On Monday night, Congressional Democrats held a rally to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The Capitol Hill gathering was a tad embarrassing since the microphone at the podium didn’t work. MSNBC’s Mike Brzezinski said she agreed with what these Democrats were saying (she's a liberal), but felt like this was not “where we needed to be.” She asked Politico’s Jake Sherman is there anything that could be gleaned from this? Sherman noted that these antics are more or less pretty tiring. The Democratic Party is in shambles and in the deep minority in Congress, and they’re operating from a 2006 playbook that he described as “frayed and tattered.”
“I think we saw that last [Monday] night,” he said. “This party has not really moved on from 2006 and I can’t tell you how many Democrats that I talked to on Capitol Hill want change and want it now in the leadership on Capitol Hill,” he added.
Brzezinski's Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough, brought it back to winning elections, noting that we’ve seen the Left go bananas over the Trump administration's agenda. How does that help the Democrats come out of the wilderness? In other words, do these protests help them win back counties that went to Obama, but flipped for Trump in 2016? Brezeinski added that watching the protest, she felt Democrats were overreaching.
Former Vermont governor and DNC chair Howard Dean, who crafted the Democrats' 50-state strategy, deflected from his party's woes by focusing on the spike in young voter enthusiasm, along with an increase in awareness of the importance of institutions. Dean was alluding that while this isn’t an organized movement, it could bode well for Democrats in future elections.
Brzezinski asked Dean, “Were any future leaders of the Democratic Party on that stage last [Monday] night?”
“Um—I think there probably were. I think where there’s a lot of younger—we need—the other problem is we need a whole new generation to come up and there’s a lots of good candidates out there,” replied Dean.
That’s not the most confident answer, Mr. Dean. And just say there were no future leaders on that stage. That was self-evident.
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