‘Old guard isn't cutting it' Ro Khanna tells voters in town hall tour

Politico

24-03-2025

BAKERSFIELD — The banner draped behind Rep. Ro Khanna promised, in a deliberately Bernie Sanders-esque style, 'Benefits over Billionaires.' The hand-painted signs in the audience lambasted Elon Musk.
But in the three town halls Khanna hosted in three red House districts far from his Silicon Valley home base on Sunday, it was the Democrats who were unambiguously being put on blast. So it was up to Khanna to convince his audience that his party still had a pulse.
'I want to know why in the world the Democratic Party hasn't fought yet?' asked Ryiad Cooper, a 45
-
year-old combat veteran at Khanna's afternoon event in California's Inland Empire, the eastern exurbs of Los Angeles. 'I'm sorry but you're the only Democrat standing here, so you're the only person I've got to ask.'
Town halls are, once again,
in the political zeitgeist
, much like the Tea Party-inspired outpouring of 2009 or the 2017 backlash to the efforts to gut Obamacare. Republican leadership is advising members
to avoid in-person meetings
; those who forged ahead anyway are rewarded with viral clips of booing crowds Meanwhile, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hosted mega-rallies over the weekend, including attracting 34,000 attendees in Colorado.
Khanna, the 48 year-old son of Indian immigrants who has carved out a distinct and somewhat incongruous niche as tech-friendly populist, had planned a tour designed to make California's most vulnerable House Republicans sweat. He intended to send a signal to GOP Reps. David Valadao, Ken Calvert and Young Kim that the DOGE wrecking ball through the federal government and fears of cuts to Medicaid and Social Security was fomenting a popular backlash that could soon put their jobs at risk.
Valadao, Calvert and a spokesperson for Kim all responded with variations of the same theme, brushing off Khanna's visit as a political stunt. All three of their districts had shifted further right in 2024 compared to four years prior, a reflection of just how much ground Democrats had lost even in the blue bastion of California.
The road trip, inspired by Sanders, suited the peripatetic congressman. He's been known to take political tours far outside his Bay Area stomping grounds — traveling in West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, to explore how tech industry innovation could transform coal-dependent economies.
His trips to the early primary state of New Hampshire, which
are so frequent
he's been jokingly called the
fifth member
of the state's House delegation, have often fueled speculation of Khanna's eventual presidential ambition, not to mention his near-constant appearances on cable news shows and his active presence on X.
His profile is high enough to draw out respectable crowds — roughly 1,000 apiece in his three events on Sunday, mostly the dedicated Democrats who keep MSNBC playing in the background. He was received warmly and enthusiastically, and even when attendees grew pointed about the Democratic Party, they never turned sharp on him.
But there was a tinge of pleading when attendees came to the mic. They wanted marching orders on what they could do to stop Trump. They wanted assurances the Democrats had some sort of plan. They wanted him to know they were scared.
Khanna readily conceded that his party had dropped the ball.
'Our messaging is too fragmented,' he acknowledged in Bakersfield. 'The old guard isn't cutting it.'
He was particularly searing in his critiques of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom he faulted for
not extracting any concessions
to avert a government shutdown.
'He didn't get any concessions,' he told POLITICO. 'I believe if Nancy Pelosi was in his position, we would have still had the government open, but we would have gotten concessions.'
But when an attendee asked if Khanna agreed with Sanders that perhaps more people should run as independents, the congressman responded with a riff forcefully defending his party.
'We are the party that got the 40 hour workweek. We are the party that got overtime pay. We are the party that got Social Security. We are the party that got Medicare. We are the party that got Medicaid. We are the party that funded public schools. We are the party that fought and got civil rights and voting rights,' he said. He kept going as the applause from the crowd overtook him, basking in the nostalgia of a time when being a Democrat didn't feel like such a bummer.
As soon as he stepped off stage in Bakersfield, he instructed his staff to blast out that clip defending the party.
It was an unexpected highlight, given how down so many had seemed about the state of the Democrats.
But, on the two and a half hour drive from Bakersfield to his next stop in Norco, Khanna told POLITICO that the moment stood out as precisely what dejected Democrats were searching for.
'What surprised me is the reaction of it in the room, because they were — as you know — very, very skeptical about the Democratic Party and our leadership,' he said, sitting in the front passenger seat as his political director navigated a bulky SUV through the curves of the Grapevine. 'And yet, at least being up on stage, it seemed to me that that answer got the most enthusiasm. So they're looking also for kind of an inspiration for our party.'
On that front, Khanna appeared to have delivered. Lisa Jo Gage, a social services provider in Bakersfield whose business could be decimated by Medicaid cuts, said she left 'more hopeful than when I walked in.'
'It was uplifting to see people of so many backgrounds in the same room believing in the same thing,' said Gage, a 56 year-old Democrat. 'Living in a red county can be exhausting at times feeling like no one sees or feels things that I am seeing or feeling.'
Khanna recognized that the folks attending his town halls wanted to do more than vent.
'It was more than just a therapy session,' he said. 'I think it was people asking for direction. They're saying we're ready to spend our time on a Sunday and come out. What are you guys doing?'
For Democrats, that question is much harder to answer.
Khanna gamely did his best. By the second and third stops of the day, he took pains to add more specifics. Schumer should not have simply demanded concessions, he should have demanded that no veterans be fired and no Social Security offices be shut down. He said Democrats
should not have voted
against the Laken Riley Act, which makes it easier to detain immigrants without legal status charged with smaller crimes, nor should some of his House colleagues have
voted to censure
Rep. Al Green for his disruptions at Trump's address to the joint session of Congress.
But Khanna also had to state the obvious: when it comes to governance, his party has very little leverage.
'The reality is, we don't have the White House, we don't have the Senate, we don't have the House,' he said in Norco, a pocket of rural horse country in the industrialized Inland Empire
.
'So we can point fingers, but what we need to do is figure out, how are we going to get past this? What are we going to do to actually stop Musk and Trump and prevent these cuts? And the only thing I can think of is to organize like we're doing here in every red district in this country.'
In the car between events, Khanna acknowledged that there's no one pat answer that is going to immediately satisfy voters yearning for direction.
'What we need from the Democrats is a plan,' he said. 'Every day we should have our leaders saying 'here's what we're doing…' What I got [from the town halls] is there's not a clear sense of the plan.'