Opinion | The Democratic Party’s New Recruiter Has a Theory

For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details.

“A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,” he told me, chowing on a burrito at a corner table in Milly’s Community Cafe in Aurora, Colo., at the heart of his district outside Denver. Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck to paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. “They’re not listening to us because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.”

He’s not wrong. How the Democratic Party wound up in the political wilderness has myriad answers. But one of the clearest and, for many Democrats, the most vexing, is that the party became identified as the champion of cultural elites. Mathematically speaking, this is no way to win the White House, the Senate or the House — the chamber where Mr. Crow recently became a point person in recruiting candidates to run in the midterms and give the Democratic Party its best chance to regain a modicum of power in Washington.

How the Democrats lost their identification as the party of factory workers, nurses, cops and firefighters is not a theoretical matter for Mr. Crow, who grew up in a working-class family and helped pay his way through college by working in construction and joining the National Guard and R.O.T.C. program before going on to become a paratrooper and Army Ranger, with three combat tours and a Bronze Star to his credit. In 2018 he unseated a five-term Republican congressman to become the first Democrat to represent what was then a tough swing district.

“You go into rural areas, you go into red areas, you hang out with the people that I grew up with, and they just straight-up think that a lot of Democrats don’t respect them — that they’re the deplorables,” he said, nodding to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016. “I still hear that word come out of so many places when I’m talking to people, when I’m trying to earn their trust.”

To hang out with Mr. Crow in Colorado, and to talk with his colleagues about him in Washington, is to grapple hard with the trust question. It’s central for Democrats right now. Having lost ground among almost all demographic groups in the November presidential election, they face both a furious party base that wants fiercer fighters and a collection of moderates, independents and swing voters who see the party as captive to the left. Democratic leaders in Washington have been all over the map in opposing the Trump-Elon Musk juggernaut, often looking impotent, and lately looking divided after their failure to block a government funding plan left many Democrats fuming at the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer. With the party’s popularity at a new low, Mr. Crow feels like a savvy choice to help nurture fresh talent: He doesn’t succumb to blind rage over Mr. Trump, nor is he a blind partisan in lock step with his team.

Nothing conveys independence and builds trust quite like a politician standing up to his own leadership, and here Mr. Crow is a standout. He arrived in the House in 2019, and his first vote was against Nancy Pelosi as speaker, on the grounds that it was time for a new generation. For “a brand-new baby congressperson” to do that is something, said Abigail Spanberger, a friend and fellow newcomer and Pelosi rebel that year. “The pressure campaign to get you to fall in line is more than anything you could ever imagine,” she recalled. Fast-forward to last July, when Mr. Crow confronted President Joe Biden on a Zoom call with moderate Democrats, warning that “without a major change,” the party was headed for electoral defeat and questioning if Mr. Biden’s age posed a national security risk. The president reportedly got testy. “I don’t want to hear that crap,” he barked, according to Politico. Eight days later, Mr. Biden dropped his re-election bid.

Ms. Pelosi, who would be entitled to hold a little grudge against Mr. Crow, has only praise for him. “Congressman Crow is an excellent messenger on national security and how we govern from the center,” she told me, citing his work as a House manager for Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and as a member of the intelligence committee, along with his bravery during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trapped on the House floor after most members had been evacuated, Mr. Crow, shifting into battle mode, coached his colleagues on what to do if the chamber was breached, including little things like removing their member pins so they wouldn’t be as easily identifiable by the mob. There is a moving photo from that day of him holding the hand of a colleague lying on the floor.

Mr. Crow has distinguished himself in the legislative trenches as well. In his first three terms in the House, he was the primary sponsor of 10 bills that became law. In the most recent Congress, he was ranked the fifth-most-effective House Democrat by the Center for Effective Lawmaking.

From a different corner of the Democratic tent, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez sees Mr. Crow’s blue-collar, heartland upbringing as a boon to growing the party. “Leaning into working-class politics is deeply, deeply important,” she told me, “and also demonstrating and showing the ways that that cuts across all differences in geography, identity, background.”

This is not to suggest that Democrats would win with an army of Jason Crow clones. Every House district is different. But the party needs to get a lot better at relating to regular people circa 2025. Mr. Crow is not unlike those centrist Democrats from the West and South who pushed the party to grow beyond coastal liberalism during the Reagan-Bush era, when they were shut out from the presidency for 12 years until Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. Then and now, that work involves winning over not-so-blue enclaves with ideas and leaders who make genuine connections with people. “Jason gets it,” Ms. Ocasio Cortez said, noting that he won in a House district that has been both a tossup and, after redistricting, solid blue. “He understands almost better than anyone what it means to actually genuinely represent the full breadth of the Democratic coalition.”

Like many progressives in his party, Mr. Crow believes Democrats should be focused on helping hard-working people realize the American dream. He just has different ideas about how to best convey that message and who should do it — ideas his party would do well to lean into in light of its current sorry situation.

“The image of the party, it breaks your heart,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist known for his politically incorrect assessments. “Go to focus groups and ask what people think about Democrats, they say, ‘Old and urban,’” he lamented, before gushing that the 46-year-old Mr. Crow cuts against the party’s caricature. “He’s exactly what we need. He’s not coastal. He went to a state school. 75th Ranger battalion. Effective. Articulate. Honestly, what’s there not to like?”

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As Mr. Crow sees it, Democrats being out of touch with “vast swaths of the country” has little to do with policy and a lot to do with more visceral matters. “People across the board predominantly support our policies,” he said. “What that tells me is there are cultural and identity issues at play here.”

While stressing that there are “so many great Democrats winning in tough areas,” Mr. Crow has thoughts about how to revamp the brand. “We need to stop defending government and instead go back to our roots of government reform,” he told me. People are frustrated with the examples of government inefficiency and dysfunction they see around them, he said, positing that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is an “outgrowth” of that frustration. “It’s the wrong response, and it’s a farce, but it’s responding to that.”

More Democrats also need to show a “willingness to break from party” and cross partisan lines, he said. “People want to see that. And I can’t go to my Republican colleagues and say, ‘You need to break with your party,’ if I’m not willing to do that, too.”

Mr. Crow reminded me that he had been “very critical” of how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled — “Folks in the Biden administration stopped talking to me for a while after that,” he recalled — and of the “slowness” and “timidness” of the early approach to Ukraine. Then, of course, there was his clash with Mr. Biden last summer. “I took a lot of heat for that,” he recalled. But if you’re not willing to take the hard stands, he said, you probably don’t belong in public service.

“To do this job right, there has to be at least one thing that you’re willing to give the job up for,” he said. “I always ask people, ‘What’s the one thing that you would be willing to do and you know you would lose this job?’”

When I ask what his red-line issue is, Mr. Crow does not hesitate: “gun violence and also campaign finance reform.” Mr. Musk’s dropping several million dollars to influence a political race as effortlessly as “me walking into this coffee shop and buying a burrito” grossly distorts the electoral system, Mr. Crow said. His refusal to accept corporate PAC money is cheered by Ms. Ocasio Cortez, who sees it as an issue that defies left-right distinctions. “People sometimes want to tag not taking corporate PAC money as a progressive or left thing,” she said. “It’s not. It’s a populist thing. And it builds public trust.”

The problem now, Mr. Crow acknowledged, is that many people no longer see the Democratic Party this way. Which brings us to the core challenge: to dispel the prevailing notion that it is the party of the coasts and of cultural elites. This is fundamentally less about geography than about culture. Some of his colleagues need to work on “understanding the importance of some of our history and traditions,” he said, citing the discussion over guns as a prime example. His district has suffered multiple mass shootings, including the 2012 massacre at a movie theater in Aurora and the 1999 one at Columbine High School in Littleton. He gets emotional recalling the time his daughter, then 6 years old, came home from school talking about hiding in a bathroom during a “bad guy drill.”

But Mr. Crow also grew up hunting “everything that flies or walks or runs through the woods,” and he recognizes the importance of hunting in many people’s lives. “For us to ignore that and to write that off or to malign it — and for some Democrats it’s literally not to know what the hell they’re talking about,” he said, “is unforgivable.”

The head of the Colorado Democratic Party, Shad Murib, recalled how Mr. Crow navigated this terrain in his first House race. One of his campaign ads “was really leaning into his roots as a soldier who understands what weapons of war can do to people and why a Democratic position on getting weapons of war off our streets or holding criminals accountable for gun violence is something that can bring Republicans to the table with Democrats.” Finding ways “to communicate these issues in ways that everybody can find agreement on is one of his greater skills,” said Mr. Murib. “He can translate his message to a conservative audience without sacrificing his values.”

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Mr. Crow is indeed a good talker. He’s not electrifying like Barack Obama or a charmer like Mr. Clinton. But he has a gift for explaining things in a way that sounds so straightforward and common-sensical that even his ideological opponents seem impressed.

In a recent appearance on Brian Kilmeade’s show on Fox News radio, for instance, Mr. Crow detailed his concerns with the Trump administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine. He also parried claims that Aurora had been taken over by Venezuelan street gangs and that sanctuary city policies had made the situation worse. There was no shouting, no insults. The segment was respectful and occasionally chummy, as when Mr. Kilmeade quizzed Mr. Crow about his fitness regimen.

A recurring guest on conservative shows, Mr. Crow believes Democrats must go everywhere and talk to everyone — especially those who disagree with them. “Maybe I’m not reaching the grumpy guy watching Fox News, but maybe I’m reaching the spouse who’s in the same room. Maybe I’m reaching the children,” he said. “I’m sure as hell not ceding the ground. I’m not allowing these echo chambers to go uncontested.”

In more private settings, his approach boils down to: Get personal. “You have to show a genuine interest in people, and you have to be curious about them,” he said. “You just can’t come right in and start a policy discussion and start beating people over the heads with your policy prescriptions. That’s not the way you build trust — you know, start waving around our 21-point plans. You’ll immediately be shut out. You have to sit down and ask about people’s lives.” He added, “Once you build a relationship, then you can actually have tough discussions.”

This feels like sage advice for a party whose House members, according to its own polling, are seen by a majority of voters in battleground districts as “more focused on helping other people than people like me.”

Mr. Crow talks a lot about servant leadership, the idea that “every leader needs to consider themselves a servant of the people that they are leading.” This is a concept with biblical roots — Jesus talked about it in the Gospel of Matthew — and one that Mr. Crow said he absorbed during his time in the military. It also colors what he looks for in other candidates.

“You need to have the right people of integrity, servant leaders who understand their communities, who are respected by their communities, deliver that message,” he ventured. “I look to prior service. What has that person done with their life before politics? Have they built the business? Have they served in the military or Peace Corps?” he said. “What have you done outside of politics that shows that you know how to work with a broad swath of people that has put you out of your comfort zone and you’ve been successful in doing? Because Democrats have to win in red areas to retake the majority.”

And his main piece of advice for any candidate is a simple one: Be authentic. People will know if you’re lying to them, he warned. “I see so many people who fake working class in this business. You can’t put on a Carhartt jacket and brand-new boots and then walk into a construction site and have anyone think you’re going to be legitimate.” He recalled from his younger days working construction: “You’d go on a construction site and shake each other’s hands. And you can tell instantly by somebody’s hands who they are and whether they’re a working person or not. You do a callus check. Does the person have calluses, or do they have soft hands? You can’t fake that.”

To lay the groundwork for any kind of resurgence, a big part of Mr. Crow’s job for now is figuring out how to channel the frustrations and manage the expectations of voters outraged by a Trump administration run wild.

On a Thursday evening in late February, the auditorium of Hinkley High School in Aurora was packed in anticipation of Mr. Crow’s town hall. More than 1,500 people had signed up, around triple the usual number. Some attendees shared with me their concerns about specific actions taken by the new administration, such as cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Park Service. Mr. Musk’s name was invoked frequently, and not gently. Others offered more general criticism. Stuff is “on fire,” declared Jessica Berman, who described herself as an “elder millennial” and was seated in the overflow room before the event.

This air of urgency was evident when it came time for Mr. Crow to field questions. The audience grilled him on a range of topics, from Gaza to tariffs to the future of the Buckley Space Force Base. What could be done to rein in the administration was a recurring theme. The congressman patiently explained the complexities at play, including the grim math of being in the House minority. He talked about the Democrats’ lack of legislative leverage and shared alternative ways his caucus was pushing back, such as taking the fight to the airwaves and supporting litigation.

It was hard to tell how well his efforts were received. The crowd was restive, boos occasionally erupted at the mention of Mr. Musk or DOGE, and the applause was muted for many of his more nuanced responses. His balanced thoughtfulness did not seem to satisfy fired-up constituents looking for concrete answers and action items.

Later I asked him how he planned to deal with voters’ growing anxiety and impatience for Democrats to push back. “First of all, you have to be honest with people,” he said. “You can’t make promises you can’t keep. The worst thing you can do is to say we’re going to do things that we can’t do right now in the minority.” That way lies even more disappointment and alienation.

People need to see strength right now and understand the importance of “not allowing ourselves to be controlled or overtaken by” fear, he said. But he stressed that this a longer-term fight. “I’m not going allow myself to give in to the emotion of any one issue, because that’s going to be a lot over the next three years.”

There is no quick or easy road out of the wilderness for Democrats, Mr. Crow said. “The secret is there is no secret.” You just have to rebuild trust one voter at a time. “That’s done through individual leadership, through town halls, through engagement,” he said. “By showing up.”

Well, by showing up and knowing how to connect with people — no matter when they take their shower.