Elissa Slotkin, Democratic rep, says party’s ‘brand has been weak for a while’

Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin admitted Wednesday that her party has a messaging problem in the Midwest and that issues like the economy and strengthening the middle class have been getting drowned out by left-wing ideas like defunding the police.

Mrs. Slotkin, a reelected Michigan freshman who served as a CIA operative during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, told MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle that the Democratic Party’s failure to pull off its much-anticipated blue wave in last week’s elections showed the party’s need to “broaden the representation.”

“To be honest with you, maybe I have a different opinion than some on this, I think that the reason why it’s relatively easy to paint all Democrats with a broad brush is because people don’t know always what we stand for,” the congresswoman said. “I mean, I want to be frank, we have a problem in places like Michigan where people don’t know what it means to be a Democrat. The brand has been weak for a while, and therefore, every two years you can just superimpose whatever hit is the most popular thing and you’re going to convince some people that that’s what all Democrats are about.

“So while I don’t love some of the slogans, I don’t love a lot of what I’m hearing from some of my colleagues who are further left of me, I think that we have a bigger strategic problem, and we need to own that as Democrats,” she added.

Mrs. Slotkin’s comments came after Democrats apparently failed to win a majority in the Senate and expand their majority in the House despite a projected Joseph R. Biden presidential win against President Trump.

“It’s not like the results of the election are such a clear repudiation of Trumpism that Biden and his team can walk into these national capitals and say, ’Look, we just had this aberration, this strange four years, and we’re back,’ ” Mrs. Slotkin told Newsweek in an interview published Monday “If he’s going to have big bold initiatives on climate change, those leaders have the right to ask, ’Do you have the mandate for this? And how can you convince us that in four years or eight years, we’re not just going to have a pendulum swing back like we’ve been experiencing?’”