Senate Democrat: Party needs to lose 'weak and woke' reputation

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) wants Democrats across the country to focus on ways to "retake the flag" from President Trump and Republican majorities in the House and Senate and told one media outlet she thinks they should start by shedding public perception of the party as "weak and woke."

"I don’t understand how to rally us into a coherent approach if we aren’t on the same page on where we’re going," she told Politico this week before delivering a "war plan" speech to a gathering of Democratic volunteers in her home state on Thursday.

Slotkin, whose campaign team didn't immediately respond to The Hill's requests for comment, posted photos on the social platform X after her event at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, Mich., and wrote that she wanted to use the speech "to lay out my strategy for how Democrats should be meeting this moment in our country’s history."

"After this 100 days of the Trump Administration, we owe the nation a plan: reclaiming our patriotism, a real economic plan for the Middle Class, and a fight for our democracy that recognizes the stakes," she wrote.

Politico reported, based on a draft version of the speech before it was delivered, that Slotkin would lay out why Democrats suffered sweeping setbacks last year, attributing her critiques to focus groups of home-state voters who she said described her party as "weak and woke."

Slotkin, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump's joint address to Congress in March, plans to deliver another speech on the party's future sometime next month, Politico reported.

"I don’t think we need to hide the fact that Trump is flooding the zone and making us look 12 different ways at the same time," she told the outlet.

Democrats have been struggling to reach a consensus on a way forward following Trump's return to the White House in January. A wave of Democratic donors even stopped contributing because of frustrations over the current state of the party, The Hill reported in February.

Democrats mounted a party-wide effort to curb Trump's influence after he won the 2016 election, but the party hasn't come together similarly this time and has struggled to rein in mounting tension between more traditional Democrats and a growing progressive upsurge.

A poll last month found that the Democratic Party's brand has hit an all-time low among voters.