Democratic strategist Patti Solis Doyle said the party lacks a leader, message and agenda when asked about the state of the Democratic Party in an interview that aired Friday.
“Right now we’re leaderless, we’re messageless, we’re agendaless, we don’t have any alternative ideas to the president and the Republicans right now. So, you know, I’m concerned, to say the least,” Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, told journalist Mark Halperin on his podcast “Next Up with Mark Halperin.”
“You know, if your party holds the White House, the leader of the party is president. If your party doesn’t hold the White House, the leader of the party is the last, you know, president of that party. So right now for us, that’s Joe Biden, but he has completely — you know, he’s off the radar completely,” she said, adding that the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) “isn’t really the leader of the party.”
Solis Doyle also noted she has “never been happier not” to be in the middle of politics.
“It sounds really depressing, what’s going on at the party,” she said. “I mean, overall, when you lose, the party that loses gets, as you know — as I know, personally — attacked and criticized, and they’re the stupidest people that ever walked the planet, and ‘How could you have missed that?’ That’s what’s happening with the Democrats right now. They’re getting attacked from all sides.”
Solis Doyle’s remarks come as intraparty tensions among Democrats have spilled out into the public in recent weeks. News surfaced Sunday that American Federation of Teachers union President Randi Weingarten and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Lee Saunders would decline to be reappointed as at-large members of the DNC. And last week, David Hogg said he would not be running for reelection as DNC vice chair after he faced backlash from Democrats for announcing that his organization, Leaders We Deserve, would primary incumbent House Democrats in an effort to bring about generational change within the party, all while he was serving as a vice chair.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday found that 62 percent of Democrats said “party leaders should be replaced,” 49 percent of Democratic respondents said they were “unsatisfied with current leadership” and 41 percent said they disagreed with the sentiment that they were unsatisfied with leadership.