Fractures in the once solidly united Democrat party continue to appear since Donald Trump’s second election victory, with an ex-Nancy Pelosi adviser essentially saying this week that House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries lacks the right stuff to take on the MAGA movement.
In a podcast for Politico’s Playbook Deep Dive this week, political adviser Ashley Etienne said that the New York Democrat “hasn’t shown enough backbone as a leader, and that his organizational skills are deficient at a time when strong, creative leadership is badly needed,” wrote the show’s host, Politico’s Washington Bureau Chief Rachel Bade.
Etienne knows her way around the top rung of the Democratic establishment. She was the communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris for a time and served as the former communications director and senior advisor to Nancy Pelosi. She was also a former special assistant to Barack Obama.
Bade also wrote of her podcast:
We talked about what Democratic kingmakers need to do to win back voters — from building out a better ground game to ditching attention-grabbing stunts that reek of desperation. She scoffed at the Democratic Party’s failure to conduct an autopsy of what went wrong in 2024, which has left the party reaching contradictory conclusions about how to fix its problems.
The podcast was full of behind-the-scenes bombshells.
Bade wrote:
Etienne believes Jeffries isn’t doing enough to wire the Democratic infrastructure with an anti-Trump message. He’s not coordinating enough with outside groups and elected officials around the country, she said, or deploying his moderates to argue that the party needs to heed the center.
“If you don’t have coordination, you’ve just got words on a paper that you’re calling talking points,” Etienne said. “It’s meaningless. And I think that’s where we are right now.”
For years Democrat lawmakers and pundits have spoken with one voice in Washington, while Republicans have often had difficulty staying on the same page. Many attributed that to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sway over her caucus.
Bade described the “most shocking part of our conversation” as Etienne’s observations on the Jeffries team’s failure to access advice from Pelosi’s more seasoned Speaker advisers.
Etienne said Jeffries’ team has spurned the idea of seeking advice from Pelosi or her former team. She said she recently ran into Jeffries staffers and offered to help them. But they told her that “the members don’t want any Pelosi.”
“I was hearing from leadership staff that the leadership on Capitol Hill right now wants to sort of move away from that Pelosi era — that they … don’t want to embrace anyone or anything that’s like Pelosi,” she said. “Which I just think is the dumbest s-h-i-t ever.”
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