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The New York Times interviewed Elissa about her vision for the Democratic Party and her message to other elected Democrats on what it will take for us to win back the American people.
It’s an important message, so we wanted to share a lengthier excerpt of it with you below. It would mean a lot to Elissa if you would take a few minutes to read it and share your thoughts.
- Team Slotkin
New York Times
Elissa Slotkin Wants Democrats to Reclaim Their ‘Alpha Energy’
Last month, she laid out what she called her “economic war plan,” focused on rebuilding the middle class and slaughtering “some sacred cows” in the process.
She is planning to give speeches about security and democracy later this year.
“You cannot win a game, a war, anything, just by playing defense,” Ms. Slotkin said in an interview this week. “You can’t just point at Donald Trump every day and point out the bad things that he’s doing. You have to show a positive, affirmative vision of what you’re going to do if you’re in power.”
In the half-hour interview, Ms. Slotkin discussed her party’s messaging problems, the new fault lines defining Democratic debates and the 2028 presidential race.
Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited and condensed.
You have said you spent your earliest days in the Senate pushing for a strategic plan for the Democratic Party, and eventually got tired of waiting for someone else to make one. In an ideal world, where should that plan come from?
There’s a lot of leaders in the Democratic Party. I liken it to a solar system. We have stars, and we have planets with their own gravitational pull, but we don’t have a sun that we all center around.
When I would push and prod for some sort of unified approach, I would get a lot of people telling me, ‘Well, that’s hard.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it is hard.’ And I got tired of pushing on other doors across Washington and decided that I was going to take my best stab at it, as someone who comes from a swing state, who won on the same ballot as Trump.
I don’t totally understand why we don’t have a clear recent history of a chain of command in the Democratic Party. We have lots of ideas, lots of different voices, and so in order to keep that coalition together, people have treated each other very carefully and run party offices and the party apparatus by consensus.
In your recent economic speech, you argued that some Democrats conflate large multinational corporations with small businesses, making it seem to many Americans as if Democrats are anti-business or are vilifying success. But the Harris campaign explicitly emphasized support for small businesses. Why did that effort fail?
Kamala Harris had a very short time to formulate her campaign. But I don’t think I can say with a straight face that the Michigan public felt her main agenda was support for small businesses.
Democrats were saying we were for everything, that everything was a priority, everything was important. And so the American public couldn’t understand what we really prioritized and cared about. Donald Trump, whether you believe him or not, prioritized the talking point of cost of living and the economy.
Democrats have policy plans on their websites about good things that they support. I still think we have good ideas. But when you prioritize everything, you actually prioritize nothing.
You also said, with regard to immigration, “Republicans are rounding people up in a way that goes against American values, and Democrats are scared to impose real rules.” Who or what is scaring Democrats, and what should those rules should be?
Most Americans understand that we need immigrants to grow and for our economy to survive. They just want them to come here through legal, vetted channels. Congress could fix that problem.
The Republicans are fomenting anti-immigrant hate as a policy and a strategy, and Democrats are so scared of offending either immigration groups or people to the left of them — maybe they’re in a primary. They are concerned about saying: “No, not everyone gets to be here. Not everyone has the right to live in the United States, and we, like every other country in the world, get to know who and what is coming across our borders.”
That kind of clamping down with rules tends to make a lot of my Democratic colleagues really nervous.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about advocacy groups that don’t seem to represent a lot of voters. We saw that in real time in this last election, when no one had a bigger swing toward Trump than Latinos. Some of these groups were trotting around Washington saying they represent the immigrant community, and they clearly did not.
You have also talked about the need for a new generation of leadership, and I wonder how you want that to play out in practice.
That means fresh faces. It means innovative ideas. It means speaking truth to power, even if it makes you less popular with certain groups.
A very important point that some of my colleagues who have been in elected office for 20, 30 years are missing is that it’s not just Trump supporters who are frustrated with their government. It’s across the board. While Trump is being sloppy about how he cuts programs and cuts personnel and throws tariffs on, very few people in America are hoping that we just return, hook, line and sinker, to the status quo from before Trump.
Is Senator Chuck Schumer the national leader the Democrats need in this moment?
Senator Schumer, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, have hard jobs being leaders. But I have said, long before getting in the Senate, that we need a new generation across the board. That means at the Democratic National Committee, that means in the House, that means in the Senate, that means candidates running for the White House. It’s not any one person.
In the Senate, we don’t really divide into progressive versus moderate when we’re behind closed doors. The real debate now is: Do you believe that Trump’s second term is an existential threat to American democracy, or do you believe Trump’s second term is bad but, like his first term, survivable if we just wait it out and let his bad policies boomerang on him?
What concerns me is that some of my peers have been around and seen so many things happen in Washington that their approach to Trump is just: wait. I do not fall in that camp.
It’s not just about age. It’s approach.
When you talk about a new generation of leadership, are you saying that anyone currently in leadership should step aside?
No. It is not like being in leadership means you’re automatically old guard and need to be booted out. But I do think leaders in the party are feeling upward pressure, and I think that’s a good thing.
You don’t want to name names on anyone you think should be booted out?
I do not.
You have encouraged presidential hopefuls to start early. Why?
People are looking for leaders, and the earlier we start to give people some airtime, and people get to react to them, the better. It’s good to have more voices out there. There’s a range of governors who I think are interesting. There’s a range of other elected leaders. There’s interesting people from the business world. There’s folks I hope I’ve never heard of who are thinking about making a name for themselves.
Are you ruling yourself out of the 2028 presidential race?
It’s just not where my head is right now.
You often talk about the need for Democrats to bring back “alpha energy,” along the lines of Michigan sports coaches. What is something Democrats do that is the opposite of alpha energy?
In the Midwest, alpha energy is about emotion. Whether you’re a coach and you know what your team has put into the game, or you’re frustrated that they didn’t give it their all, you’re not speaking from wonky details. You’re speaking about your gut and your emotion. I think Democrats have lost that.
We respond to people’s pain with a long list of wonky policies.
Alpha energy is synonymous with being bold. Call the tough play, take a risk, be bold. And don’t be so damn scared of your own shadow.
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