Senator Chris Murphy says his party and the Senate are broken. He’s joining the Democratic leadership team in the new Congress with hopes of helping fix it.
Senate Democrat Leader
Murphy, 51, who won re-election in November and outperformed his party’s presidential ticket in his state, wants Democrats to sell themselves better and more aggressively go after corporations. He also wants the Senate to take more difficult votes, but has a grim outlook for negotiating bipartisan bills in the next two years.
“Certainly this is a pivot moment for our party and without a Democrat in the White House, the power centers are the two caucuses,” Murphy said in an interview. “At this moment, I’d much rather be in the room than out of the room.”
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Bloomberg Government: Why did you want to join the leadership team ?
Murphy: We have some very big decisions to make as a caucus and as a party. I really worry about a Democratic brand and message that’s pretty broken. Right now, our ceiling is 52 seats in the Senate, and that should be unacceptable to us. I’ve been in the mix on a number of pretty important negotiations, and so I’ve already been in pretty regular contact with Senator Schumer and members of the leadership team over the last few years. But I want to play a role in trying to fix what’s broken about this party in the way that we communicate with voters, especially lower income voters and working class voters.
After the election, you said it was time to rebuild the left. What direction will you be pushing the party when it comes to messaging in future elections?
We have to be tougher as a party, especially when we talk about economic elites and people who have power. We need to explain to people that this economy is absolutely rigged in favor of the billionaire class and the big multinational corporations. Trump’s embrace of that elite and his push to give them another big tax cut gives us a real opportunity to resell ourselves to working class Americans who have been deluded into thinking that Trump is an actual populist. So I think we can’t be shy about taking the fight in a more aggressive way to the corporations and the billionaires that are going to be embedded in Trump’s administration.
Second, I want to build a bigger tent party. That means that we’ve got to be actively in conversation with voters who agree with us on our economic platform but may not agree with us on every social and cultural issue. So that means that we’ve got to be in forums where those voters exist on cable news and online, and it also means we have to be less judgmental about folks who don’t agree with us on all of those hot button issues.
You come into this role as Democrats are moving into the minority. You’ve been a part of negotiating bipartisan measures in the past, including immigration, will there be room for that in the new Congress with a GOP trifecta?
There will be much less room for bipartisan work in the next two years compared to the last two years, and obviously I will be ready to try to get a deal done on issues that matter, like immigration. I think the immigration compromise we worked out can still be a platform for a bipartisan bill. But what I’ve experienced is that compromise tends to happen more often when Democrats are in charge of the Senate. I’m happy to be proven wrong.
What do you see as your goals in the leadership team for Senate Democrats over the next two years?
I know that the left is licking its wounds right now, but starting on Jan. 20, we have got to be firing on all cylinders, because these Trump nominees potentially spell the death of democracy. We’ve got to organize a massive national effort to try to stop these nominees, or at least make clear to the American public what the stakes are.
I do want to help the caucus understand how to effectively communicate in 2025. I’m not young, but I pass for young in the Democratic caucus. I’m one of the few senators that engages directly with people online, rather than just through my communication staff. So I don’t claim to have all the answers when it comes to how to communicate, but I do hope to paint a picture for my colleagues as to how much space we’re not occupying.
It’s insane that there’s only a handful of us that are on TikTok. We are way too risk averse when it comes to going on shows and podcasts that are not conventional and mainstream.
Is there anything you want to see when it comes to the way the Senate works that could be modernized going forward?
The Senate is pretty broken right now. We’ve got to sort of put legislation back on the Senate floor and allow for an open amendment process. There is too much aversion to taking tough votes in the Senate. There are too many people that demand too much in order to get a schedule of amendments agreed to. Maybe some of the younger members on both sides of the aisle can have a conversation next year about how we open back up the Senate floor so that we can have some real debate and discussion.
To contact the reporter on this story:
To contact the editors responsible for this story: