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In a year when Democrats fared badly across rural areas and the industrial Midwest, Rep. Angie Craig was a rare bright spot for her party. The Minnesota congresswoman was re-elected to her fourth term by a double-digit margin last November, scoring her biggest victory yet and outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. Exit polls showed that a significant portion of Donald Trump voters in her district split their ticket to vote for Craig. Now the top Democrat on the House Agricultural Committee, Craig—a former journalist, mother of four boys, and first openly lesbian mother to serve in Congress—is contemplating a run for Minnesota’s open Senate seat next year. She spoke to TIME about what her her party needs to do to win back the rural voters she represents.
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This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What’s your brief assessment of what went wrong for Democrats? Why is the party in this situation?
I think we have to get back to meeting voters where they are, not necessarily where we want them to be. As it turns out, people in a purple district in Minnesota that I represent, one of their primary concerns is keeping their community safe. And if that is a primary concern to them, then knowing that they have someone in Washington who is going to work to support the police, who’s going to work to secure the southern border, who’s going to make sure that we keep fentanyl out of our country, those are sort of basic things that our voters have to know that we’re working on. That’s what we did in my last election. And many of the messages that I just talked about are not leading messages from a lot of Democrats right now.
My messaging was, I’m going to keep your family safe, our community safe. That’s what I’m prioritizing. And I’m going to work to lower costs and put more money in your pocket. I think as a party, we get pretty caught up in a lot of other issues, and they aren’t the issues that my swing voter is talking about when I’m home.
What do you think are the issues the party’s getting caught up talking about?
We have become so reflexive on the Trump Administration. If he says, ‘We got to secure the border,’ we say, ‘No, we have to do something different.’ Well, what I think we should be saying as a party is, ‘Absolutely we need to secure the southern border. Absolutely we need to make sure that fentanyl is not coming across those ports of entry. But we can have a secure border and a big gate that allows immigrants through into America. We don’t have to choose between one or the other.’
I think we’ve become so reflexive to fight against what the Administration does in many ways. Not that we shouldn’t be fighting right now, particularly as they usurp congressional authority. But I think we’ve got to understand that where we are on some of these issues is not where the American people are.
Why do you think you did so much better than Harris in your district? Why did some of your voters vote for Trump and you?
My greatest outperformance was in the rural areas and the townships, not the towns. We estimate we won about 17% of Trump’s voters in my congressional district this last election cycle. My constituents know that I don’t think Washington is perfect. In fact, I’m running on a platform of reforming Washington every single cycle. As Democrats, if we show up and try to convince people that the economy is better than it feels to them, if we show up and say, look how great Washington is, people can smell bull—t a mile away.
And what are those things you’re fighting to change?
I think we should have term limits here. The majority of people in our country think we should have term limits. I’ve supported legislation for six terms in the House, two terms in the Senate. People think that we shouldn’t have legislators who come here and remain forever. I think that there is a perception that politicians are corrupt, and the fact that we can buy and sell individual stocks only furthers that perception that there’s a bunch of insider trading, whether there is or not. And so that’s another area that I’ve written legislation to address.
I want to go back to something you said earlier, about how your constituents don’t think Democrats take their concerns about safety seriously. Why is that?
One: Republicans have done a good job of framing us in this way. Two: I literally am in a state where the city of Minneapolis tried to abolish its police department after the murder of George Floyd, which was an egregious act on the part of our police officers. But I was the first Democrat in the state to stand up and say, ‘Look, of course, we need to make policing better in our country, but the answer is not to take public safety out of our communities.’ And in fact, the voters of Minneapolis rejected that ballot initiative sometime later.
The people who are in front the most in our party often are the most progressive. And frankly, I think the Democratic Party needs to think through the big tent all over again. I’m not someone who would argue that so-called moderates or centrists need to be the face of the Democratic Party entirely. I think what we have to do is expand the tent. We’ve got to make room, if we want governing majorities, for people who are a little more Blue Dog in nature. Because those are the Democrats who can win in these rural areas. I think we can’t be critical of each other for the policy positions that we take. Because, as it turns out, if only progressive members of the Democratic Party exist, this is going to be the minority party for a very long period of time, if not forever.
How does the culture within the Democratic Party need to change to allow that to happen?
You’ve got to be willing to piss your friends off. Special-interest groups—many of them I believe are working tirelessly on behalf of our country—have got to understand that you can’t hold every Democrat in the country to the same scorecard if you want lasting majorities. I pissed off some of the environmental groups from time to time. Not that I’m not trying my best to address climate change in our country. It’s just on something like the Waters of the U.S., and agricultural policy, I really did think the Biden Administration needed to get the definition more correct, because my family farmers were going to be harmed. I’m gonna vote the best interests of the people that I represent. So I think we need these groups to support us, but there cannot be an expectation that every Democrat in the tent is going to be 100% on every one of your scorecards. And frankly, what you end up with is either a Democrat who’s a 95% or a Republican who’s 0%. So take your pick. If you want perfection, you’re not going to get the majorities. And if we don’t have the majorities, we’re not going to be able to help protect the communities that we care so deeply about.
What do you think should be at the core of a winning platform for Democrats?
The child tax credit over and over again comes back as the most substantial benefit to our economy from an investment perspective. Housing is something that we should be talking about more as well. I should be talking more than I have about that. How do we make sure that people have a good job, that their paycheck goes far enough to be able to to buy a home?
The other part of it is around regulation. You know, we can’t be the knee-jerk party of more regulation at every turn. We ought to be the party that is cutting red tape and looking for ways to streamline the path from start to finish of a home, or paving the way for new home construction or multi-units in communities. Can we do more to create more housing from a policy perspective? Not that the government should pay for any of this. Policy should enable the private sector to be able to accelerate things.
What’s the toughest love message you have for your fellow Democrats?
It is the messaging. And it is the policy platform. You know, I’ve heard some folks say, ‘It’s not our policies, we just have to communicate better.’ It actually, in some instances, is our policies that swing-state voters and swing-district voters aren’t with us on. Again, those colleagues who a few years ago who were calling to defund the police: our voters are not with you on that. That was not the Democratic overall messaging. But when you have individual members of Congress with very high profiles saying things like that, it hurts the entire party. We need to make sure that we do a better job of communicating what the party is about.
Hakeem Jeffries gets that. The language that I’ve heard him using since we came back from this last election is very encouraging. How do we lower costs? And how do we keep our community safe? I’m hearing him say that, and that was the winning message in my outperformance this last election cycle.
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