Brian Schatz Doesn’t Know What Went Wrong
A few hours after Donald Trump was re-elected, Brian Schatz conducted an experiment. Upset, tired, and uncertain about what should come next, the Democratic senator from Hawaii pulled up ChatGPT and prompted it to produce an analysis of what had gone wrong for his party.
Schatz, who is 52 and a few years into his third term, asked for a response in the voice of The Atlantic and free of opinions that might offend any particular groups of voters. He wasn’t expecting actually useful solutions, but he was curious to see what the program would spit out. Votes were still being counted and already his news feeds were awash in grimly predictable recriminations and ideologically driven finger-pointing among depressed and furious Democrats. Pressure was already building on him and his fellow senators to dramatically reshape their party after such a devastating loss, and the suggestions for how and why to do so already varied widely.
ChatGPT’s answer was a confident but generic four-paragraph summary of his party’s failings. “It plausibly sounded like half the crap I’m reading online,” Schatz recalled. He deleted it and promptly forgot its specifics. The limp analysis was an indictment of the AI, but also of the chatter that was beginning to engulf the Democrats.
It took just hours after Trump’s win for the Senate to turn into an arena for the party’s internal debate about its future, driven largely by recognizable figures whose immediate diagnoses and prescriptions were predictable to anyone with a passing knowledge of their previous work. Less than half a day after the election was over, Bernie Sanders released a statement declaring the result unsurprising and accusing the Democrats of “abandoning working class people” and being controlled by “big money interests and well-paid consultants.” The next day Elizabeth Warren published an op-ed in Time detailing her recommended “plan to fight back,” which included resisting Trump’s every move in Congress and the courts and refusing to compromise with his administration. Before long, John Fetterman was blaming Democratic losses on “all of the very hard-left, kind of ‘woke’ things” that safe-seat liberals and progressives had embraced and that Republicans had used to to tag swing-state candidates as extremists. Soon after that, Chris Murphy began circulating polling insisting that Democrats focus more on a populist message to “reclaim our identity as the party of the working class” as part of an overdue divorce from neoliberalism.
“It’s not too soon to start thinking through, for instance, what kind of information environment we are now operating in and how we go about communicating with our constituents. I also think the normal left-right recalibration that happens after a loss is a perfectly reasonable conversation to have,” Schatz told me about two weeks after Election Day. But, he warned, “I happen to be wary of anybody who thinks this result vindicates their particular policy worldview, whether people think we were too far to the left, or not populist enough, or not pro-Israel enough, or not pro-Palestinian enough. I am deeply suspicious of anybody who uses this result just to advocate for what they wanted all along.”
“To take Bernie’s statement, there’s a reason it didn’t stick, because it did feel like a kind of scold, and it felt like a rather convenient explanation for the results,” Schatz said. “You have to admire Bernie’s consistency, but every event in the world is not a reason that he’s right.”
A low-key character who’s mostly popular among fellow Democratic senators, Schatz since the election has, for the most part, avoided seeking out public fights or direct disagreements with his louder colleagues. (Murphy is among his closest friends in D.C.) But he is perturbed by how quickly Democrats’ debates about their future are moving and has been using one-on-one chats with colleagues to become the Hill’s most prominent advocate for taking a very deep breath, learning way more about what went wrong, and cooling it ASAP with the hot takes. In his view, the party is at risk of going down a series of unproductive paths, and of fighting unhelpful fights, if it commits to any one course before it fully understands what just happened.
“What I worry about is something where the way everyone’s mind works is they want a discrete, elegant, one-to-two sentence thing they can say during the holidays to sound smart about politics,” he said. “I think we owe it to everyone to address the challenges and not just sound like a ChatGPT version of a Democratic pundit.”
While some have been receptive, other Senate veterans basically asked me why they should care what Schatz thinks when I put his position to them last week. Many of his colleagues have already made the case that their party’s flaws (they’re out of touch with blue-collar workers, they’re too woke, they’re too pro-Israel) are obvious and that there is little time for self-reflection in a world where Trump poses immediate threats.
This could become a delicate moment for Schatz, whose future profile within the caucus may depend in part on how his colleagues receive his recommendations to take a breath; he is regarded by some close Senate watchers as a possible future leader. (Chuck Schumer brought him into the leadership fold by adding him to his team in 2017 and promoting him last year.) In recent years, he has earned a reputation among his colleagues and many party strategists as a nimble communicator both in person and online. He posts on X way more than your average elected official, and it’s very obviously him doing the typing; one top Democratic operative told me he wished more senators would learn from this, and another agreed but warned that this might drive their press secretaries to early retirement or to drink.
His frustration has been most visible online. Two days after the election, Schatz quoted on X a story about how incumbent leader after incumbent leader fell in elections around the world this year and added, “We have a lot of reorganizing and soul searching to do as a Party, so this is not to dismiss the need for fundamental changes. We need them desperately. But this context is relevant for those who feel like this defeat is structural and permanent. Nothing ever is.” When a user responded demanding specifics “because the base is calling for one direction and the consultants are calling for a different one,” Schatz quickly replied, “I’m not doing this here or now.” The user replied again, “Gotta wait for the consultants to consult?” At that point, Schatz shot back, “I’m just not trying to have a hot take on something so important. This will be my last response fyi.” The next day he reposted a Semafor article arguing Democrats should “just wait,” since so little was yet known about the election’s fundamentals and the issues defining future elections would look little like those that dominated 2024’s.
What Schatz does want is a careful process of trying to understand the Democrats’ problems. I asked if he was proposing some sort of listening tour with Trump voters, but he said even that would assume too much about who, exactly, they need to be talking to. “Rather than blame the people who have decided to reject us, we might want to inquire as to why, for example, a bunch of people voted to ratify abortion rights and then put Donald Trump in charge of the country. And I’m not suggesting we should take the next year staring at our belly buttons or climbing a high mountain and meditating on this,” he said. “I’m just suggesting we are all still in the rubble of what happened and that there are two ways to approach this. One is some deep reflection and strategic thinking and the other is to participate in the race to crystallize the conventional wisdom.”
That’s not to say he’s entirely against criticizing how Democrats campaign — just that he thinks the solution to their problems may be harder to find than many of his colleagues believe. “There are lots of people who voted for Obama, then Trump, then Biden. Lots of people who are pro-choice who voted for Ron DeSantis. People do not fit into neat categories, and one of the problems of the Democratic coalition is we are making a series of assumptions about people and their voting tendencies that don’t always turn out to be true and also manifest as an insult to them — that they are expected to think a certain way, they are expected to talk a certain way,” he said. That means some groups of voters have long been taken for granted and others have received plenty of condescension. “We should start from a blank sheet of paper, as if we know nothing about anyone’s voting tendencies, and just try to figure out what we can say and do for people across the country and not think about these folks as demographic and geographic categories that can be algorithmically expected to have a certain kind of voting behavior,” he said. “Republicans are talking to people, and we’re talking to groups and tendencies and categories.”
That may be a heavy lift, but beginning it is clearly an urgent necessity. Schatz believes one opportunity for Democrats to redefine themselves will surface soon next year, when Trump and congressional Republicans begin talking about economic policy — with Trump eager to impose tariffs and with his old tax cuts due to expire at the end of 2025. “The tax fight is going to be a defining moment because the leader of the Republican Party wants to increase the price of stuff regular people buy through tariffs, then use that money to finance tax cuts for billionaire corporations, and I think that’s a fight we can and will win,” Schatz said.
His theory is that the fight is an optimal chance to reframe how people think about the two parties. “It lines up very nicely with two things: our need to win back working class voters, but also our need to speak plainly about the actual impact of Republican policies as opposed to treating everything like it’s an emergency for the democracy itself.”
If the Democrats are successful in that goal, he thinks, it might even coax everyday citizens to actually pay attention to Washington rather than continuing to disengage from news entirely — a dynamic that helped doom Democrats this fall. But that will require Schatz’s party to learn a new vocabulary.
“We have to fight for families, not our own prerogatives, and if anyone says the fucking word ‘norms’ again, I’m going to throw up,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t think norms are important or institutions aren’t worth protecting. It’s just that if you are a regular person, you don’t know what the fuck that means. You are just trying to survive economically.”
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