At a recent luncheon in Wichita, Kansas, the mood was reflective but urgent. Former U.S. Representative Dan Glickman, who spent 18 years representing the Wichita region in Congress, stood before more than 100 attendees at Wichita State University and offered a candid diagnosis: the Democratic Party, once the champion of working Americans and rural communities, is now struggling to connect with the very voters it needs to win back the U.S. House in 2026.
Glickman’s message, delivered on October 25, 2025, was as much about his own journey as it was about the party’s future. He recalled his first campaign, launched half a century ago with little more than determination and shoe leather. “I knocked on 45,000 homes in the district,” he said, recalling the days when relentless face-to-face campaigning and a modest $100,000 war chest could topple an eight-term Republican incumbent. “I don’t know if that could happen today, because you need a message, you need money, you need time and you need luck.”
But today’s Democrats, Glickman warned, are missing the mark. “We’ve got to elect a Democratic Congress,” he urged, “I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be easy. One of the reasons why is because, perhaps, our messaging isn’t right.” He stressed that the party must shift its focus away from cultural battles and toward “meat-and-potatoes economic issues that included health care, education and employment.”
His call for a strategic pivot comes at a time when the party is facing a full-blown identity crisis. According to a Wall Street Journal poll cited in an October 24, 2025, Deseret Magazine article, Democrats are at a 35-year low in popularity, with a majority of voters viewing the party unfavorably. The numbers are stark: between 2020 and 2024, Democrats lost 4.5 million registered voters to the GOP. Exit polls show support slipping among Black men and Hispanics—groups once considered reliable Democratic constituencies. Even nonvoters, often assumed to lean left, favored Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by four percentage points in the last election.
What’s behind this dramatic shift? The Deseret Magazine piece traces the decline to the early 1990s, when Democrats began losing their grip on working-class voters. The trend accelerated through the 2016 and 2024 elections, as the party’s leadership leaned into progressive social causes and away from the bread-and-butter economic concerns that once defined its platform. “This wasn’t about turnout, messaging or campaign tactics,” researchers at Tufts University concluded. “When the same realignment appears among people who don’t even vote, it signals something more fundamental — the Democratic Party has lost touch with where Americans, engaged or not, actually stand.”
Glickman’s observations echoed this critique. He emphasized the need for Democrats to expand their base beyond urban strongholds like Johnson County and reach out to rural, small-town America. “We cannot win without appealing to rural, small-town America,” he said, drawing on his own experience as a former secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton. He pointed to President Trump’s controversial proposal to give $25 billion to the government of Argentina to facilitate more beef exports to the U.S.—a plan condemned by American livestock producers—as an example of an issue ripe for Democratic engagement. “Focus on issues that people care about — economic issues, inflation, cost of health care, research and America’s role in the world,” Glickman advised.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ attempts to reconnect with voters sometimes veer into the realm of spectacle—and not always successfully. The Deseret Magazine article recounted how Zohran Mamdani, a rising socialist star and likely next mayor of New York, failed to bench-press 135 pounds at a Brooklyn street festival. The episode, widely mocked online and by political opponents, symbolized the party’s awkward efforts to project strength and authenticity, often falling flat compared to the brash, unscripted style embraced by figures like Donald Trump.
“Politics have always been about spectacle,” the article noted, citing examples from Ronald Reagan’s log-chopping to Barack Obama’s basketball games. But today, the message is less coded and more performative, with Democrats struggling to match the raw, populist appeal that has energized the Republican base. The party’s internal struggles over messaging are compounded by a divided consultant class, with some urging a hard left turn and others advocating moderation. The Democratic National Committee’s much-anticipated postelection “autopsy” has been repeatedly delayed, fueling speculation that it will avoid confronting the party’s most uncomfortable truths.
Glickman, for his part, argued that Democrats could benefit from a lighter touch—and a little humor. “I have found that almost every successful person — every leader that is successful in politics or whatever field — has a decent sense of humor,” he said, pointing to Presidents Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt as models. “They could laugh at themselves. I have never seen (Trump) laugh at himself. Only at other people.” He believes that self-deprecating humor, far from being frivolous, can be a powerful tool for connecting with voters on a human level.
The stakes are high. With three of Kansas’s four congressional seats held by Republicans and the possibility that the state legislature may redraw maps to further disadvantage Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, Glickman and others see the 2026 House races as critical for restoring balance to the federal government. “The objective in Kansas, he said, must be to expand Democrats’ base from population centers such as Johnson County and nominate candidates more relevant to interests of rural Kansans.”
Yet, as the Deseret Magazine article observes, the party’s problems are not unique to Kansas. Across the country, Democrats are grappling with the legacy of decades spent drifting from their working-class roots. The rise of political consultants, the embrace of progressive orthodoxy, and a reliance on identity-based messaging have left many voters feeling alienated. Recent polling shows that swing voters’ top criticism of the party is its perceived focus on cultural issues over middle-class concerns, even outranking inflation and immigration as decisive factors.
Some Democrats are beginning to question the party’s litmus tests and purity demands. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, for example, publicly challenged the party’s stance on transgender athletes in sports, while former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel bluntly rejected the idea that a man can become a woman. Others, like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, have acknowledged that making issues like gun control a litmus test has shrunk the Democratic coalition.
For strategists and data analysts, the path forward is clear: return to economic populism. As Democratic data analyst Ali Mortell told Deseret Magazine, “Some of our top performing messaging are policies designed to lower the cost of living and curb exploitative practices — like going after corporate price gouging and addressing abusive practices by credit card companies, insurance companies, and landlords.”
In the end, both Glickman’s reflections in Wichita and the national debate chronicled by Deseret Magazine point to the same conclusion: for Democrats to regain their footing, they must rediscover the language of economic opportunity and authenticity. The political game board has been upended, and the old rules no longer apply. Whether the party can adapt—or if it will continue to be defined by spectacle and division—remains an open question. But as Glickman’s own career suggests, it’s never too late to start knocking on doors and listening to what voters actually want.
