Rahm Emanuel makes case for change to a divided Democratic Party

Rahm Emanuel helped build the modern Democratic Party. Now he’s making the case that it isn’t working. 

In recent months, as he tests the waters for a 2028 presidential bid, the onetime chief of staff to former President Obama has emerged as one of the party’s most pointed internal critics — warning that Democrats are losing their bearings on issues ranging from economic messaging to cultural positioning. 

Democrats “lost the plot,” Emanuel said last month on the podcast “The Fifth Column,” adding that the party “got unanchored.” 

“Every one of our most successful electoral presidents anchored themselves in what I call middle class values and values that are universal, at least in this country, ascribed to. We went from acceptance to advocacy,” said Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor who has at times tangled with progressives in the party.

“Big difference,” added Emanuel, who most recently served as former President Biden’s ambassador to Japan.

Emanuel’s remarks are getting outsized attention, in part because they come in a midterm election year from the architect of his party’s successful effort to retake the House in 2006.

At the time, Emanuel recruited a number of centrist candidates to win races in purple districts, including Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback who won a seat in North Carolina. Much of Emanuel’s message that year involved middle-class economic issues at a time when the Iraq War was the big focus.

Twenty years later, another war in the Middle East has Democrats arguing a GOP president has taken his eyes off the middle-class economic issues that drive voters to the polls, giving their party a big opportunity.

Emanuel is also widely seen as a presidential hopeful, and he’s been making the rounds recently, including at Politics and Eggs, a must-stop at Saint Anselm’s College’s New Hampshire Institute for Politics. He also made more than a dozen stops in South Carolina last week, where allies claim he was met with a positive response. He’s headed to........

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