The Institute of Politics hosted a forum titled “The Future of the Democratic Party” on February 19. The event, moderated by IOP Founding Director David Axelrod, featured a discussion with former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Washington Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb at the Rubenstein Forum.

Axelrod, age 70, opened by emphasizing the importance of getting young leaders’ perspectives on elections, saying “hilariously, Pete Buttigieg is the old man here.” He began by asking each panelist to describe what message they felt voters had sent in 2024.

Gluesenkamp Perez emphasized her unique perspective as a red-district Democrat. “I represent a triple-Trump district, so he’s carried it three times now, but I do think I am representing my district,” she said. “This is my family, my team, my community.”

She continued by criticizing the Democratic messaging around democracy and the party’s failure to reckon with voters’ rejection of the argument.

“I think one of the things that’s frustrating to me is… you get the answer to the question that you ask, and people have been asking the wrong questions. They ask the question that delivers the kinds of answers they want to hear, that doesn’t indict them in any way,” she said.

“A lot of the narrative and discussion—it’s almost disempowering for people to say our entire world is based on one vote. Democracy persists in all of these small things; it’s how well you know your neighbors, it’s who comes to your house, it’s who’s teaching shop class—those are all the things that build a strong nation. And a lot of times it feels like the national agenda is just this industrial complex of consultants that want to sell the same TV ads in Ohio as in Washington.”

Buttigieg emphasized his concern that Democratic messaging simply wasn’t reaching people.

“The thing we’re not talking about enough while we talk about what we have to say is where we say it,” he said. “I think that’s become a huge gap in the way that our party has approached politics.”

“People aren’t listening to [Joe] Rogan because they view it as being of the right,” he added. “They’re not looking for politics. They’re looking for… an interesting podcast, and politics finds them… And I think we really need to be much smarter about taking this conversation to places where it’s not reaching folks.”

Gluesenkamp Perez also discussed her proposed REPAIR Act, inspired by issues farmers in her district faced with their John Deere tractors, which is emblematic of her political emphasis on stewardship and autonomy. The policy would require manufacturers to provide buyers with access to parts and information for repairs.

“Imagine having a $600,000 piece of yard art and you can’t open it up to fix [it] without voiding the whole warranty. So, you know, people lose their [crops],” she said. “And what we’re saying with right to repair is that we have the right to fix our own shit, we are not just consumers. We are stewards. We don’t want this black, black box that we have no agency in.”

Gluesenkamp Perez noted that she had found a number of Republicans receptive to Right to Repair and argued that nonpartisan issues can help swing-district democrats build trust with voters.

Axelrod then asked Bibb for his explanation of the Democratic Party’s declining vote share among Black and Hispanic voters. Bibb emphasized messaging, saying, “I think our party, in many ways, has overintellectualized our values, to where we’ve forgotten how to have a very focused, singular message on what we stand for.”

Gluesenkamp Perez jumped in to emphasize the need to connect messaging and policy to tangible local issues.

“It’s like we have moved away from a system of representative government, where there’s accountability and a place-based politics, and moving further and further towards hegemony, where power exists nowhere and everywhere,” she said. “Without a fierce loyalty to place, representative government fails, and it becomes captured by these very abstract ideas. When we turn environmentalism into a commodity that you can buy at Target, you lose [it]. That is a flaccid argument in the face of what is an urgent necessity.”

In a similar vein, Buttigieg criticized the proceedings of the Democratic National Committee elections on February 1, arguing its focus on identity-based categorization alienated voters by failing to connect the party to substantive issues.

The New York Times reported that the event “devolved at times into almost a caricature of left-wing litmus tests on inclusivity. Candidates were asked to pledge to expand transgender representation, add a new Muslim caucus and affirm that racism and misogyny had contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat… [while] departing D.N.C. chairman, Jaime Harrison, labored to explain the party’s dizzyingly complex gender-parity provisions: ‘Our rules specify that when we have a gender nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female and the remaining six officers must be gender-balanced.’”

“It was a caricature of everything that’s wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach those people who all agree with us,” Buttigieg said. “And we cannot go on like that. We cannot.”

“I also think that we believe in the values that we care about for a reason, and this is not about abandoning those values. It’s about making sure we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them,” he continued. “What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one’s mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia? [That] is how Trump Republicans are made.”

The event concluded with audience questions, the last of which asked Buttigieg to share what he believed the Democratic Party represented in three words.

“For me, it’s always been about freedom, security, and democracy,” Buttigieg said. “I mean not just freedom from an overbearing government but things the government should do to secure your freedom from anybody else who can threaten your freedom, from a corporation to your neighborhood. Security on everything from aviation safety… to national security, to democracy.”

“And democracy in a rich sense of the term,” he continued. “Not just the formalities of voting in elections but living in a society where people are empowered to know that the government works for us. That’s what I think we’re about.”