Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Howard Dean argued that the Democratic Party needs to work across the country in order to restore its brand with voters.
“The Democrats need to have a complete reboot,” Dean told MSNBC host Ari Melber after being asked how the party should move forward.
“They’ve been functioning inside the beltway, and that’s what their tendency is. That’s what everybody’s tendency is, to function inside the beltway. The Republicans actually for 20 years have been building outside the beltway with their gazillions of dollars from all the billionaires whose taxes they’re now cutting. And the Democrats haven’t done that,” he added.
Dean declared, “This is not an inside the beltway fight, this is an outside the beltway fight.”
He then specified that the Democrats’ tattered brand is not a problem that can be solved overnight.
“The name ‘Democrat’ has been branded really badly. And we don’t run enough local candidates to un-brand it. We leave whole swaths of legislative seats unchallenged in red states. That is insane,” Dean said to Melber.
“People are never going to get to know the Democratic Party and who we really are, unless the Democrats are knocking on your doors… and I’m not talking about four weeks before a presidential election! We need to be in every election, including school boards and city councils.”
He went on to tell the news host that right-leaning efforts to allegedly ban a book in a “somewhat conservative” Vermont town were rejected by local residents, “Why? Because everybody knows everybody, and nobody believes the things that Republicans actually say about Democrats. We’re just people here. And before we’re Democrats or Republicans, we’re people. We may be conservatives, we may be Republicans, but we respect our neighbors.”
He then argued that, by contrast, “That is absent, I would say, in about 45 states. And the reason for that is in many cases, because the Democrats simply have not gotten their butts out in the countryside running for all these offices, and the more we keep focusing on Washington, the longer this kinda nonsense is gonna go on.”
