Moulton says Democrats not grasping ‘depth’ of election losses: ‘We lost big’
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said Democrats are not grasping the “depth” of election losses last week, arguing the party should have performed better across the board, but instead “lost big.”
“I think there’s a lot of Democrats going around, especially in the House, justifying how we did by saying, ‘Oh we did a little bit better than Harris.’ But let’s put this in perspective,” Moulton said Friday on “CNN This Morning.”
He argued the GOP has been “in a civil war for the last year, the Trump faction with traditional Republicans, culminating in the House where we couldn’t even have a Speaker.”
“They couldn’t elect a Speaker for three weeks, all right? This party is led by a convicted felon,” he continued, adding that Democrats “should’ve had the easiest election in our lifetime.”
“We should have cleaned up, from president of the United States to local school board. Democrats should have swept this, and yet we got defeated across the board. So, seriously, we lost big,” the Massachusetts Democrat told CNN host Kasie Hunt. “And we’ve got to come to grips with that if we’re going to be willing to change.”
Moulton has been critical of his party in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election in which President-elect Trump defeated Vice President Harris, combining with Republicans maintaining their House majority and flipping the Senate red to deliver the GOP a trifecta.
The lawmaker has gotten pushback for his assessment of the election and recent comments he has made about transgender athletes; his campaign manager resigned after Moultain said Democrats are overreliant on identity politics.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told The New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
He doubled down on his remarks over the weekend, saying the criticism he received “proves my point that we can’t even have these discussions as a party.”
Moulton told Hunt that the pushback exemplifies the Democratic Party not being in lockstep with the American electorate.
“It completely proves my point. I mean, I was using this as one of many examples where the Democratic Party has lost touch with the American people, but the problem is we’re so insistent on policing our words and even refusing to engage in debates about contentious issues that we’re just losing on them,” Moulton said.
The House lawmaker was one of many Democratic politicians who were vocal about the party’s shortcomings in this year’s election. Some lawmakers argued the party has abandoned the working class, while others said the “far left” had an outsize role in forming the perception about the party, which ended up backfiring in November.
“We’re the party that’s going to stand up for minorities all across America when they come under assault from the Republicans,” Moulton said in the interview Friday.
He added, “And yet, we can’t even engage in a debate about the policies that we can win on, that we can actually win over the American people to support our position, not only to start winning elections again to get power back in Washington — which is really critical if we want to support and protect minorities — but even just to win this debate.”
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