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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 24 episode of the “Say More” podcast.
Carine Hajjar: I’m Carine Hajjar, in for Shirley Leung. Welcome to “Say More.”
Okay, Democrats are at a crossroads. According to recent polling from CNN, just 28 percent of Americans view the party favorably. The lowest rating in the poll’s 30 plus year history. Critics say the party lacks vision and fails to connect with voters. Some say the party is out of touch. Others believe it’s simply gone too far to the left.
But there are new voices looking to dictate a path forward for Democrats. They work to gain back the trust of centrist and working class voters and seats in Congress heading into next year’s midterm election.
Some want to double down on the progressive direction of the party, but others are calling for a return to the center and a new vision for working voters to rally around Massachusetts.
Representative Jake Auchincloss represents the state’s fourth district in Washington, D.C. He is one such leader. Rep. Auchincloss, welcome to “Say More.”
So I want to start with a new initiative you helped form earlier this month. It’s called “Majority Democrats,” and it’s a group of Democrats in Washington and local offices who say they want to remake the party’s image.
It seems like every subsect of Democrats wants to do the same thing in different ways. What sets this group apart from those other top-down approaches?
Jake Auchincloss: “Majority Democrats” is a group that is starting with about 30 Democrats from across the country — local, state, federal — most of whom have won tough races or have big specific ideas about how to remake the party’s policy agenda. Together we are intent on challenging the status quo because Americans perceive the status quo as corrupt and as a threat to their financial freedom, and indeed to the American Dream itself.
And they want to see the Democratic Party treat cost disease in housing and healthcare, which now consumes half of the American middle class families’ take-home pay. They want to see us restore law and order, and they want to see us take on corruption and corporate capture that they feel is raising prices and keeping the American dream farther out of reach.
Hajjar: With the 2026 midterms just over 15 months away, when you’re thinking about this mountain that Democrats have to climb, that’s not a lot of time.
So what are your top priorities? Especially, what are the issues that are going to help get the Democratic Party back in the good graces of voters? And how do you specifically plan to sort of implement that vision in such a short amount of time?
Auchincloss: We can’t implement that vision by the midterms. This is an explicitly multi-cycle project because it took the Democrats many cycles to fall to the state that we’re at today from Obama in 2008, all the way through the 2024 coalition.
It’s going to take us multiple cycles to get back out of it. But of course, for the very protection of our democracy, we need to take back the house at the very least. I have a leadership pack called “Beyond Thoughts and Prayers,” where I support battleground Democrats.
I’ll be supporting them in this cycle coming up and we know that the focus areas are going to be healthcare costs and the fact that Donald Trump’s recent bill, which cuts Medicaid is also going to explode healthcare costs for the middle class, particularly those who get insurance from their employer. It’s also going to be about the general lawlessness and corruption and grift of this administration.
That is going to resonate with the American public — as it should — because they deserve an American government that, particularly on healthcare, is watching out for them, not for the health insurance corporations.
Hajjar: So I’m hearing some of the issues that you want to move towards: healthcare, law, housing, and corruption. But what issues do Democrats have to move away from — political, social, and economic?
Auchincloss: It’s encapsulated in the school closures. I took office in fall of 2020 and my day one issue was reopening the schools. In May of 2020, Ashish Jha, who’s a constituent of mine and would go on to become the COVID coordinator for Joe Biden, was saying that the schools not only could, but should reopen fully May of 2020.
Well, the amount of time it took from when Ashish Jha said that, to the schools actually reopening across blue cities and blue states is about 18 months. The damage both academic and socioemotional to American children is profound. There’s 50 million public school children in this country, about half are behind on reading, writing, or arithmetic.
At this point, teachers tell me that their behavior and social skills have atrophied and have still not fully recovered. Democrats have to be plain that we own some of that. We kept the schools closed for too long, and the way that we did it, I think, exemplifies where we have divorced ourselves from the median voter.
Instead of focusing on the outcomes that mattered to Americans at that time, which was, “Get my children back into the classroom,” we became fixated on process, particularly process that was oriented around different demands from interest groups. “Process, process, process,” not actual outcomes. And we see that pattern too many times.
And the second thing is when parents came to these school committee hearings or to other platforms to voice their real fear and frustration, what you heard from too many elected officials was condescension, patronizing, even mockery, that toxic mix of condescending to voters, while focusing on process for groups rather than outcomes for everybody, that is what we have to get away from.
We need to be a party that delivers for the middle class. The middle class doesn’t have a corporate political action committee (PAC) or a Super PAC or a lobbyist as Senator [Elissa] Slotkin has said. But, they should have the Democratic Party.
Hajjar: So, the COVID School closures is sort of one of these borderline culture war issues. What about another issue that your Democratic colleague and fellow Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton brought up earlier this year about transgender athletes in women’s sports? Do you think that that was a valuable conversation to open up for the Democratic Party because it did become quite a divisive voter issue in the 2024 election?
Auchincloss: I think it’s an example of Democrats being perceived as outside of the cultural mainstream, but the result, or our take away from it, should not be that we become “MAGA White.” I’m hearing too many across the party think that on a whole range of issues, whether it’s trans rights or immigration or gun safety or climate, that somehow the answer is a reflexive move to the center.
To me, it’s more nuanced than that. It’s not a reflexive move to the center. We are a different party than the Republican Party. We have different values. We believe in gun safety. We believe in climate action. We believe in civil rights and non-discrimination for the LGBT community. But we have to speak authentically about the issues rather than in a moralizing tone.
Andy Beshear, I think has put this very well. Andy Beshear, obviously the governor of Kentucky, a red state, and he vetoed an anti-trans bill. He vetoed it knowing that frankly, the majority of Kentuckians disagree with him on it.
And he explained why he vetoed it.
He said, “Listen, I’m a Christian and my Christian faith tells me that this is not the right way to treat our young people.”
And I respect that. “Some of you may disagree with me. Now let’s move on to talking about roads, bridges, and jobs.” And that worked for him. And I think that is a tone that Democrats need to take.
Don’t apologize for having progressive points of view on issues, particularly where we think the arc of history is on our side with expanded civil rights. But do it in a way that invites people into a conversation rather than hectoring them for not having a point of view that fully aligns with us.
And also, of course, the curiosity and pragmatism to understand that we don’t always have the full, right answer. We should get to a place where their safety and sportsmanship is being upheld and we’re also respecting the trans communities’ rights to live, to pursue happiness the way they perceive it.
Hajjar: I want to touch on another issue that’s been very controversial in your party, particularly, which is Israel.
You’ve been a staunch supporter of Israel. A lot of members of your party are not. So how do you move forward when there’s so much division on such a contentious issue?
Auchincloss: There’s always going to be divisions within parties on contentious issues.
And, I think for me it is about preventing this claim that somehow Zionism equates to colonialism from taking hold over the Democratic base, because I fundamentally reject that claim. Zionism is a story of heroism. It’s a fundamentally progressive story, and the United States and Israel’s alliance makes both Israelis and Americans safer.
If you look at October 7th, the day after Israel was surrounded by six terror armies and facing an Iran that was marching towards a nuclear weapon and exporting oil to China that it was using then to fund these proxy terror groups. Since that day, and because of US support for Israel, expressed sometimes through funding and material, Israel has knocked out four out of those six terror armies and boxed in the other two. And it has made Iran weaker, relative to the Arab states and to Israel than at any time since the Shah was in power.
The Middle East is in a more stable and peaceful place now than it was on October 7th, and that is a direct result of the US and Israel working together, and I don’t think Democrats who believe that should be on our back heels because if we had listened to the hard left on issues of foreign policy– first on Ukraine– we would’ve capitulated in summer of 2022 and second on Israel.
Hamas would still be in power. There’d be more hostages held in terror tunnels. Hezbollah would still be in power and the Lebanese people would not have the prospect for a new dawn. The Syrian regime that had gassed children would still be in power and there would be no prospect for building bridges of commerce and culture with a new Syrian government.
So they’ve just been wrong on the issue, and I don’t think we should be afraid to engage on the subject, but at the same time, we can’t let it explode the Democratic party because we have work to do here in the United States.
Hajjar: I want to go back to something you said about communication, how leaders talk to voters.
You said that Democrats at times condescend to their electorate. Tell me about that. What do you mean specifically and why is that such a hurdle?
Auchincloss: Well, I think back to one voter I talked to from Pennsylvania who said, “I think the GOP is crazy, but I think the Democrats are preachy and I’ll say crazy over preachy because they’re not judging me.”
And the reason that’s so profound is that the human brain responds to being judged in the same way that we respond to physical fear. If you feel that you are being judged, particularly being judged on attributes that you associate closely with your own identity, you literally have a flight or fight response.
And if you are afraid, if you have that response, it is impossible to be curious. You can’t be afraid and curious at the same time, your brain doesn’t allow it. So if people are being condescended to, they neurochemically cannot be curious about democratic policies or ideas, they won’t hear it. They literally will not hear it.
So, there’s a lot of Democrats who are insisting that our road back has to be laser focused on affordability. And of course I agree and I hope we can talk about treating cost, disease and ideas for financial freedom. They won’t hear them if they think that we are looking down our nose at them because of a whole milieu of cultural issues.
Hajjar: So earlier this month, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in the race for New York City mayor. He’s a new voice in the Democratic Party who has advocated for narrowing the scope of policing, for example.
Just days before that, you had a really interesting Substack post about shoplifting and quality of life. You argued that Democrats have to pay more attention to these quality of life issues, shoplifting being an example.
Was the timing just a coincidence, and did democratic socialists like Mamdani who want to steer the party further to the left, make your job harder?
Auchincloss: Make my job harder? Let me put it this way.
I think it is good for us to have a vigorous exchange of ideas as a party. For the last 10 years, Democrats have been in an ideological straitjacket. There used to be an old saw that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, and that has flipped in the last decade. What happened is Republicans fell in love with this very stable genius that we have in the White House.
And Democrats fell in line to oppose him and to protect democracy. As we should, we needed to be disciplined, and still do need to be disciplined to beat him back. But what that has done is it has stifled some intellectual dynamism within the party. And that’s not a good thing because we need bigger and bolder ideas.
So, I think this should be an opportunity, not to reflexively shut down new voices, but to counter them with our own points of view.
So Mamdani is talking about making housing cheaper in New York City. A hundred percent that needs to be a focus of effort. Housing is taken up somewhere between a third to 40 percent of most people’s take home pay. It is asphyxiating the middle class, and it’s denying the younger generation that first rung on the economic ladder.
I think a better way to do that is to build 5 million units of housing across this country over the next 10 years. And in particular, to make legal by right, that missing middle housing that is the workhorse of affordability: two units to 20 unit apartment buildings and making it so that they have no parking minimums, that they have one staircase — not two — required and by making the construction financing more affordable so that more small-time developers rather than only big ones can get involved.
These are all things, by the way, that Massachusetts has been exploring. And these are much better ways to lower the price of housing because ultimately what makes your landlord have to lower the rent is when your landlord has competition from other people building housing.
Hajjar: On housing in particular, I hear you on the point about competition. It would help decrease prices, no doubt. But what has to be done from the government side of things when it comes to red tape and making it easier for that competition to happen.
Do you have any ideas around regulations that should be peeled back, laws that should be passed on, making that a more competitive market?
Auchincloss: Yes. Zoning is the antithesis of economic mobility. And, this is a really important point because there’s this stale debate within the party about, “Is government the problem or is business the problem?”
Show me the problem and we’ll decide. Let’s look at it pragmatically. In drug pricing issues, business is the problem. You have these pharmacy benefit managers that are the middlemen of drug pricing owned by the health insurance conglomerates, and they’re extracting hundreds of billions of dollars a year and creating no value, and we have to take them on.
It’s a corporate power problem in housing. It’s a government problem because the zoning laws we have here in Massachusetts have made it so that only 4 percent of land in Massachusetts is available for multifamily housing. So if we’re wondering why there isn’t enough housing in Massachusetts and we have to build 250 thousand more units in the next decade and we can’t figure out where to build it, well, I don’t know because 96 percent of the land is not available to build it on.
So we have to cut that red tape. As I said, we have to make it so that it’s a single staircase, not a double staircase. We have to get rid of the parking minimums, which layer in cost to housing and are a subsidy to car storage. We need to make it easier for first time or smaller developers to be able to build.
It used to be that you could come in and you could do a lot of fixer uppers, you could do a lot of two to four unit housing and you know, look at Allston or Brighton and you can see what that was like in the 1950s and 1960s. And now it is that if you don’t have a half billion dollar balance sheet and some big time developer, you don’t have enough capital to wait three years for a planning process. In most of the cities and towns around Massachusetts, that creates this very brittle monopoly over real estate development.
We want it to be a more dynamic market where small time entrepreneurs can compete.
Hajjar: I want to pivot to the kind of voters that Democrats have really started to struggle with, particularly young men.
You’re seeing Democrats try to make up for that in the past few months. For example, Pete Buttigieg trying to replicate what worked for Trump, like going on bro-y podcasts like Flagrant, which is comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast. But when Trump won, you said something really interesting, which is that Democrats shouldn’t just give voters a different flavor of what worked for Trump.
I think you called it the Diet Coke approach, right? They should offer something different. So I’m curious, is Buttigieg approaching a diet Coke strategy, and if so, can Democrats find a different way to resonate with young men?
Auchincloss: I think going into new and uncomfortable formats to have conversations is a good thing and we need more Democrats doing it.
And I do it on Fox News. I do it on various podcasts or YouTube channels. I’ll continue to do it. When it comes to reaching young men, my concern is there’s this very beltway mind of like, “Oh, we need to hire some consultants and test some messages that young men like.” And it ain’t gonna work.
Because you know what? I was a 16-year-old man once, and I can tell you that we don’t want to meet them where they’re at. What you want to do is challenge them to be and build something bigger than themselves. That’s what young men are looking for, is a mission that they can be a part of together.
They want to be challenged, not patronized. This is what I wanted when I joined the Marines. I wanted to feel like I was with others with a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps and working on something that was more important than me.
And I think MAGA is giving a very empty calorie version of that.
One that I think is overly oriented towards rolling back the clock and making a zero sum equation is, “You can only be a man if we roll back rights for women.” And I just fundamentally disagree with that.
My approach would be, “Hey, this country has to build 5 million units of housing. We have to build more ships than the Chinese Navy. We have to build five Hoover dams within nuclear power. We have to start more small businesses and the rest of the world combined over the next decade if we want to achieve a 21st century that is the American century.”
And you know what? “Young men, we need your help doing that.”
“We’re going to build a thousand trade schools across this country. Trade schools that are at the cutting edge of biotechnology, that are at the cutting edge of electrical work and nuclear work.”
“And we want you enlisted in this mission. We want you to be able to get the work, the wages, the wealth that allows you to be a provider and a protector for your family. And we’re going to empower you to help build this next American century.”
But give them a mission and challenge them. Don’t kind of talk down to them or think that if you make enough dumb jokes that it’s going to win them over.
Hajjar: I hear your criticisms of how Republicans are reaching out to young men, but what got them there in the first place? It seems like a lot of the young men that I covered throughout the election cycle in particular were drawn to the right because they felt like Democrats in particular either did not like them or did not fight for them or spoke down to them.
Do you sort of acknowledge those problems and how do you think they can be fixed, if so?
Auchincloss: Yes. And it gets into the pursuit of identity politics that has not served the Democratic Party well.
What the Republican Party has been able to do effectively is emphasize the unum over the e pluribus unum and make people feel like they’re the party of the flag and of patriotism.
And as someone who was in the chamber on January 6th, 2021, I find that immensely frustrating and it’s a massive opportunity for Democrats, particularly as we’re approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I think we should hook into this moment that we have.
We saw this with the No Kings Day demonstrations where in the last decade, the Revolutionary War has become right coded. I think that’s totally unnecessary. I think Democrats should actually try to take that narrative and say it is deeply American and patriotic to be opposed to authoritarian overreach.
Heck, we did it 250 years ago and we are using this moment now, this 250th anniversary. We commit ourselves to the American experiment and to be proud to be Americans, to be a party that is embracing patriotism. I think that’s a big part of where we lost young men, is they felt like we were on the other side of a bigger story that they wanted to be on the right side of.
Hajjar: So throughout this conversation, you’ve been bringing up something of a centrist approach to your party’s politics. It could be said though that there’s a risk by moving to the center, that the party becomes a party that no longer stands apart, that by trying to please everyone, you please no one.
What do you say to that?
Auchincloss: I think the left versus center distinction is stale and unhelpful in the same way that the government versus business distinction has become stale and unhelpful.
I think it’s ‘Do you have an appetite to challenge the status quo, including deeply held orthodoxies and very well vested interest groups? Or do you not?’
And there are some issues where you’re totally right. I would put myself in the center part of the spectrum.
I think housing is a great example of this. You tend to associate the left with rent control and with the center of the party on kind of a supply side that wants to build more housing. I definitely think that building more housing is the way to get this thing done.
On gun safety and on climate action, I’m quite progressive and I actually think that’s where the country is moving. On healthcare, I’m quite progressive. I think that’s where the country is moving. The question is, “Can you match the convictions with the political courage to actually get stuff done for the American public?”
That’s what people want to see.
Hajjar: You’ve laid out a really ambitious vision for the Democratic Party going forward, and I’m curious how that vision impacts Massachusetts and Massachusetts voters.
Auchincloss: Yeah, let me give a couple of examples. The first is on housing. As I said, we have to build 250 thousand units of housing here in Massachusetts.
We can do that partly in building more units of housing across the 351 cities and towns. We also have federal and state land that we can build on and we should build on.
I wrote a piece with Jonathan Gruber, the chair of the MIT economics department, calling on states to build new cities on federal and state land.
Massachusetts has Devens, which is a decommissioned military base. It has Naval Air Station Weymouth, a decommissioned military base, both of which have the infrastructure and their proximity to Boston to be good sites for large scale housing production.
On healthcare, we’ve got the Medicaid 1115 waiver coming up in 2027. And for our listeners, the 1115 waiver, in simple terms, is basically a negotiation between Massachusetts and the federal government on how much autonomy we have to spend Medicaid dollars and in what ways we’ve used that waiver over the last 15 years to do so.
That waiver just became really critical, because this “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is a gut punch to Massachusetts hospitals, it’s gonna kick hundreds of thousands of base leaders off Medicaid. It’s gonna raise healthcare costs for everybody.
The status quo is totally unacceptable to Massachusetts right now. We need to be engaged in these waiver negotiations and really swing for the fences and basically say to the federal government, “Hey, we actually want to cut a lot of the strings that you have attached to this money and want a lot more autonomy to run healthcare here in Massachusetts for our own to lower costs.”
Hajjar: So last question is one I’m sure you’re getting a lot these days. There have been plenty of rumors that you’re considering a run for Senate against Ed Markey. Are you in the mood to break any news on “Say More” today?
Auchincloss: I’m running for reelection, and where the conversation is right now in Massachusetts is about these Medicaid cuts and what it means when I’m talking to state senators and state reps and constituents.
The conversation that we need to be having right now is, “How does this state prepare for the impacts of this bill?”
So my head’s there, my plans are on reelection and we have a lot of work to do on those fronts.
Hajjar: But are you considering a run for Senate at all?
Auchincloss: I’m considering Medicaid cuts and I’m considering my run for reelection.
Listen to more “Say More” episodes at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at saymore@globe.com.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Carine Hajjar is a Globe Opinion columnist. She can be reached at carine.hajjar@globe.com.
