Former Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel explained why he thinks the Democratic Party has lost touch with voters during a podcast interview Saturday.
Emanuel, who is considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, has called out his party in recent years for alienating voters by talking down to them and fixating on niche identity politics issues.
“We lost the plot,” he said in a snippet shown on social media from the “Fifth Column” podcast. “We as Democrats nationally, from ‘Latinx,’ to defunding the police, to ‘Police organizations are all racist,’ to bringing a set of cultural wars to our schools. We are on the losing side of those cultural wars. Full stop.”
“You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence?” he rhetorically asked. “You have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level.”
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“Well, they can just say, ‘We can do both,’” one co-host of the podcast said.
“You’ve proven you can’t, because you’ve permitted a 30-year-low in reading and math scores and nobody seems to be calling the whistle on this,” Emanuel said.
“We’ve lost the plot,” Emanuel repeated. “Because the party got un-anchored.”
He went on to argue that past successful Democratic presidents “anchored” themselves to middle-class values that reached a wide variety of voters. The Democratic Party, he said, “went from acceptance to advocacy,” and noted there is a huge difference between the two ideas.
“And I’ll just take one on that I shouldn’t. So, here goes,” he said. “I remember fighting for Title IX. The reason we are champions in women’s sports in the Olympics in soccer, hockey, is Title IX. Why would you undercut the premise of Title IX with the ability of trans men playing in women sports?”
“To me, it’s insane,” he continued. “You’re undermining one of the great accomplishments we as a country, but also spearheaded by the Democratic Party, Title IX! And we’re undercutting it!”
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Emanuel argued there were multiple peak moments in the first 25 years since the millennium, such as the Iraq War, which he said was waged on a lie, the 2008 financial crisis where banks were bailed out, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all of which had one key result.
In all those events, he said, the wealthy were able to stay afloat while others paid the price as their world dramatically changed. He said that, while many people simply wish to point the finger at President Donald Trump for bringing more rage to American politics, Trump merely rode the anger that was already there.
