Returning from my family’s annual vacation to the Jersey Shore last August, I was struck by the number of Trump flags and signs we saw driving north. If I had a nickel for every piece of Harris-Walz signage I saw, I’d be well short of the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike. All the enthusiasm was for MAGA.
As Democrats prepare to pick a Democratic National Committee chair early next year, they need to find a way to reclaim their hold on places like the small towns that dot the Jersey Shore and points north, not to mention the big cities the people who vacation there come from: primarily, New York, Philadelphia and Washington.
If I had a nickel for every piece of Harris-Walz signage I saw, I’d be well short of the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike. All the enthusiasm was for MAGA.
Trump did better in those and many other cities, which are usually blue redoubts. He did better in the suburbs, too. On the whole, Donald Trump only lost New Jersey to Kamala Harris by 6 percentage points — a stunning achievement, considering that in 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney here by 17 points. Trump also had a relatively strong showing in deep blue Maryland; he even won a (very small) swath of Manhattan.
“It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states,” Josh Barro wrote after the election in The Atlantic, after describing what he saw as a sad state of affairs in his home base of New York. “The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem.”
Cue the red siren emoji. Democrats have grown weak in the very places where they were supposed to be strongest: big, coastal cities and the suburbs that ring them. Which is why, as they prepare to select the next chair of the DNC, they should put aside worries about the Midwest and the Sun Belt and instead elect someone from one of those cities that suddenly got worryingly Trumpy.
I am thinking specifically of Max Rose, the former U.S. congressman whose district included Staten Island, by far the most conservative of New York’s five boroughs. Rose is reportedly looking to chair the DNC, which will hold an election on Feb. 1. There are several fine candidates already in the mix, including some likely with more institutional backing than Rose, who lost his seat to Nicole Malliotakis in 2020 and has been in private industry since. Still, his political outlook is one worth paying attention to, unless Democrats want Connecticut to go the way of Mississippi (yes, Trump did better across Connecticut, too, as well as 75 cities and towns in neighboring Massachusetts).
Rose is a combat veteran who went to Wesleyan University, arguably one of the most liberal of America’s elite schools. But he talks more like a Brooklyn native than someone trying to impress his postmodern theater study group. Short, bald and given to cursing, he looks like he’d have your back in a bar fight. That’s refreshing for a party that podcaster Mike Pesca has described as the electoral version of a human resources department.
During the presidential campaign, Harris put out a raft of policies to entice Black men, Latino men and other groups. She had fixes for housing costs and food prices. It was like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Warren Has a Plan for That” shtick, except less wonky and less ambitious.
Why didn’t it work? Because voters don’t care about plans. “One of the hopes is that the Democratic Party will begin to understand that voting is not always an act of self-interest, but also an act of self-expression,” Rose told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a recent interview. “And if we completely ignore that element of decision making, we’ll continue to fall short.”
Why didn’t it work? Because voters don’t care about plans.
Rose went on to diagnose what I think is the Democrats’ main problem: “We have the country largely unified around what we’re doing, but not feeling like they’re emotionally, culturally and psychologically aligned with where are as people.” Hence the huge “Take America Back” flags flying from the expensive, well-outfitted boats at the Stone Harbor marina, or the Trump-Vance bumper stickers on tank-sized SUVs barreling down the Garden State Parkway.
In 2018, Rose defeated Rep. Dan Donovan, a Republican, by casting himself as a practical centrist. “He didn’t fight a culture war; he talked about oppressively long commuting times and the opioid crisis,” The New York Times noted approvingly after his win. Imagine that: a politician who remembers legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local. No one cares about your plans to save democracy if you don’t have a plan to fix potholes.








