While appearing on MSNBC on Saturday, former Democratic Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan called for a “rebranding” of his party which he says is “toxic in so many places.”
After Vice President Kamala Harris lost this year’s election to President-elect Donald Trump, the Democrats have been in a reflection period, with some scrutinizing what the party has become and how it led to the Democratic presidential nominee’s loss.
In a post-election statement, Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Tim Ryan, who represented Ohio’s 17th district from 2003 to 2013 and then its 13th district from 2013 to 2023, told the hosts of MSNBC’s The Weekend on Saturday morning, that Democrats failed to bring in working-class Americans by boasting about how the Biden-Harris administration supported them with legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, which put nearly $53 billion in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and research. He then called for a “complete reboot” of the party, asking to go back to the President Bill Clinton era of Democratic politics.
“You start with a complete reset. We need a rebrand. I think you and I have been talking about this since 2016,” said Ryan, who left his House seat to run a failed Senate campaign against now-Vice President-elect JD Vance, to host Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
In 2016, Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and wife to Bill Clinton, lost to Trump, a Republican New York real estate businessman who just came onto the political scene.
“Our brand is toxic in so many places, and it is like, ‘you are a Democrat?’ That’s the stuff we get in Ohio. We need a complete reboot. We need a complete reboot with the DNC. We need a complete rebranding,” Ryan continued. “People want to trust us. They don’t want to go to Donald Trump. I’m telling you, the middle-of-the-road people, they’re holding their nose to vote for him, but we did not give them enough, like, we are reindustrializing, we are talking about American competitiveness.”
There has been division among Democrats on how to handle the cryptocurrency industry with some seeing it as innovative and others viewing it as a source of scams.
Ryan continued: “We are moderate on things like natural gas in western PA which ended up being a big issue that we can’t be for natural gas displacing coal. We are in a big fight with the crypto industry. What are we doing? Why are we in a fight with crypto right now? We’ve got to get back to the bread-and-butter policies.”
Newsweek reached out to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via email for comment and We The People, an American unity group founded by Ryan, via email for comment from Ryan on Saturday afternoon.
Ryan talked about the Democratic party getting back to the idea that it is the party of the middle class. “White, Black, brown, gay, straight, man, woman, North, South. If you’re a working-class person, the Democratic party is for you,” he said.
“We have to lead with the economy. We have to lead with growth…It is about getting back to—it is the Bill Clinton campaign,” Ryan said.
Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992 focused on domestic policy, specifically, increasing jobs and economic growth. Democratic political strategist James Carville, who rose to national prominence working on the 1992 Clinton campaign famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
On a recent episode of his podcast Politics War Room, Carville also criticized the Democratic party, telling his co-host Al Hunt, a renowned journalist, “The damage that the 2024 campaign has done—the damage that this decade has done to a Democratic brand is almost unfathomable.”
