Or, looking outside the conventional political realm, Mark Cuban greatly elevated his Democratic profile this year on behalf of Harris’s campaign and is unafraid to mix it up with everyone from Rogan to Jon Stewart. Cuban also has the history that comes closest to Trump’s: a wealthy, pugnacious businessman who became famous to a non-politics crowd by starring on a TV show. Oh, and George Clooney demonstrated a cold-blooded talent for seizing the moment when he undercut a vulnerable Biden with a blunt New York Times op-ed.
Then there’s New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Inside-the-Beltway types tend to dismiss her as having peaked in 2020. But Ocasio-Cortez, more than any other young Democrat right now, is a brand. She has a gift for social media, with more than 8 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on TikTok, and a talent for generating polarizing reactions. The second quality is highly useful in the current and foreseeable information age. David Hogg, the anti-gun-violence activist, recently posted a smart take on the importance of Democrats having a facility for direct-to-camera online video. Hogg’s prime example, 26-year-old Brooklyn city council member Chi Ossé, won’t be old enough to run for the White House in 2028, but Ossé has clearly learned from AOC. Sure, Republicans would vilify Ocasio-Cortez as a radical lefty, but they do that to all Democratic presidential candidates anyway, including Harris, who was solidly centrist. And maybe it’s time for the Democrats to lean into the party’s liberal base; eagerly embracing Liz Cheney in pursuit of moderate Republicans sure didn’t work.
It has been a while now since Democrats nominated a presidential candidate who combined elite performance skills with public policy chops—Barack Obama, in 2008 and 2012. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” declared a John McCain ad attacking Obama as a global phenomenon (as if being widely known and talked about in a national election was a bad thing).
Since the Obama era the balance has shifted even more toward the show business part of the equation. Who better to consult, then, about the party’s way forward than a Hollywood screenwriter with experience in both fictional narrative and real-world politics? Billy Ray wrote the Hunger Games script, and his Captain Phillips screenplay earned an Oscar nomination. Ray has also counseled victorious Democratic congressional candidates, including Pennsylvania’s Susan Wild and California’s Adam Gray. “Stop any American on the street and say, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’ The only answer you can come up with is, ‘They are the party that hates Trump,’” Ray says. “That is a failure of storytelling.”
“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”
That’s a terrific start on a message. Finding a riveting messenger—someone who can stir passion in millions of voters as Trump has, only for good instead of evil—will be a little trickier.
