As assessments of what went wrong for Democrats in the 2024 election have poured in over the past few weeks and the party searches for its next leader, one former House member is calling for a “complete rebranding.”
Speaking on MSNBC’s The Weekend, former Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who launched a failed Senate bid against then-candidate J.D. Vance in 2022, slammed the current Democratic “brand” as “toxic” and emphasized the need for a “complete reboot with the DNC.”
“We need a rebrand. … Our brand is toxic, in so many places, and it’s like, ‘You’re a Democrat?’ Like that’s the stuff we get in Ohio. And so we need a complete reboot, we need a complete reboot with the DNC, we need a complete rebranding. We got to get back established into our values,” he said.
Ryan claimed that the public “want[s] to trust” Democrats and that middle-class people are “holding their nose” to vote for President-elect Donald Trump, even as he improved significantly in voting blocs typically dominated by Democratic candidates.
Ryan pinned the disconnect between the Democratic Party and the middle class on energy policy and issues with the finance industry and the economy.
“We did not give them enough, like, we’re reindustrializing, we’re talking about American competitiveness, we’re moderate on things like natural gas in Western PA which ended up being a big issue that we can’t even be for natural gas displacing coal. We’re in a huge fight with the crypto industry, like, what are we doing? Why would we be in a fight with the crypto industry right now?”
Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have surged since Trump’s win, as the industry views the incoming Trump administration as more friendly to digital assets, particularly since Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, who is seen as hostile to crypto, is stepping down.
For Ryan, the solution for Democrats is to “get back to the bread and butter policies of ‘We are the party of the middle class.’”
“If you’re a working-class person, the Democratic Party is for you. And here’s how we’re going to build that future. We’re gonna reshore chips, we’re gonna build batter[ies]. … We have to lead with the economy,” he said.
He concluded by lamenting the fact that Democrats’ did not have a “reinventing government plan” similar to Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, despite every government “system” being “broken.”
“We let Elon Musk and Vivek [Ramaswamy] take on reinventing government. The whole world knows that the American government is broken. Immigration’s broken, healthcare’s broken, education’s broken — every system that we have is broken. We had no reinventing government plan,” Ryan said.
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Trump recently tapped tech billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new agency, which aims to make massive cuts to government spending.
As Democrats search for solutions, various figures have entered the race to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee, including a New York state senator who is pitching himself as an anti-establishment force. The DNC will host four candidate forums in January for candidates to pitch themselves as the next leader of the Democratic Party.
