In Bucks County, attendees of the town hall and Sen. Ruben Gallego criticized the party’s strategy for communicating with non-traditional voters.
LEVITTOWN, Pa.—As Democrats assess the future of their party after losing the 2024 election, there are harsh words to go around about their own performance.
At a “People’s Town Hall” in the battleground area of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on May 10, featured speaker Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) offered much criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and the party’s traditional strategies.
“The problem is that we are too [expletive] safe all the time,” Gallego said in response to a question about party messaging.
“We don’t necessarily go talk to Fox News, or we actually don’t go on podcasts, because maybe that podcaster … isn’t 100 percent aligned with our politics, or they said something stupid years ago, and therefore we can’t go on there, because then we’ll get canceled by our own people,” he said.
President Donald Trump won Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia, by just 292 votes in 2024. Gallego and the audience criticized the Democratic Party for its alleged failures to communicate with voters.
He referred implicitly to Harris’s failure to secure an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a popular podcast hosted by celebrity Joe Rogan, which has nearly 20 million subscribers—including many young men, a key demographic the party lost in 2024—and on which Trump appeared before the election.
While Harris and Rogan negotiated an appearance, she allegedly sought conditions—such as a time limit and the presence of aides—that were non-standard for Rogan, and for which Harris was later criticized, given the popularity of Trump’s appearance on the show.
“We had Joe Rogan,” Gallego said, hinting at Rogan’s past support for Democratic candidates including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) before he supported Trump. “We canceled Joe Rogan years ago. Democrats don’t want to admit this. We did, and then it became … questionable [as to] whether we should go on Joe Rogan or not. We did this to ourselves.”
Gallego said that the party needed to expand its outreach, beyond “CNN and MSNBC” to different media, including conservative media.
He also advised Democrats to host non-traditional political events to connect voters—such as “boxing watch parties,” “rodeos for white people,” “food tastings,” a “taco truck,” and “pickleball”—drawing on lessons from his campaign, where he won Arizona’s 2024 Senate race as a Democrat despite Trump winning the state in that year’s presidential election, an uncommon combination.
Democratic voters in the audience who spoke to The Epoch Times had similar complaints about their party’s performance.
“It’s the incrementalism that lost Democrats the election,” said Kyle Kravitz, a 32-year-old plumber and progressive voter from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who attended the town hall. “I think [they] could be a little more outspoken [and] straightforward about what [they] want to do.”
“Get louder, host a town hall, do what AOC or Bernie are doing—go around the country a little bit, or just post on social media much more directly,” Kravitz said, referring to a series of large rallies hosted by Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a prominent progressive leader.
Patricia Lanzata, a retired nurse from Bucks County. She suggested Democrats have a credibility problem, whereby their ideas seem unrealistic without an explanation of how it will be accomplished. In the past, similar criticism has been leveled against progressive proposals, such as “Medicare-for-all” universal health care.
“Give us more direction as to how [you’re] going to do things. [Do] not just say ‘We need to do this,’ but [say] how are we going to do it. … I don’t want to hear just all of these ideas. I want to know how [we are] going to implement those ideas,” Lanzata said.
“I love what Cory Booker did—to get out there, make that stand, and to be so vocal. I am hoping that … it gives more Democrats strength and courage,” she said.
Some Democratic candidates and officials appear to be getting the message. At the town hall, several figures in the party were in attendance and expressed approval of Gallego’s remarks, including DNC vice chair and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta as well as the state party chairman, state Sen. Sharif Street.
Tim Witherspoon, a professional boxer, said social media is important.
“It’s important that we try to take some of the new technology … TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and we engage because that’s where a lot of that demographic is already,” he said. Witherspoon is a Democratic candidate in the May 20 election for the Bristol Township School Board in Bucks County.
“Democrats try to fight … the anger with anger, and I don’t think that that’s a good way to get the message out. I think that we have to fight that anger with our positive message,” Witherspoon said, referring to the party’s methods of responding to Trump and Republicans.
So far, such discourse within the Democratic Party has been heterogeneous, rather than a formal strategy for the whole party.
Given the decentralized structure of American political parties, it is likely to continue this way until the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, which is when the party selects its leader.
“It’s the voters that rarely thought about politics, and were not engaged until they voted, that voted for Donald Trump,” Gallego said. “What’s wrong with us? What are we doing wrong, that we aren’t breaking the barrier, that we aren’t getting to them?”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) are hosting a series of “People’s Town Halls” across the country in hopes to mobilize the party’s base and cultivate more supporters in preparation for the 2026 midterm elections, which are traditionally promising for the party in opposition to the president.