A man adjusts a US flag hanging above his cattle on August 17 in Des Moines.
“I’m a border security Democrat.”
With five words at a CNN and Jubilee Town Hall last week, Texas Senate candidate James Talarico sought to dodge the stigma of the Biden administration’s failure to secure the southern border.
Talarico is one of a crop of Democratic midterm election candidates choosing language that pivots away from past election failures. For future political viability, the Democratic Party must reclaim voters alienated by its perceived contempt for politically and culturally more conservative Americans — including those who were once the foundation of its blue-collar base but defected to President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
One way to do this is to craft messaging on issues like affordability that connect with working Americans and highlight the link between Trump’s decisions — like the Iran war — and the cost of groceries, gasoline and housing.
Democrats also face a linguistic minefield as they try to again talk like the voters they want to attract without angering the party’s new base of more liberal urban and highly educated voters.
In recent years, Democratic messaging has often seemed academic, esoteric, politically correct or choked with jargon. Terms like “unhoused people” and “birthing people” were adopted to include and respect people who are marginalized or vulnerable. Such language shows regard for the humanity and individual rights of others. But it has sometimes obscured meaning and baffled people who are not deeply political, or turned away voters with more conservative values.
In some cases, Republicans have used Democratic language to drive a wedge between the party and persuadable voters and to suggest it has tacked to the left. The most hard-hitting ad of the 2024 election season attacked Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over transgender issues, telling voters that “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
A demonstrator holds a sign reading "Defund the Police" during events to mark Juneteenth amid nationwide protests against racial inequality in New York City, in June 2020.
The term “defund the police” became a national slogan after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Republicans soon co-opted it to argue that Democrats were weak on law and order — a narrative that circulated for several elections, even though senior party members like former President Joe Biden publicly repudiated it and its policy implications.
And in one of the most notorious examples of loose language haunting Democrats, 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton suggested some Trump fans belonged in a “basket of deplorables” — handing MAGA a rallying cry to underscore Trump’s claim that establishment elites viewed his voters with disgust.
‘I understand why you voted for Trump’
One reason — apart from Trump’s unpopularity — why Democrats are competitive in more states than expected during this year’s midterms is that they’ve selected candidates who sound like their states.
In North Carolina, Senate nominee Roy Cooper has developed a colloquial way to argue he’d “Make Stuff Cost Less.” He appears to be rebuilding the broadened coalition that made him governor twice in a reliably Republican state.
James Talarico during a CNN and Jubilee Town Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, on Wednesday, October 14.
Talarico speaks the language of faith in pious Texas to distinguish himself from progressive Democrats. His “border security Democrat” phrase balances his support for both a hard border and a softer immigration purge that would target only undocumented criminals rather than “small business owners, grandmothers and infants.”
In Iowa, which Trump won by double digits only two years ago, Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek brands himself a “prairie populist” and tells voters, “I understand why you voted for Trump” before he lambasts the president for raising costs and starting the kind of war he vowed never to fight.
In Maine, Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson refused to apologize for telling Sen. Susan Collins to “shut up” during a debate. The incumbent Republican suggested he was guilty of sexism. But Jackson, a former logger, turned the conceit of supposed establishment contempt for working people against his opponent. He said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that, “What I’m not going to be is talked down to by Senator Collins.”
Collins and Jackson are seen during their debate at the Gracie Theatre in Bangor, Maine, on October 15.
Jackson added: “I’m fighting for Mainers. And, I mean, I just think that was another situation where she was talking down to me.”
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has meanwhile developed his own searing linguistic critique of Trump that links alleged White House corruption to the economic struggles of millions of Americans. “Under the failed president Donald J. Trump, it costs more than ever in American history to fill up your truck, stock your fridge, visit the doctor or power your home,” Ossoff said at a rally earlier this month. “They promised to drain the swamp. Instead, it’s the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it.”
Of course, Democrats have one big advantage that facilitates their linguistic balancing act: It’s far easier to find language to attack an incumbent Republican president over high prices and economic insecurity than it was for the party to defend the Biden administration for its struggles on the same issues in 2024.
And a party that failed to take advantage of a president who boasts about an economic “golden age” when Americans are paying $4.30 for gasoline and dread their grocery bills would be guilty of gross political incompetence.
‘Talk like a normal human’
In August 2025, the moderate think tank Third Way published a memo warning that the while Democrats spent “billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters” they used “an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.” The memo concluded that “the effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.”
In the wreckage of another defeat to Trump, some top Democrats agreed.
Former Obama administration White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, told CNN’s Michael Smerconish a year ago that in 2024, the party allowed itself to be framed as “culturally, not only distant, but culturally isolated from where the general public is.”
Emanuel added: “You have to build a winning coalition, which means it has to be big. It has to be broad, and other voters have to be respected, something elements of our party don’t do. They like to lecture people to be exactly like them.”
Another possible Democratic presidential candidate, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, has been striking similar notes this year. He said at a dinner in Michigan that he was a “pro-diversity” governor but that to win, Democrats needed to “talk like a normal human.”
Governor Andy Beshear on the campaign trail at the University of Louisville on in 2023.
He criticized terms like “food insecure” for hungry and “justice-involved population” instead of prison inmates. “Sometimes these terms make it feel like we’re talking down to people, like we’re talking at them, instead of to them,” Beshear said.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way, said Democrats this year were doing a better job of finding ways to connect with voters.
“For the most part, we’re delighted with the people that have won their primaries and the races that they’re running, and they seem very well suited,” he said, pointing especially to the example of Cooper, who has prospered in a state that last voted Democrat for president in 2008. “He has done what it takes to win the trust of these voters.”
The general election campaign has been kinder to Democrats so far than primary season, which threw up several viral moments quickly seized upon by Republicans to portray Democrats as extremists.
In an interview with Fox News, Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer advocated abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court, and defunding the Pentagon. She said prisons could be abolished under long-term plans, along with national borders. The encounter ran on a loop on conservative media for days as the GOP tried to define all Democrats by association.
But Republicans are now creating their own viral moments with language that seems deliberately aimed at excluding citizens and groups.
Trump has been inciting Islamophobia in the crudest and most inflammatory terms by mocking the name of Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayedand falsely calling him a jihadist. On Monday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that a protester — a person of color who shouted that he was an American citizen — must have crossed the border illegally.
Democrats may not be the only party with a language problem.
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