As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, a prominent Democratic pollster and strategist emphasizes that her party must develop a new strategy to challenge the former and upcoming president effectively. “The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” Molly Murphy, a top pollster on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, emphasized in a presentation at the first meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee since the November election.
Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris—securing the popular vote and winning all seven critical battleground states—along with the GOP flipping the Senate and maintaining a slim majority in the House, has left Democrats scrambling for answers as they attempt to regain their footing in the political landscape. Murphy pointed to post-election polls indicating that most Americans approve of how the president-elect is managing his transition. She noted that Trump is expected to return to the White House next month with greater popularity than he had eight years ago when he first won the presidency, Fox News reported.
She pointed out that voters “give him a pass on the outrageous” comments Trump frequently makes because they approve of his management of the economy. Speaking on Friday, as DNC leaders gathered at a hotel near the U.S. Capitol, Murphy stated that the Democrats’ goal moving forward is to change that perception. “We want to focus on this term … and tell the story about how this term is worse and things are not going to be good for the American people,” Murphy said.
The Democrats’ message should be “Donald Trump does not care about you. He is going to screw you,” Murphy argued. “As a north star, I think we need to stay focused on … the economy and costs. A lot of people are expecting the price of milk to go back where it was,” Murphy noted. She went on to say that Democrats need to borrow a page from the GOP’s 2024 campaign playbook: “We can do what they did to us … even if the economy is stronger, costs are still going to be too high for people.” She went on to say that Democrats need to spotlight what she called unpopular parts of the Trump agenda, including “tax breaks for the wealthy” and “letting corporations drive up prices and making you pay for it.”
Trump never enacted ‘tax breaks for the wealthy’ as the cuts enacted during his first year in office benefited the vast majority of Americans. Also, lowering the corporate income tax on corporations led many to stay in the U.S. rather than move their headquarters to other nations where the corporate tax burden was less, such as Ireland.
Murphy also highlighted that Trump and Republicans made significant inroads with key segments of the Democratic Party’s base—young voters, Latinos, and Black voters—due in part to the economy, but also because of the Democrats’ “wonky” messaging. “A lot of times we’re talking about polices,” Murphy said, while Republicans have “culture conversations that create a connection between the party and the people that go beyond polices.” She argued that “these culture conversations that conservatives have been able to have in an organic way have been able to draw a connection that we know is not supported by policy … and we know that we have a lot of shared values with these working Americans and we need to find ways to have more authentic connection points there.”
