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Opinion|The Truth About Democrats, According to Amy Klobuchar
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/opinion/amy-klobuchar-interview-democrats-trump.html
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Michelle Cottle
Feb. 1, 2025
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.”
Let’s skip the happy talk: Democrats are in a dark place. It’s not merely that Donald Trump has rolled back into Washington with an everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach to grabbing power. The new president is buoyed by eager-to-please Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and a #Resistance movement that feels played out.
The American people, meanwhile, remain in a surly mood with the blue team. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows the Democratic Party with its highest unfavorability rating (57 percent), and the Republican Party with its highest favorability rating (43 percent), since the organization began asking the question in 2008.
To claw their way out of this pit, the Democrats need to do some serious rebuilding and rebranding. But how?
Senator Amy Klobuchar has thoughts — so many, in fact, that when we spoke on Thursday, she was practically breathless trying to share them all. They are well worth a listen. Ms. Klobuchar, a Minnesota moderate, knows how to win in the heartland, including in rural territory not especially friendly to Democrats. In her re-election race last November, she outperformed her party’s presidential candidate by more than 11 points. Her secret, as she explained it, has something tangentially to do with … bedbugs.
In December, Ms. Klobuchar was elevated to be the chair of her caucus’s Steering and Policy Committee, making her the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate. From this key leadership post, part of her mandate is to help reshape her team’s policy priorities.
Two days before the Democratic National Committee was meeting to elect a new chair to help lead it out of the wilderness, Ms. Klobuchar hopped on the phone with me to talk about some of the big questions facing her party: how it lost its way, what it needs to do to rebuild public trust and how Democratic lawmakers should handle the reconstituted and re-energized Trump presidency. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
