Dem Strategist Roginsky: We Don’t Know How to Talk to ‘Normal People,’ We’re ‘Not the Party of Common Sense’

Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Julie Roginsky said Thursday on CNN’s “Newsroom” that her party cannot speak to “normal people,” stating that it was “not the party of common sense.”

Roginsky said, “You know, I’m going to speak some hard truths to my friends in the Democratic Party. This is not Joe Biden’s fault. It’s not Kamala Harris fault. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault. It is the fault of the Democratic Party in not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us. For a number of reasons, for a number of reasons, we don’t know how to speak to voters. When we address Latinos — and language, and language has meaning — we address Latino voters. as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”

She continued, “When normal people look at that and say, ‘Wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so that they can burn buildings and trash lawns,’ right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say she/her, as opposed to saying, you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” but stop with the virtue signaling and just speak to people like they’re normal. There’s nothing I’m going to say to Shermichael, that I’m not going to say to you, that I’m not going to say to somebody else. I speak the same language to everybody. But that’s not what Democrats do. We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking to different cohorts because our focus groups or our polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It’s not common sense. And we need to start being the party of common sense again.”

Roginsky said, “Joe Biden is not responsible for that. Neither is Kamala Harris. It is a problem that Democrats have had for years. I’ve been banging the drum on this for I don’t know how, probably ten years, if not longer, on this. We need to get back to being the party of common sense that people look at us and say, we understand you, we appreciate what you say because you speak our language. And until we do that, we should stop blaming other people for our own mistakes.”

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