From “What My Party Needs to Do: To win again, we need to speak to voters about the ideas that drew me to the party in the first place: opportunity, security, and justice,” by U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:

“When did Democrats stop caring about working people?”

I hear that question a lot from Delawareans—nurses and cops, dental hygienists and mechanics. I also heard it plenty in 2024 as I campaigned for Kamala Harris and Senate Democrats. Elected Democrats—me included—still see ourselves as fighting hard for the middle class, protecting the rights of workers, and trying to make life easier for working families. These are the people who are on our minds when we write bills and take votes. But when those same people look at us, they don’t feel that we care about them or their needs. We lost an election in 2024, but more than that, we’ve lost Americans’ trust.

Little more than a year later, the luster is coming off President Trump thanks to his unfulfilled promises and his assault on our rights and Constitution. His approval rating, alongside that of Republicans in Congress, has fallen sharply, and this summer he rammed through one of the least popular pieces of legislation in modern American history. Even so, Americans still trust Republicans more than Democrats on most of the issues that matter, from the economy to safety.

Democrats need to stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe. Instead, we need to listen. Then we need to solve the problems they’ve shared with us. In the last few years, it’s not just our message that was wrong—it was some of our policies, too. People didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took. That’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks, and social media posts.

We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with.

I would know because they’re what drew me to the party. I didn’t begin my political life as a Democrat. My parents were Republicans, and I was raised on the idea that if you worked hard, you could attain the American dream the way my family had. In college, I helped found the Amherst College Republicans. My freshman summer, I interned with Senator Bill Roth, a Delaware Republican.

It was a wealthy, white bubble, and by my junior year, I realized I had to experience something from the world beyond it. So I decided to study abroad at the University of Nairobi.

In Kenya, I experienced what I came to think of as radical hospitality. I stayed with people who, although enduring terrible material circumstances, were sustained by their faith and family—and who welcomed strangers in openhearted ways I’d never seen in this country. They showed me a kind of worship I hadn’t experienced before either. I grew up going to Red Clay Creek Presbyterian Church, a suburban, mostly prosperous, and mostly white church in Wilmington, Delaware, where, although the sermons were moving and the choir compelling, there was a reserved determination to the services. Now, half a world away, I was at lively, joyful, four-hour church services filled with music and with people truly relying on the hope they gained through worship to get them through hard days.

More here.