Democrats Need to Stop Lecturing Trump Voters

There’s a romantic idea about American elections: Democrats make their case, Republicans make theirs, and the American people decide. But that’s not what really happened in 2024. Not even close. What actually happened was a failure of engagement—a slow abandonment, over the past decade, of entire swaths of this country by the Democratic Party. We stopped showing up. We stopped listening. And in doing so, we alienated voters who could have been with us—who wanted to be with us—but weren't given a reason to stick around.

I’m not writing this because I’m mad at those voters, even though I’ve struggled with their choices. I’m writing this because I love this country—and I know we can do better. Democrats have a real shot to win back the people we’ve lost. But it won't happen by lecturing them. It won't happen by acting smug. It'll happen when we show up, shut up, listen, and offer them something real that improves their lives.

You Can't Shame People Into Voting for You

I don’t understand how people I love—my own family, some of my closest friends—could vote for someone like Donald Trump. To me, he's unqualified, cruel, unempathetic, incompetent. I see right through the bullshit he tries to sell. And it hurts to watch people I care about support him.

But what hurts just as much is watching Democrats respond to those voters with contempt. We've gotten way too comfortable writing people off—calling them stupid, racist, irredeemable—and every time we do, we push them further away.

This isn’t about hurt feelings. It’s about survival. Most voters—whether in cities, suburbs, or small towns—are struggling to survive in a system that feels rigged against them. A healthy democracy, a healthy economy, a healthy society doesn’t cough up someone like Trump. It sure as hell doesn’t elect him president twice. That’s not just a voter problem. That’s a societal problem. It’s a problem with both political parties and our institutions that have allowed too many to fall behind. And that's on everybody who works in this space.

And it's worse than just blaming them. It's mocking them. I keep hearing Democrats say, "Well, sometimes you have to let a kid touch the hot stove to learn." Okay. Maybe. I’ve got a kid, so I get it. But what are we doing once they burn their hand? Are we offering help—or are we standing there, smug, watching them suffer?

Too often, it's the latter. We’re not acting like neighbors. We’re being judgmental jerks.

We have to stop treating politics like we’re running the country’s HR department. We’re not. We’re supposed to be the people who show up when shit gets real—the ones who bring water when the house is on fire. "I told you so" has never won a single argument in the history of any relationship. (I'm married. Trust me.)

What wins people over is compassion. What wins is someone saying, "I'm sorry you got burned. That shouldn’t have happened. I’m here to help. Let’s figure this out together."

Elections aren’t about who we like. They’re about who people trust to fight for them in an increasingly chaotic world. And right now, too many people—including ones we used to depend upon most—don’t believe that’s us.

Here’s How We Win Them Back.

We’ve spent too much time pushing people away. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s been screwing them over in plain sight—and they’re starting to notice. They might not be screaming it from the rooftops yet, but it's there, underneath it all: the frustration, the betrayal, the disappointment. You can feel it if you bother to listen.

Donald Trump isn’t helping people pay their bills. He isn’t helping them buy homes, raise families, or feel safe. He’s not fixing their lives. He’s too busy performing for the Internet and putting money in his pocket through corruption and grift. And a lot of people—normal people, working people—are waking up to the fact that none of this shit is making their lives any better.

Trump’s underwater on the economy. He’s underwater on immigration. He’s underwater on almost every major issue he ran on. We have a huge opening—but only if we’re smart enough and humble enough to take it. And that starts by recognizing the truth: we alienated people, we didn’t deliver for them in the last four years, and now it’s on us to go back and earn their trust.

We have to show up again. In the places we abandoned. In the states and the towns Democrats wrote off a decade ago. In rural counties, in working-class neighborhoods, in the online spaces too many people sneer at. We have to go there. Stay there. Build real, lasting, local trust—not just throw up a few TV ads before an election and hope for the best. Politics is about presence. It's about being there before people even know they need you.

And once we’re there, we need to stop playing defense.

Instead of getting sucked into every dumb culture war the Republicans cook up, we should be flipping the conversation around: What's the role of government? How do we build a country that works for regular people? What are we for? Is this creating jobs? Is it improving your life? If it’s not making life better for people, why the hell are we even talking about it?

And we have to change how we talk to people.

If you’re thinking about running for president in 2028 and you can’t sit down for three hours with Joe Rogan’s audience—and talk about literally anything—you’re not the right candidate for this moment in these mediums. Period. (Don’t take that as criticism of Harris who I personally believe would have done fine on Rogan.)

We’ve got to stop acting like it’s beneath us to engage with messy audiences or take risks. We’ve got to stop pretending that the people you may find "problematic" aren’t worth fighting for too. Because they are. They're still listening. They're still looking for someone to give a damn about their lives. And if it's not us, it’s going to be someone else.

Democrats love to talk about building coalitions—and when we do it right, it's powerful. But right now, we’re leaving too many people out of that conversation. We roll out plans for Black voters, Latino voters, LGBTQ+ voters—and we should. But where’s the plan for the working-class white dudes who are angry, struggling, and spiraling into a world of MAGA hate? Where’s the plan for the young men of every race who feel lost and alone and isolated? Where’s the plan for rural voters or people living in small towns where the loss of American manufacturing has destroyed their community?

As one of the founders of White Dudes for Harris, I know how uncomfortable this idea makes a lot of Democrats. White men in particular have had outsized power historically. That’s undeniable. But today, a lot of them are getting crushed in this economy by corrupt billionaires—and to an under 30 white man who is getting screwed in this economy, what do they care about history like that? If we’re not offering them anything, we shouldn’t be surprised when they find someone else who will—even if that someone else is lying to their faces.

And when we talk to people, we have to stay laser-focused. Jobs, housing, health care, safety. Survival. Dignity. A future.

We also need to get real about the fact that we’ve screwed some things up. We let cultural posturing replace real work. We spent way too much time preaching to the choir and pretending it was organizing. We took positions on issues like immigration and crime that didn’t make any God damn sense—and ran people out of the party with purity tests that don’t understand how to build governing coalitions in this country. We got too proud to knock on doors in places that didn’t vote for us. We convinced ourselves we were right instead of convincing voters we were fighting for them.

And it’s cost us—badly.

Just look at what happened with Kamala Harris. She gained a little ground with young white men in this last election compared to Biden—but she lost ground with young Black and brown men. She even slipped a little with Black women. A lot of that was inflation, sure. But a lot of it was about trust and connection. People felt vulnerable. Pissed off. Ignored. They didn’t believe we were fighting for them anymore, and Kamala didn’t have enough time to actually convince people she was given the position she was put in by Biden.

If Republicans had nominated someone like Nikki Haley instead of a poor candidate like Trump (and yes, I think he ran an awful campaign in 2024), I honestly think they may have won in a generational landslide. In some ways we got lucky.

That’s not on them. That’s on us.

We left. We stopped fighting. A lot of Democrats won’t even go on Fox News! We made the mistake of thinking it was voters' job to come to us instead of our job to go to them.

Now we have a second chance.

But only if we’re ready to fight like hell to earn it back.

The Good News? We Still Have Time.

The bad news is, we blew it. We stopped showing up. We stopped fighting for some of the people who needed us most and now they’re getting hurt. And we let the other side fill the vacuum with bullshit and fear and lies.

The good news is, it’s not too late.

People are waking up. They’re hurting. They’re looking for someone who actually gives a shit about their lives—and they’re not finding it from Trump, or the billionaires, or the corrupt operatives running today’s Republican Party. They’re still looking. And if we’re smart, if we’re humble, if we’re willing to get off our asses and fight for them, we can be the ones who show up.

But only if we stop lecturing and start listening.

Only if we stop sneering and start building.

Only if we start acting like neighbors again—and not like we’re better than the people we're supposed to be fighting for.

Because at the end of the day, politics isn’t about who wins an argument on Twitter. It’s about who shows up when your life’s on fire. It’s about who brings a bucket of water. It’s about showing up.

And people outside our party are showing us the way: We are currently witnessing the emergence of a grassroots national protest movement that is focused on defeating fascism and is bringing together an ideologically diverse group of people—and it has largely grown without Democratic Party support. That’s proof that bringing people together is still possible, and that the appetite for solutions is as great as it’s ever been.

We’ve still got time to get this right.

But not much.

Let’s get to work.