Democrats "Bringing a Pencil to a Knife Fight," Top Dem Says

Most striking to me about Martin’s overall message is that Democrats need to stop getting into arguments with each other.

“We have to stop settling on winning arguments with each other; we have to win elections,” Martin said. The way to win, the Party leader says, is to unify behind “one single goal to stop Donald Trump … and put this country back on track.”

And how to put the country back on track? By my count, Martin uttered Trump’s name 19 times in his main address. Obviously, it makes sense that the opposition party would have some things to say about the sitting president. But he hardly mentioned major issues like housing, a word he didn’t mention at all, even though Zohran Mamdani just weeks ago campaigned to victory on it. He didn’t mention inflation either, and only said healthcare twice and inequality once.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made this point even more explicitly in his speech, saying: “We do not have the luxury to fight amongst ourselves while that thing sits in the White House.”

(The irony here is that he leads a state in which the Democratic Party just days ago took the extraordinary step of withdrawing their endorsement of the Minneapolis mayoral candidate, state Senator Omar Fateh. Then there’s Mamdani, who still can’t get the endorsement of his own party’s leaders like Hakeem Jeffries, whose district Mamdani outperformed him in!)

The 2024 presidential ballot was shaped by Biden and the Party apparatus and not by the voters. Throughout the first half of the year, the White House and the Party tolerated no acknowledgment of the president’s frailty. In the name of not having any debate, the Party squashed any primary challenges to Biden and then left no time (or way) for a viable candidate to emerge, anointing Kamala Harris instead. The Democratic Party met this past week and emerged with an exact repeat, a strict adherence to where the puck was in a losing game.