Democrats need new playbook to confront Trump, Kamala Harris pollster tells party

As President-elect Trump gets ready to return to the White House, a leading Democratic pollster and strategist highlights that her party needs a new game plan to confront the former and soon-to-be future president.

“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” Molly Murphy, a top pollster on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, emphasized as she gave a presentation at the first meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee since last month’s election.

Trump’s convincing win over Harris — he captured the popular vote and swept all seven key battleground states — as well as the GOP flipping the Senate and holding on to their fragile majority in the House, has Democrats searching for answers as they now try to emerge from the political wilderness.

Murphy, pointing to post-election polls, said most Americans give the president-elect a thumbs up on how he’s handling his transition, and that Trump will return to the White House next month more popular compared to eight years ago, when he first won the presidency. 

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And she noted that voters “give him a pass on the outrageous” comments he continuously makes because they approve of his handling of the economy. 

Murphy, in her comments Friday as DNC leaders huddled at a hotel near the U.S. Capitol, said the Democrats’ mission going 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. 

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She said 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.”

And she added 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.” 

And she said the party needs to frame Trump’s proposed tariffs on key American trading partners “a sales tax on the American people that will drive up prices,” which was a line that Harris used on the campaign trail.

Murphy also spotlighted that Trump and Republicans made gains with key parts of the Democratic Party’s base – younger voters, Latinos, and Black voters because of 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.”

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Murphy 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.”

DNC chair Jaime Harrison complimented Murphy’s presentation. 

But, Harrison, who is not running for a second four-year term steering the national party committee, pointed to the next White House race and offered that the party should also target Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance.

“I think it will be a big error on our part if we focus all of our attention on Donald Trump and not JD Vance, particularly as we start to look at the 2028 race,” Harrison highlighted.