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Democrats Have a Problem (And It Isn’t Trump)
Myopic focus on Donald Trump is leaving progressives partially blind.
“Democrats are lawyering themselves into political oblivion: Time to change that,” lobbed Matthew Wollin from the left-leaning quarter of Salon on March 1, 2025. “As a lawyer, I understand the Democratic Party all too well. That’s honestly not a good thing.”
“As a lawyer, you also always put the focus on the opposition,” remarked Wollin. “If you talk too much about your own client, that might encourage people to look too closely and begin to notice their flaws. So you make your client’s story all about the person across the aisle: It’s hardly ever about ‘my client did good’ and almost always about ‘my opponent did bad.’ That’s exactly what the Democrats did last year, seeking to undermine the opposition’s case (‘Here are all the reasons Trump is bad’) instead of building their own case (‘Here are all the reasons Harris is good’).”
No, argued longtime Democratic Party analyst James Carville, as reported by Griffin Eckstein for Salon in January: “Dems must go on the offensive with a populist agenda under Trump.”
“We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for,” Carville argued. “Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe…