When anyone whose family is as political as Rep. Debbie Dingell’s says that Democrats are in trouble, it would be wise for party leaders to listen.
The Michigan Democrat represents a district held by her father-in-law for 22 years before his son, John Dingell, won it, and then she ran and won after her husband retired in 2014. Combined, the three Dingells have represented that district for over 90 years.
She was a freshman representative in 2015 and 2016, which may explain why her warnings to the Democrats about the surging then-candidate Donald Trump went largely unheeded.
“Everybody knows, I’m now the famous one who tried to warn everybody in ’15 and ’16 that we had a problem,” the Democratic House member told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “And nobody listened.”
This election cycle, Dingell claimed, things will be different.
“The thing I’m going to say about these polls: It’s getting people’s attention,” she said, referring to a poll mentioned by Hunt that showed incumbent President Joe Biden, 81, losing a hypothetical 2024 match-up to Trump, 77, by 10 points.
It should be noted that the poll surveyed only registered — not likely — voters, and had a reported margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. Still, such a wide margin, even this far in advance of the election, must have raised some eyebrows among Democratic Party leadership.
“We know what we have to do to go in and win this campaign,” Dingell told Hunt. “It’s going to be hard-fought.”
Dingell then claimed that Michigan is a “very complicated state,” pointing to the prevalence of young people in the state, the strong union presence and differing opinions about the current unrest in the Mideast.
Will Biden win in 2024?
She said those issues could be overcome, but Biden would have to visit the state and meet with the various voting groups.
“All of us have got to do a better job of talking about what has been done to save the economy,” she said.
“Do you feel like the Biden campaign is listening to you?” Hunt asked, causing a long pause of Dingell’s part that actually made the CNN host laugh.
“Yes, I actually do,” Dingell eventually said. “My phone calls get returned.”
“I think there are a lot of senior people inside the White House that get, ‘OK, this really is a problem,’” she said, calling Vice President Kamala Harris out specifically as focused on the issue.
“And now we’ve got to get to the things that we’ve got to do to make sure that we’re addressing them,” Dingell added.
You can watch the entire CNN interview below.
The current RealClearPolitics average of national polls shows Trump leading Biden by 2.1 percent amount registered voters. Virtually no polls of likely votes appear on the site.
At this point in the 2016 race, that average showed former first lady Hillary Clinton winning by 4.3 points; at this point in the following cycle, Biden was up by 7.5.
