Debbie Dingell is going against the grain of today’s Democratic Party.
During an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday, she criticized the party’s hyper focus on “identity politics,” and believes the obsession is costing the party elections.
“We as a Democratic Party have got to be talking about working men and women, the issues that matter to them — understand the issues they’re concerned about,” Dingell said.
Dingell said she’s unsure about her place in the party because “nobody listened to me in the last election when I told them they weren’t talking about the issues that really mattered in the Midwest.”
The Michigan congresswoman believes Donald Trump won the November election “because of trade issues.”
“We’ve got to get our acts together. There are too many people — we’ve become this identity politics. We’re the women’s caucus, the black caucus, the Hispanic caucus. We’ve lost sense of ‘we’,” Dingell said.
“That our strength comes in community,” she said, adding that she sometimes doesn’t feel like she belongs in “any of the little different caucuses.”
Dingell initially sidestepped a question about whether she would leave the party before declaring that she would not become a Republican.
She acknowledged that she believes “identity politics” have “hijacked” the party.
“I am very concerned that is what’s happening,” Dingell said, “and we are forgetting that our strength comes in being ‘we.'”
“If we don’t figure out how we become ‘we’ again, we’re going to keep losing,” she said.
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