Democrats need new playbook to confront Trump, Kamala Harris pollster tells party

As President-elect Trump gets ready to return to the White House, a leading Democratic pollster and strategist highlights that her party needs a new game plan to confront the former and soon-to-be future president.

"The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook," Molly Murphy, a top pollster on Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, emphasized as she gave a presentation at the first meeting of the Democratic National Committee's executive committee since last month's election.

Trump's convincing win over Harris — he captured the popular vote and swept all seven key battleground states — as well as the GOP flipping the Senate and holding on to their fragile majority in the House, has Democrats searching for answers as they now try to emerge from the political wilderness.

Murphy, pointing to post-election polls, said most Americans give the president-elect a thumbs up on how he's handling his transition, and that Trump will return to the White House next month more popular compared to eight years ago, when he first won the presidency. 

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And she noted that voters "give him a pass on the outrageous" comments he continuously makes because they approve of his handling of the economy. 

Murphy, in her comments Friday as DNC leaders huddled at a hotel near the U.S. Capitol, said the Democrats' mission going forward is to change that perception.

"We want to focus on this term … and tell the story about how this term is worse and things are not going to be good for the American people," Murphy said.

The Democrats' message should be "Donald Trump does not care about you. He is going to screw you," Murphy argued. "As a north star, I think we need to stay focused on … the economy and costs."

"A lot of people are expecting the price of milk to go back where it was," Murphy noted. 

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She said Democrats need to borrow a page from the GOP's 2024 campaign playbook: "We can do what they did to us … even if the economy is stronger, costs are still going to be too high for people."

And she added that Democrats need to spotlight what she called unpopular parts of the Trump agenda, including "tax breaks for the wealthy" and "letting corporations drive up prices and making you pay for it." 

And she said the party needs to frame Trump's proposed tariffs on key American trading partners "a sales tax on the American people that will drive up prices," which was a line that Harris used on the campaign trail.

Murphy also spotlighted that Trump and Republicans made gains with key parts of the Democratic Party's base - younger voters, Latinos, and Black voters because of the economy, but also because of the Democrats' "wonky" messaging.

"A lot of times we’re talking about polices," Murphy said, while Republicans have "culture conversations that create a connection between the party and the people that go beyond polices."

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Murphy argued that "these culture conversations that conservatives have been able to have in an organic way have been able to draw a connection that we know is not supported by policy … and we know that we have a lot of shared values with these working Americans and we need to find ways to have more authentic connection points there."

DNC chair Jaime Harrison complimented Murphy's presentation. 

But, Harrison, who is not running for a second four-year term steering the national party committee, pointed to the next White House race and offered that the party should also target Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance.

"I think it will be a big error on our part if we focus all of our attention on Donald Trump and not JD Vance, particularly as we start to look at the 2028 race," Harrison highlighted.

The DNC's meeting came as Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley said that Trump would play a "significant" role in supporting GOP candidates.

Whatley argued that "as we go forward into this next election cycle, the fundamentals are going to remain the same" during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Thursday.

"We need to make sure that we are building our state parties, that we're building our ground game, we're building our election integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get those candidates through those primaries in ‘26, that we're going to be in a position to take them all the way to the finish line," he emphasized.

But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the following midterm elections. And Trump, who was a magnate for voter turnout, won't be on the ballot in 2026.

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Whatley said that even though he won't be a candidate, "President Trump is going to be a very significant part of this because at the end of the day, what we need to do is hold on to the House, hold on to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda."

And Whatley predicted that "Donald Trump will be very active on the campaign trail for Republicans. And his agenda is the agenda that we're going to be running on."

HEAD HERE TO FIND OUT WHAT RNC CHAIR WHATLEY SAID ABOUT THE 2028 GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION