In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman.
Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”
Slotkin said that she experienced this personally on her campaign, giving an example of an event with a group of Pakistani-American doctors she assumed would be reliable voters for Vice President Kamala Harris, but were actually all voting for Trump. She said the Democratic Party has also made mistaken assumptions about Latino and African American voters.
“You’ve got to appeal to people’s core issues regardless of their historical voting patterns, and you can’t get lazy,” Slotkin said. “And I think Donald Trump was not lazy.”
She described pocketbook issues as the key question in the race, and said her campaign had tackled the issue head-on. Voters, she said, were “confused” about what Democrats’ priorities were, especially at the presidential level, following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race.
