U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, said she’s sick of playing defense.
Michigan’s junior senator, a first-term Democrat, has been an outspoken member of the party since President Donald Trump took office in January, including when she gave the Democratic response to his State of the Union address in March.
During a half-hour interview with the New York Times this week, Slotkin shared what she believes Democrats need to do to rebrand and be more effective, which she called bringing back “alpha energy.”
“You can’t just point at Donald Trump every day and point out the bad things that he’s doing,” she said. “You have to show a positive, affirmative vision of what you’re going to do if you’re in power.”
In the July 17 article, which gave a nod to Detroit Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell’s 2021 “We’re going to bite a kneecap off” speech, Slotkin said she views the shift as synonymous with being bold, calling the tough play or taking the risk.
“In the Midwest, alpha energy is about emotion,” Slotkin said. “Whether you’re a coach and you know what your team has put into the game, or you’re frustrated that they didn’t give it their all, you’re not speaking from wonky details. You’re speaking about your gut and your emotion.
“I think Democrats have lost that,” she said, adding, “We respond to people’s pain with a long list of wonky policies.”
Slotkin is now delivering a series of speeches in hopes of inspiring a shift. Last month, she laid out an “economic war plan” before the Center for American Progress (CAP), and told The Times she’s planning more later this year on security and democracy.
This month, she’s also prompted a response from Trump as one of the sponsors on a bill requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to unmask and identify themselves.
Immigration and border security are two issues where Slotkin said Democrats need to be less afraid.
During last month’s CAP speech, she said for the past 20 years both parties have “abandoned immigration deals,” either because they were “good but not perfect, or because they preferred to use the immigration issue as political ammo.”
Now, she told The Times Republicans are using anti-immigrant hate “as a policy and a strategy, and Democrats are so scared of offending either immigration groups or people to the left of them.
“They are concerned about saying: ‘No, not everyone gets to be here,’” Slotkin said. “‘Not everyone has a right to live in the United States, and we, like every other country in the world, get to know who and what is coming across our borders.’
“That kind of clamping down with rules tends to make a lot of my Democratic colleagues really nervous.”
Slotkin said during her CAP speech that big, bold change is needed to fix a “broken system,” adding that an immigration system must also be keyed into the economy, as “immigrants fill critical labor shortages on our farms, in our factories, in our hospitals and in our firms.
“We need a system that brings legal, vetted immigrants into our country,” Slotkin said. “That means talking directly with employers. Setting up a completely new system that automatically sets visa caps to the needs of our workforce.”
She also spoke about the importance of economic policy for Democrats, namely moving away from a “prioritize everything” mentality.
“Democrats were saying we were for everything, that everything was a priority, everything was important,” she said. “And so the American public couldn’t understand what we really prioritized and cared about.
“Donald Trump, whether you believe him or not, prioritized the talking point of cost of living and the economy.”
Slotkin also said it’s important to recognize that it’s not just Trump supporters frustrated with their government.
“It’s across the board,” she said. “While Trump is being sloppy about how he cuts programs and cuts personnel and throws tariffs on, very few people in America are hoping that we just return, hook, line and sinker, to the status quo from before Trump.”
Since taking office in January, Slotkin said she’s spent her early days pushing for these conversations and prodding for some sort of unified approach.
Eventually, “I got tired of pushing on other doors across Washington and decided that I was going to take my best stab at it, as someone who comes from a swing state, who won on the same ballot as Trump,” she said.
Slotkin likened the Democratic party, with “a lot of leaders,” to a solar system, and said a new generation of fresh-faced leadership is necessary.
“We have stars, and we have planets with their own gravitational pull, but we don’t have a sun that we all center around.”
She said what concerns her is that some of her long-time legislator peers have seen so many things happen in Washington that their approach to Trump is just to wait.
“In the Senate, we don’t really divide into progressive versus moderate when we’re behind closed doors,” she said.
Instead, the real debate now is, “Do you believe that Trump’s second term is an existential threat to American democracy, or do you believe Trump’s second term is bad but, like his first term, survivable if we just wait it out and let his bad policies boomerang on him?
“I do not fall in that camp,” she said.
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