable. 

And then the Reagan Revolution happened: the 80s, the decade that brought us Heathers, Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally, and despite a struggling economy, Reagan kept the people happy- whether making enemies internationally, or just knowing how to talk to a group of people. 

Well, it kept certain people happy. 

In the 1960s, two kinds of Republicans existed. 

The New York City big business, Rockefeller Republicans, perhaps who we might call fiscally conservative, socially liberal. As long as we’re friendly to big business- everyone’s happy.

The other was the Western, Marlboro Man, rustic, cowboy, bootstrap pullin’, gun totin’, dippin’ Goldwater, the nuclear cowboy himself. The government’s primary purpose is defense. Everything else people can handle on their own.

The Democrats won in ‘64.

In a way, Reagan embodied a certain synthesis of these two, which also represented how different the country had become- a modern, big city Republican, from out West, with enough powerful and rich men in his pocket from his time in Hollywood, and then as governor, and enough rural, Midwestern charm, and a helping of having starred in Westerns during their twilight years, who took the country back. 

The 1990s. The Clinton Years. “New Democrats,” (Ya liked Republicans so much the past decade? Well, we’re more like Republicans now), apparently after 12 years post-Carter, Americans were looking out again for a Southern governor who believed people could help themselves, funny how things change. 

The only difference was that any ability Clinton had to use the government to help people, he wouldn’t take. What put Carter in a bind so long ago was now a route freely taken by the man who declared “The era of big government is over.”

And then decades of “pro-business” rule caught up with America in 2008. Tired, sluggish, fighting two wars, natural disasters, market disasters all abound. And along comes Obama.

Not exactly progressive, but went to the right places, and made enough vague platitudes to win over working class voters.

Now, let’s talk local for a second. Harris did not visit Louisiana. Now this might make sense, Louisiana hasn’t been blue since 1996. But, Louisiana still has a strong Democratic voter base, which was energized in 1992 and 1996. 

Nonetheless, Louisiana voted for a Democrat for governor as recently as 2019. There is a strong, and strengthening youth moment, evidenced by the fact that the Louisiana Republicans four amendments failed earlier this year, and there are three young Democrats chapters, in Baton Rouge, the River parishes, and Northwest Louisiana. There’s not even a current chapter in New Orleans, the Democratic stronghold, how’s that for grassroots campaigning? 

And yet, Harris visited Southern states, she visited Georgia, similarly to Louisiana in the past 15 years, has a blue center, a red periphery, but still counties and parishes that go blue every year. And both states voted blue statewide in the last ten years. While Georgia is much bigger, Georgia is also, and in my view more importantly to the Democrats, much wealthier than Louisiana. 

When candidates, people, movements, and the Democratic party work in Louisiana, Louisiana works for the Democratic party. If you only visit places that matter financially to a campaign, the campaign is bound to fail.

In the past 20 years, they haven’t even needed to say the right things. If they say close enough in the places they’ve got to go, we would’ve had a third Obama term.

The solution here is simple: be pro-worker.

Strengthen the National Labor Relations Board, raise the minimum wage, tie it to inflation for gods sake, re-regulate housing, banking, transportation, and everything we had regulated for so long before we were in the stranglehold in which we find ourselves.

Push for unions, visit unions, talk with union leaders, that’s how the base was made in the Blue Wall in the first place. There need to be no more excuses, no more explanations, if rhetoric is strong, and action follows, people vote. 

The Democratic Party controlled the House from 1955-1995. The people’s house. The lower chamber. 

The legislative body that since 1788 has been elected by voters, instead of by the state legislature like the Senate was until the turn of the 20th century. It was only in the first two years of Clintonian New Democratic policy that Gingrich led the Republican Revolution, and we lost the House. 

‘Tax the rich’ is not an unpopular slogan. 

But Democrats run from it. It’s not that the vast majority of Republican voters keep thinking that they’ll be millionaires soon enough to be taxed with the rest of the owning class, it’s that for the past 30 years, every time the Republicans run right, the Democrats follow.

Republicans won the house in ‘94, then in ‘96, Clinton declared “The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to when people were left to fend for themselves.” See the problem? Saying “we cannot go back to when people were left to fend for themselves,” but shrinking the government, is a contradiction. The government, of, by, and for the people fails to work for the people anymore, and it has been the Democrats playbook for decades.

Republicans for the past two decades are busy playing culture war against “political correctness,” “woke,” “DEI,” and “cancel culture” and stirring up the emotions of the people. 

Appeal to logic. Don’t just be the alternative, the lesser evil. Don’t make another four years out of “the other guy is worse.” Logically, we have a progressive tax system. Those at the top get taxed more, true since time immemorial, quite literally before anyone alive in America can remember.

We have a social safety net that picks people up, that supports our seniors and those who can’t work. That fosters hope, and encourages, in the face of growing monopolies everywhere, putting people before profit. It is there. Fund it. 

As long as the Republicans keep playing culture war and Democrats keep playing catch up to the same old attacks, (There’s an apt Charlie Brown- Lucy football reference here.) You will continue to lose. 

Let me demonstrate.

“You’re too woke.” Lucy winds up the football.

“No we’re not! No we’re not! We’re not woke!” Charlie Brown runs like the wind. 

Flat on his back. Football still in her hand. You’ve played the game, and every time you play this game, you lose. 

2016, 2024, countless midterms that led to Congress’ that filibustered common sense policies and clawed away decades of precedent. As long as you’re playing their game, you will continue to lose. 

This is the way forward – be pro-worker. Small businesses will adjust, the economy will adjust. If you can’t imagine a higher minimum wage, go back and read up on the fight for a minimum wage. Or the previous times it’s been fought to be raised. It’s the same argument. 

There are ways to win, still.

Hopefully, it’s not too late.

Now, in all honesty, this opinion piece was written by a 21-year-old college student from a nice, Republican, north Texas suburb, attending a liberal arts college in the only parish in Louisiana that went majority to Harris in 2024, but I would be incomplete in this analysis if I didn’t mention that the most politically involved member, and only Democrat, of my family was my grandmother Lorraine Gremillion (1932-2025). 

She was a working class New Orleanian who grew up in the 6th ward. She voted in every election, local, state, and national from 1956 to 2022, campaigned for governors, stayed involved in her community, and voted based on the candidate, not the Party. 

As she would tell me, she was no zealot, no sheep, and part of no demagogue. There was a time when she was young, and impulsive, and even voted for the Republican candidate for president, once, in 1956, for Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower.