David Jolly: ‘Democrats Are Right on the Precipice of Regaining Power’

MENENDEZ: “David Jolly, I would never be so foolish as to question the premise of someone as smart as my friend Juanita Tolliver’s argument. But for the sake of conversation, let me ask you this. We talk about transformational change within a party. Do you think that transformational change comes from inside the party structure in that way, right? Is the transformational change actually coming from the DNC, from the RNC, or does it need to come from somewhere else? Who leads that move into the future?”

JOLLY: “Yeah, I think the responsibility of the party is, as Juanita and Molly both said, is to build the infrastructure of a national party. And really, that means you have to invest in state party infrastructure if you’re the Democrats. There are a lot of state parties right now that need some help. And this gets harder for Democrats given the census in 2030, when likely more electoral votes go to Florida and Texas and other states get harder to win. So the five-year project for the DNC is where are we investing in infrastructure in the states, state party committees to make sure that we can win back the White House, win back the country and prepare for the 2030 census. I think the policy making, the messaging will come down to very talented politicians within the party. We see the postmortems after the election. How do you communicate better? Look, I think it’s pretty simple for Democrats. You can give a tax cut to people making under $400,000, not just promising their taxes won’t go up. You can ban assault weapons, you can save our public schools, you can pay public teachers more, and you can get corporate money out of politics. You start talking about that, those policy issues while you’re building state parties. You’ve got a competitive party. This race Democrats nearly won. This was not the mandate Donald Trump, or a landslide that Donald Trump says it was. Democrats are right on the precipice of regaining power. The importance of the DNC, the RNC, other national parties is to build that infrastructure to compete and win in future cycles.”