Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) offered a frank message about the path forward for Democrats in the wake of their loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
The prominent lawmaker shared his two cents after MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked him on Wednesday what action Democrats will take as Trump makes “very obvious noises and very obvious actual decisions designed to subvert the American rule of law.”
“Look, we lost an election by around 3 million votes,” Raskin said. “Joe Biden had beaten Donald Trump four years before that by more than 7 million votes. So obviously, the country is closely divided.”
“So we’re going to alter some tactics and strategies and figure out how the right has captured a lot of the social media, and I think we have been outflanked there,” he said.
He said he stands by the “massive ground game” strategy Democrats deployed for this year’s election, but “there are clearly some changes that need to be made.”
He continued, “We’re not going to change our values. We’re not going to abandon American constitutional democracy because we lost an election by 1% or 1.5%. We’re not going to abandon the rule of law.”
“We’re going to be recruiting and mobilizing hundreds of thousands and millions of more people to get out there and be leaders in this fight,” he concluded. “What else can we do? This is not a game of volleyball or badminton where we’re going to quit the game or something. I mean, this is the fight of our lives that we’re in now.”
Raskin is vacating his role as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee to run to lead Democrats on another influential House committee, the judiciary. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is running to replace Raskin.
Republicans won full control of Washington in the November election, but they’ll hold a very slim majority in the House.
Trump has already alarmed critics by choosing deeply controversial figures to fill his administration, such as conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, whom he picked to lead the FBI.
Democracy In The Balance
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See his MSNBC interview below.