The Democratic Party’s New Recruiter Has a Theory
Posted on: Mar 19, 2025 18:15 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
Supported by
Michelle Cottle
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She reported from Aurora, Colo.
For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details.
“A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,” he told me, chowing on a burrito at a corner table in Milly’s Community Cafe in Aurora, at the heart of his district outside Denver. Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck-to-paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. “They’re not listening to us, because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.”
He’s not wrong. How the Democratic Party wound up in the political wilderness has myriad answers. But one of the clearest, and, for many Democrats, the most vexing, is that the party became identified as the champion of cultural elites. Mathematically speaking, this is no way to win the White House, the Senate or the House — the chamber where Mr. Crow recently became a point person in recruiting candidates to run in the midterms and give the Democratic Party its best chance to regain a modicum of power in Washington.
How the Democrats lost their identification as the party of factory workers, nurses, cops and firefighters is not a theoretical matter for Mr. Crow, who grew up in a working-class family and helped pay his way through college by working construction and joining the National Guard and R.O.T.C. Program, before going on to become a paratrooper and Army Ranger with three combat tours and a Bronze Star to his credit. In 2018, he unseated a five-term Republican congressman to become the first Democrat to represent what was then a tough swing district.
“You go into rural areas, you go into red areas, you hang out with the people that I grew up with, and they just straight-up think that a lot of Democrats don’t respect them — that they’re the deplorables,” he said, nodding to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016. “I still hear that word come out of so many places when I’m talking to people, when I’m trying to earn their trust.”
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