Late last year, when he was running for DNC chair, a position he ultimately won, Ken Martin released a memo calling for a national rebrand.
“The majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites. It’s a damning indictment on our party brand,” the memo, reported by Politico, read. “We must be willing to dig deep and recenter the Democratic agenda to unite families across race, age, background, and class…”
The memo went on to call for Democrats to “show up in nontraditional and uncomfortable media spaces on a regular basis, increase outreach to local messengers and trusted validators, and create our own platforms for authentic engagement.”
Months later, the party as an institution hasn’t done anything substantial — like a robust national ad campaign —on the branding front. I will save this rabbit hole, an important one, for another time.
But for this week’s training camp, I wanted to coach the Well Said AI tool on the branding challenge. Here’s what I gave the Well Said GPT.
The Democratic Party has a brand problem at the moment. People don't trust it, think it's delivering on policy, doesn't have a backbone. This is the party as an institutional player in politics. I want to distinguish the party itself from individual Democratic voters out in the country who have been protesting. (No kings protest, for example.)
I feed the beast examples of the brand problem. And then I fed it pieces of data from the past several weeks of efforts, as I see them, to improve the brand by individual Democratic leaders. The conclusion I gave the AI was that a few bold-faced names were publicly addressing people’s concerns with the party head-on and, by doing so, have begun the rebrand.
After my own fact checking and giving the AI a couple directives to fix nuance or tone and take out something I didn’t like, here’s where it ended up.
Yes — but it’s not coming from the party as an institution. It’s coming from a handful of Democrats who are breaking ranks with the usual playbook and starting to reframe what the party stands for.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin recently called out the party’s failure to distinguish between big business and small business — noting that too many Americans hear Democrats as “anti-business.” That’s a direct challenge to the party’s economic messaging, and an attempt to speak to people’s real-world concerns.
Gov. Wes Moore put it even more bluntly: “Gone are the days when Democrats are the party of ‘no’ and ‘slow.’ We must be the party of ‘yes’ and ‘now.’” That’s not just rhetorical flair — it’s a clear pivot toward action, urgency, and optimism.
In Texas, a U.S. Senate candidate literally puts Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on screen as an example of absent leadership — while calling himself a “common sense Democrat” who stands with farmers hurt by Trump’s tariffs. It’s a visual and verbal break from the party’s national brand.
And new efforts like the think tank Searchlight are explicitly rejecting purity tests and aiming to reposition the party around broadly popular, high-impact ideas — regardless of ideology.
But maybe the biggest source of energy right now isn’t from electeds — it’s from voters. Democratic voters are showing up. They’re marching. They’re organizing. The “No Kings” protests happening across the country are a sharp reminder: the people who tend to vote Democratic haven’t checked out. They’re fired up. They’re demanding a party that fights for them — not one that folds under pressure.
So while the Democratic Party isn’t leading a rebrand, Democrats are. And if history tells us anything, that’s how change starts: with people who stop pretending everything’s fine and start doing the hard work to fix it.