Murphy isn’t shy about suggesting that his party needs to learn lessons from Donald Trump’s victory, according to this interview in The Washington Post.
Trump understood that you had to be the candidate who most credibly looked and sounded like a reformer, Murphy said.
“He never talked about it in those terms," Murphy told The Post. "But he looked and sounded like the most obvious candidate to change the way that things were done here, and you could argue that the presidential candidate who looks like the most likely to change the way things are done in Washington has been the one that has won consistently over the years.”
Democrats, Murphy added, have become too paternalistic, too wedded to Washington, DC, solutions and distrustful of ideas from the states and cities.
That has made the Democratic Party virtually irrelevant in big swaths of the country, Murphy said.
Murphy backed Hillary Clinton of Chappaqua for president in 2016, but he praised Bernie Sanders for suggesting bold solutions, like free college tuition and how to fix the economy.
“I remember that day when he left the caucus meeting on a Tuesday and went outside to do his announcement in the Senate ‘swamp,’ with like no prep, and I was like, ‘This is a presidential campaign? This is going to be a disaster.’ It almost immediately caught fire," Murphy told The Post.
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