Democrats need to stop focusing on voters' skin colour, says party rising star

Telegraph

25-02-2025

Adam Frisch would have to hurry, he realised, if he was to make his pitch to become the next vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to every minority group on the schedule.
Starting the day at the Disability Caucus (10 - 11.30am), he and 18 other candidates were due at the Women's Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the American Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus and the Native Caucus all in the space of a single afternoon.
Mr Frisch, a 57-year-old former banker, was no stranger to hustling for votes. Over two runs for Colorado's 3rd District, a vast tract of land spanning ski slopes, cattle-farms and dusty plains, he had driven his red Ford-150 truck more than 77,000 miles.
In 2022, he came within 554 votes (0.16 per cent) of pro-Trump firebrand Lauren Boebert, despite predictions of a Republican walk-over typical in the state. She fled the area rather than face a re-run in 2024.
'I know you guys aren't looking for a straight, middle aged, white, fairly successful male to be running around the Democratic banner,' he told party officials ahead of his first run, but argued his unorthodox views would help him build a 'winning coalition'.
In 2024, he ran the Republicans surprisingly close again, buoyed by a willingness to break Democratic taboos. In one campaign advert he wielded a shot-gun on a hunting trip. His priorities were 'border security', 'inflation' and 'protecting our water'. And he was the first candidate to call for Joe Biden to step down after his semi-catatonic debate performance.
But when it came to the vote at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention centre on the outskirts of Washington DC, Mr Frisch's appeal fell flat.
On Feb 1, the 450 members of the Democratic National Committee, the group that organises the party's policy platform, voter outreach and fundraising, chose three other vice-chairmen, including David Hogg, the 24-year-old gun control activist.
As chairmen they elected Ken Martin, a staffer on Kamala Harris's campaign who argued that the party 'already has the right message' – it just needed to do better in delivering it.
The DNC vote supercharged many Democrats' fears that the party is failing to fully reckon with the electoral wipe-out it suffered against Donald Trump, a man it painted as a Nazi-sympathising felon.
'The Democratic Party is still slicing and dicing up the electorate in a way that the electorate is not voting anymore,' said Mr Frisch, who is running for Colorado's 3rd district again in 2026. 'Instead of looking at people as Americans and fathers and husbands, mothers and daughters,' it tries to break voters down into sub-groups defined by ethnicity or single-issue concerns, such as climate change or reproductive rights
Democrat support has collapsed among ethnic minorities, including every caucus group that Mr Frisch pitched to at the DNC vote. The only two groups whom Ms Harris boosted Democratic vote share against Mr Biden were university-educated whites and people making more than $100,000 per year.
Over three days at the Gaylord Hotel, 'there was never a conversation about, what should we do to try to figure out how to build a winning coalition?'
'There was no How-to-Win caucus,' or even one on 'What Happened' in 2024, Mr Frisch said.
'The lack of intellectual curiosity, or political curiosity about looking at some of the top performers [against Republicans], whether they've won or lost, is political malpractice,' he added.
One month into Mr Trump's second administration, the Democrats have been reduced to little more than by-standers. Polls show the party with its lowest-ever approval rating. Gone are the days of Mr Trump's first term, when young voters joined up in droves and tens of thousands took to the streets in protest.
To appeal once more to a scornful electorate, a long and painful process of minimising the influence of 'The Groups' must begin, Mr Frisch argues. In the parlance of Capitol Hill, 'The Groups' refers to the single-issue NGOs which have taken on huge influence within the Democratic Party, furnishing campaigns with staff and ready-made political programmes.
These organisations mushroomed after Mr Trump's first victory, with large numbers of voters donating to the progressive causes closest to their heart – be it Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, or the Sierra Club, an environmental lobbying group. In just a few days after Mr Trump's 2017 'Muslim Ban', the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raised $24.1 million from 350,000 online donations, almost half the entire annual expenditure of the Conservative Party.
The real risk from 'The Groups' is that they started to work together as a sort of Left-wing 'Supergroup', Mr Frisch said, discouraging candidates from speaking their own mind. Planned Parenthood's website still boasts of its support for Defunding the Police; a colleague of Mr Frisch's was told she would lose the support of a reproductive rights group if she did not soften her stance on immigration.
'Members of Congress are kind of afraid to talk about it publicly, just the amount of influence and money that goes into this', he said. And it has come at transparent electoral cost.
In recent years, 'The Groups' bombarded candidates with tick-box questionnaires, challenging them to prove their liberal bona-fides – and thus gain the support (or risk the opposition) of their large memberships. On the road, Mr Frisch regularly ignored the missives.
But it was a long-forgotten answer by Ms Harris to one of these questionnaires, sent out in 2019 by the ACLU, that became the focus of the Trump administration's last advertising blitz ahead of the November 5 vote.
'Kamala Harris is for they/them,' the advert said. 'President Trump is for you!'
In her reply to the questionnaire, Ms Harris had promised to support government-funded surgeries for transgender prisoners, as well as cut funding for ICE and end the detention of illegal immigrants. Viewers of the Trump campaign advert swung 2.7 per cent in favour of the Republicans, according to one poll.
Sending out the questionnaire was a 'step too far' for the ACLU, said David Golberger, a former lawyer for the organisation who famously defended the rights of Nazis to parade through the town of Skokie in 1977. 'That's getting involved in partisan politics,' Mr Goldberger told The Telegraph, lamenting his former employer's shift into the equivalent of a progressive pressure-group.
On a formal level, the Democratic Party does not yet appear to have learnt the lessons from its embrace of positions that only appeal to '10 or 20 per cent' of the electorate, Mr Frisch said.
At the Climate Caucus, he repeated his long-standing position that America should drill for its own gas. Colorado has plentiful supplies and it is cleaner, cheaper and less ethically dubious than importing energy from Russia or China. He was taken to task over lacking a long-term view of the risks of climate change.
'I said: 'I'm very aware of where the earth is now, and I'm very aware of where the earth is going to be in 20 years, but the vast majority of voters have 20 days to pay rent'.'
Ahead of the final vote for the DNC vice-chairmen, Jaime Harrison, the former chairman, announced that voting procedures would have to change to incorporate the entry of a non-binary candidate. Republican social media channels gleefully shared footage of Mr Harrison appearing to lose track of his words as he instructed members how to treat a person 'neither male nor female' without violating the DNC's requirement of gender-parity across seven VC positions.
In the audience, Mr Frisch said it was like watching a 'Saturday night level skit'.
The best-known of the three vice-chairmen elected ahead of him is Mr Hogg, who survived the 2018 Parkland High School massacre. Locked inside a classroom, Mr Hogg interviewed his terrified friends about their views on gun control as the gunman shot dead 17 pupils in the corridors outside.
Telegenic and Harvard-educated, the founder of 'March for our Lives' gun-control movement has gone on to create 'Leaders We Deserve', a PAC aimed at electing Generation Z candidates to political office. But his recipe for the Democratic Party's recovery does not track with Mr Frisch's.
When a pro-gun Democrat lost her race in Alaska last year, Mr Hogg celebrated the defeat as 'good riddance'. Within two weeks of taking office at the DNC, he had used its access to vast contacts lists to send out fundraising messages for Leaders We Deserve, the PAC from which he draws a $100,000 annual salary.
'I was just elected DNC Vice Chair!,' one text read. 'This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base.'
For Mr Frisch, the Democratic Party, if anything, needs to head in the opposite direction – and become more open to winning the support of sceptical swing voters.
Responding to the text, the former currency trader sighed: 'That's God's gift to Fox News,' he said.
'Getting to the base is not the problem,' he said. 'It's adding people to your base' that the Democrats need to focus on, if they are not to face long years in the political wilderness. That is the message he will continue to take over thousands, if not tens of thousands more hard miles of driving the highways of Colorado.