Transcript: Angry Trump Snaps at GOPers as Scale of Losses Sinks In

Sheppard: I mean, I think that they’re pretty vast, I think—partly because what you’ve seen in these very disparate elections—and I think the electorates are fairly different here, too—is that voters grasp all these things, and they respond to them really quickly. And I think that this also expands into other areas, right? I don’t think that, you know, affordability and anti-Trump is, like, the long-term future of the Democratic Party. But if you are building a party that is rooted around a message that is about improving the dignity of life for everyone, right, then that’s a really good way to reach a lot of different types of communities.

And I think it also stands in really sharp contrast to the, frankly, you know, cowardly and dispiriting message that you’re hearing from a lot of Democrats shortly after the election—that, you know, the less the party does, the better—that they need to kind of strategically abandon certain groups to prove their moderation to, you know, what Chuck Schumer called “the Baileys.”

And, you know, what we’re seeing in practice is that voters—both Democratic base voters and swing voters, low-propensity voters, whatever you want to call them—are highly responsive to a party that goes out there and says, you know, we see that you are struggling right now, and we understand something about you, right? And we want to make that better. And here’s how we do it.