Kristen McDonald Rivet’s victory in her race for the open U.S. House seat in Michigan’s 8th District was impressive. McDonald Rivet is a one-term Democratic state senator who won the district by nearly 7 points despite running on fiercely competitive turf: Her district is packed with white working-class voters — typically considered Democratic kryptonite — and made up of multiple counties where Vice President Kamala Harris was walloped. About 7% of voters in McDonald Rivet’s district voted for her and Donald Trump.
The New York Times conducted an illuminating interview with McDonald Rivet about what she thinks helped separate her from the top of the ticket. Compared to the standard postmortems, it was a refreshing conversation. McDonald Rivet sees herself as a moderate Democrat — she’s an incoming freshman leader of the New Democrat Coalition in Congress — but she wasn’t gunning to blame “woke” politics. Instead, she focused on what she did right. Below, I highlight three standout moments from her interview.
1. Keep a laser focus on people’s perceived experience of the economy
“We focused continuously — almost exclusively — on pocketbook issues, on getting more money in people’s pockets,” McDonald Rivet told the Times in describing what she thought was the biggest lesson for the party in her victory. “I spent a lot of time on TV looking directly into the camera and talking about how I worry about the same things.”
McDonald Rivet rightly drove home the importance of paying attention to how people feel even if the economy is strong on paper.
McDonald Rivet, who says 80% of the jobs in her district pay less than $50,000 a year, drove home the importance of message discipline on the economy, and specifically on how far people’s wallets will take them. In her ads, she focused aggressively on bringing down drug prices and housing costs, reducing the cost of child care and tax cuts for working people. And she also used her identity as a mother of six to help present herself as somebody who is acutely aware of the average person’s concerns about costs.
McDonald Rivet rightly drove home the importance of paying attention to how people feel even if the economy is strong on paper: “When we talk about the economy and the data points that are typically associated with measuring the economy, and the jobs report and all of those things — great, beautiful and nice leading indicators, all of that — that doesn’t mean anything to people who don’t have money in the market and aren’t watching at that level,” she said.
2. Don’t use wonky language
McDonald Rivet cautioned Democrats against speaking in “generalities,” and when asked to clarify, she explained to the Times: “I don’t want to talk about ‘inflation.’ I talked about the price of eggs. We’re not, you know, having a conversation about the market. We’re not talking about interest rates. A huge swath of folks in my district work in the service industry. We can talk about raising income. Or you can say, ‘I’m not going to tax your tips.’ That is so real.”
At first blush, this is fairly standard advice — politicians should talk about policy in “kitchen table” vernacular. But it’s notable that the first example she provided was one that Democrats copied from Donald Trump. Democrats need to get better at conceiving and delivering policies that have vivid, tangible payoffs for working people. I wish Vice President Kamala Harris had taken that ethos more seriously; instead she struggled to clearly answer questions about her vision on the election’s No. 1 policy issue in a way that made working people feel seen.
3. Defending democracy is important, but you can’t lead with it
Lastly, McDonald Rivet’s commentary on Jan. 6 was striking. She described herself as outraged by the event, but she pointed out to the Times that if you’re “worried that you’re not going to keep your heat on, you care less about those things.” She continued, “I spent almost zero time talking about the state of the democracy. Let me just be really clear. Of course it’s important. And there are things that we need to worry about. But the very first thing we have to do is to commit ourselves to an agenda that makes it so everybody can thrive.”
This is also my takeaway from the post-Jan. 6 world. The event was a savage attack on democracy, and Trump deserved to be held to account for it and should never have been allowed to run for office again. But Trump was able to run, and the polling showed that over time, Republicans mostly shrugged it off and bought Trump’s version of events, and that perceptions about Trump’s economic record won out over any of his misconduct in the eyes of many voters. That Trump’s open hostility to democracy wasn’t instantly disqualifying in the eyes of tens of millions of voters says something frightening about the American public’s commitment to our founding ideals. But you’ve got to read the room and you don’t win by complaining about the rules.
