Potential US presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel has accused the party of trading middle class credibility for woke activism
Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has torn into his own party for embracing race and gender activism over “middle class values.” Can the Democrats row back the worst excesses of the woke era? And could Emanuel lead the party in 2028?
”We lost the plot,” Emanuel said on ‘The Fifth Column’ podcast this week. “We as Democrats nationally, from ‘Latinx,’ to defunding the police, to ‘police organizations are all racist,’ to bringing a set of cultural wars to our schools. We are on the losing side of those cultural wars. Full stop.”
“Nobody seems to be calling the whistle on this,” he continued. “You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence?”
“We went from acceptance to advocacy. I remember fighting for Title IX,” he said, referring to the anti-discrimination law that mandated equal athletic opportunities in schools and colleges for women. “Why would you undercut the premise of Title IX with the ability of trans men [to play] in women’s sports?”
Rahm Emanuel on how and why the Democrats have "lost the plot."
Emanuel is – or was – regarded as a standard-bearer within the Democratic Party. After three terms representing Illinois in the US Congress, he served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2019, mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, and US ambassador to Japan from 2022 to 2025.
He is the latest in a series of powerful Democratic figures to distance themselves from the worst excesses of the ‘woke’ era. Former Clinton strategist James Carville has called on fellow Democrats to abandon “performative woke politics” and embrace a “platform of pure economic rage.” Senator John Fetterman has declared that he is “not woke” and urged his party to toughen up on crime; liberal think tanks have pleaded with Democrats to stop using words that put “a wall between us and everyday people” – including ‘heteronormative’, ‘microaggression’, and ‘LGBTQIA+’.
Peak woke
The Democratic Party’s woke turn reached its apex in 2024. That year, President Joe Biden proclaimed Easter Sunday ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, Planned Parenthood offered free abortions and vasectomies from a van parked outside the the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Kamala Harris defended her record of promising taxpayer-funded sex changes to prisoners and illegal immigrants.
Current President and then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign capitalized on this, running ads featuring Harris advocating for late-term abortion and transgender athletes in women’s sports. In one TV spot, images of cross-dressing White House officials Richard ‘Rachel’ Levine and Sam Britton flashed across the screen, as a voiceover told voters: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Voters agreed, handing Trump all seven swing states and the first popular vote victory for a Republican candidate since 2004. Crucial to this victory were the votes of young white males, a demographic ignored and condescended to by Harris’ party.
Will the Democrats return to the center?
Emanuel believes that in order to win again, Democrats have to return to the cultural center. “Every one of our most successful electoral presidents anchored themselves in what I call ‘middle class values,’” he told ‘The Fifth Column’. “Values that are universally, at least in this country, ascribed to.”
His plea may be somewhat self-serving. According to a host of Democrat insiders interviewed by The Atlantic and Politico, Emanuel is “publicly and privately gearing up for a presidential campaign,” and “sees a weak field” of competitors.
Chief among these competitors is California Governor Gavin Newsom. While Newsom has repudiated some of the party’s woke dogmas – referring to the victory of a transgender triple-jumper in a high school championship last year as “deeply unfair” – he has also defended his decision to offer ‘sanctuary’ to illegal immigrants in California, created a government department to explore paying reparations to descendants of slavery, and permitted children to travel to California to receive sex change operations that would be illegal in their home states.
Newsom has not announced his candidacy yet, but is currently the second-favorite to take the nomination, behind Harris. Should Emanuel enter the race, however, it is unclear whether the Democratic base actually wants a more centrist candidate.
Emanuel has been described as a “vocal Zionist,” at a time when Democrats in the US sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis by a 65% to 17% margin. He is also an economic liberal, at a time when self-professed ‘democratic socialist’ Zohran Mamdani handily defeated centrist Andrew Cuomo in last year’s New York mayoral election. Emanuel cut funding to Chicago schools to build a new police academy, while Mamdani accused the NYPD of racism and proposed defunding the department.
Whatever form the Democratic Party takes in the runup to 2028, it will have to reckon with the fact that despite Donald Trump’s sinking approval rating, the president is still more popular than his opponents. According to polling averages compiled by RealClearPolitics, Trump’s net approval rating is currently sitting at -15.5 points, while Democrats’ net favorability rating is a dismal -20.4 points.
To close this gap, the party will have to tackle the legacy of an ideology it embraced and operationalized, through which it scapegoated and canceled skeptics, ruined careers and lives, and distracted Americans from an enormous decline in their material and existential circumstances. Emmanuel’s confession that they “lost the plot,” while reeking of political opportunism, may have highlighted an issue that could split his party’s base into cliques and clans, as the ideology he and his peers in the White House espoused did to a generation.