Brian Schatz is a progressive senator from Hawaii. Yesterday Politico Magazine published an interview with him in which Schatz offers his take on what went wrong for the Democratic Party in 2024. The senator broke his views into three basic categories: the information space, left-right calibration, and language. Let's start with his take on the information space:

...a lot of liberal donors believe if we just fund good journalism, that that’s a counterweight to the right-wing noise machine. And I think that we’ve now learned that we have to build our own infrastructure, and that’s going to take money and staffing and all of that.

I think this is absolute nonsense, though I'm happy to see Democrats bleed their donors dry to create a left-wing Joe Rogan. That's the shorthand they usually use for the kind of "infrastructure" they have in mind. They want a Joe Rogan who only echoes left-wing talking points. Already they've been pointing to "anti-Zionist" twitch streamer Hasan Piker as a potential piece of this new infrastructure. This effort is a dead end which will end in embarrassment. 

But Schatz did say something more interesting a bit later:

...it’s not just that we’re unable to reach people. It’s that people are unable to reach us. So, when inflation was pissing people off, you could scarcely find a person in mainstream, left-wing circles, who would even talk about it. Except to explain that the Biden economy was better than other countries. And that the Biden stewardship was better than other industrialized nations. And by the way, I continue to think that’s true and totally irrelevant — If you’re talking about the question of are people pissed about the price of eggs, the answer is flatly yes they are. Not, ‘Don’t you know people are paying more in Paris and shouldn’t you be happy about that.’

I don't think he's aware that those two points are completely at odds. You can't build a progressive megaphone which also dials back the talking points at just the right time. The megaphone just blasts out what the party leaders have decided is best, including all those stupid arguments about inflation. That system is not going to be more sensitive to what people really think, it is going to be less sensitive because its real goal is propaganda not conversation. The left will never figure this out because they are very confident they have all the answers. Having party puppets repeat the things they've been told to say makes for boring podcasts/talk radio.

Moving on to point two:

On the second point, on the left-right calibration, I’m less interested in that. I think it ends up becoming a Rorschach Test for where you already started. I haven’t seen a compelling case that the reason we were unsuccessful was either because we were too left wing or too right wing.

He's not looking because there is plenty of evidence that immigration and trans issues impacted the outcome. In both cases, a majority of voters felt the left had gone too far. I assume Schatz is ignoring this evidence because it conflicts with his own progressive ideology, but whatever the reason, he's wrong.

Finally, I think he gets it right on the third issue:

I think Kamala did a really good job on focusing on middle-class concerns. But I remember her saying, ‘I’m going to center the needs of the working class.’ And I thought to myself, I don’t know anyone in the world who says center. I know people in politics who say center. I know people in academia. I know people in advocacy who say center. But centering the needs, or making space for, or all of that, is a clear indication that you are not normal. And I put myself in that category. By definition, I am a coastal progressive.

But I think this question of language goes pretty deep. And it goes to not just being careful not to say things that are egregiously weird sounding, but it’s also the way we interact with advocacy groups. I remember saying I was for a cessation of hostilities in Israel and Palestine. And people said why don’t you say ceasefire? I’m thinking, that’s literally the same thing. I remember saying I was for a big, bold climate bill. And someone said why don’t you say Green New Deal? And this idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing. And I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative, for that exact reason. But it’s also just alienating. This magic words thing has to go away.

He's right that Democrats have adopted a lot of weird language from woke academics and that it's off-putting to normal people. He talks about the need to put activists groups who use this language in their place but how? The party has been running scared of them for 5-10 years now. Are democrats going to suddenly grow a spine and tell the leftists to take a back seat? They won't do it because those same leftists will label them racist and transphobic and a bunch of other things.

Again, I don't think that Schatz realizes the degree to which his party is now owned by these extremists. If you can't even bring yourself to say that the party was seen as too far left (point two) then you're nowhere near being able to tell the activists to take a back seat.

My takeaway from all of this is that even progressive Dems like Schatz grasp that their far left weirdness is a problem for a lot of voters, but his focus on the words over the substance tells me he doesn't really see the problem clearly. It's not the "magic words" that need to go, it's the far-left ideology from which they stem. Ultimately what he's prescribing is an effort to fool people by putting a veneer of sensible language over a body of far left thought. That's what Tim Walz represented in the last election, i.e. the leftist ideologue who spoke like a midwestern farmer. But it didn't work. His plan for the next election has already been tried and failed.