Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a staunch ally of former President Biden on Capitol Hill, says Democrats need to reevaluate their fundamental message to voters and “stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe.”
He said leaders of the Democratic Party instead “need to listen” to voters and solve their problems in a way that Americans recognize as genuinely helpful to their goals of achieving financial security and living the American dream.
Coons argues that while the Biden administration passed meaningful legislation to improve millions of Americans’ lives, most “people didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took.”
As a result, Coons believes “that’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks and social media posts.”
“We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with,” he wrote.
Coons, the 62-year-old third-term senator, shared his observations and recommendations for the Democratic Party in an essay published in Democracy, the “journal of ideas.”
Coons reveals that both his parents were Republicans and that he helped found the Amherst College Republicans as a young man, when he also interned with former Republican Sen. Bill Roth (Del.).
But Coons began to change his political views after studying abroad in Kenya and living with people who endured “terrible material circumstances” but were “sustained by their faith and family” and “welcomed strangers in openhearted ways.”
His views continued to change when he returned to the United States and visited what he called the “deep, concentrated poverty of the South Bronx,” which was only a “few miles from the homes of some of the richest people on Earth.”
He said these experiences instilled in him a desire to create more opportunities for all Americans, including those in underprivileged circumstances, and to “make sure no one was left behind.”
“These were the values that inspired me to join the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “Today, I and many others worry that we’ve lost sight of those values, and that we’ve in turn lost sight of how to engage Americans.”
He argues that “to win again,” Democrats “need to offer voters a concise, accessible framework that rests on the ideas that drew me and so many others to the party in the first place: opportunity, security, justice.”
He says opportunity must be created through policies to promote affordable housing and quality education.
“We need to make sure better jobs are available everywhere – not just in a few coastal bubbles but also in the towns across the country where so many of us grew up.”
He said government should partner with the private sector to rebuild the middle class.
On the subject of security, he says Democrats should “fight for the right of all Americans to be secure in their homes, their communities and their bodies” by promoting secure borders, immigration policies that respect humanity, responsible gun ownership and safe schools.
He says Democrats should help Americans keep more of what they earn and strive toward making the economy “a fair playing field.”
To better achieve justice, he urges Democrats to move away from “cancel culture” and “purity tests” and instead promote “the freedom to choose our families, our homes and our futures” and to “speak our minds and read what we want.”
With this in mind, he argues Democrats need to move past today’s “culture wars” and focus on bread-and-butter issues around the economy, security and personal freedom.
“If we leave behind the weight of culture wars and focus on improving people’s lives, we can start to rebuild the trust we’ve lost. From there, we can rebuild our coalition. From there, we can rebuild our country,” he says.
