Former Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential nominee, said his party has “lost the plot” on cultural issues with many voters.
“We lost the plot,” Emanuel said on “The Fifth Column” podcast.
“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,” he continued.
“You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence? You have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level,” he added.
“Well, they can just say, ‘We can do both,’” one co-host of the podcast commented.
“You’ve proven you can’t, because you’ve permitted a 30-year-low in reading and math scores and nobody seems to be calling the whistle on this. We’ve lost the plot,” Emanuel said.
“Because the party got unanchored,” he said.
“Every one of our most successful electoral presidents anchored themselves in what I call middle-class values and values that are universal, at least in this country, ascribed to. We went from acceptance to advocacy. Big difference,” he explained.
Check it out:
Rahm Emanuel on how and why the Democrats have “lost the plot.”
Our members-only episode with Rahm Emanuel is available now on Substack. pic.twitter.com/5HALlSCBEj
— The Fifth Column 🖐 (@wethefifth) March 31, 2026
Fox News shared further:
Emanuel argued there were multiple peak moments in the first 25 years since the millennium, such as the Iraq War, which he said was waged on a lie, the 2008 financial crisis where banks were bailed out, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all of which had one key result.
In all those events, he said, the wealthy were able to stay afloat while others paid the price as their world dramatically changed. He said that, while many people simply wish to point the finger at President Donald Trump for bringing more rage to American politics, Trump merely rode the anger that was already there.
‘LOST THE PLOT’: Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel torches his own party for losing touch with Americans, saying Democrats are “on the losing side” of culture wars and have “un-anchored” themselves from middle-class values.
Emanuel pointed to the transgender athlete issue as an… pic.twitter.com/E9JhvSQG8q
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 2, 2026
Emanuel, who served as White House chief of staff under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2010, could potentially rival other Democratic presidential contenders on social issues.
“Electorally I don’t think he’ll be a threat, but he has an ability to shape the race in other ways,” one Democratic adviser to another potential 2028 contender said, according to POLITICO.
“He’s good at getting reporters to cover him and he is shameless in a good way: He’s not afraid of putting himself out there,” the adviser added.
“He will spice up the race,” another individual commented, the outlet noted.
New: @RahmEmanuel, headed to NH and SC this week, is prepping a presidential campaign that’s a rolling rebuke of his own party. Can he really win in 2028? He sees a weak field.
“The answer to that is: It’s a jump ball,” he told me. “Even for the frontrunner, it’s a jump ball.”…
— Adam Wren (@adamwren) March 29, 2026
POLITICO has more:
Not all Democratic operatives hold an Emanuel candidacy in high esteem. Asked what she thinks of an Emanuel campaign, Rebecca Katz, the Democratic strategist who represented Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, simply said, “I don’t.”
But he’s good at making himself hard to ignore.
He has released no fewer than eight policy proposals, from a social media ban for children under 16 to a predictive markets ban for federal employees and their family members to age limits on politicians running for office. He has said he would campaign in forgotten parts of the country, and during his recent Michigan trip he demonstrated he’s in his “wearing safety glasses and touching heavy machinery alongside blue-collar workers in a battleground state” era. He also just hit up battleground Wisconsin, and on Monday will visit New Hampshire’s St. Anselm Institute of Politics for the storied Politics and Eggs event before heading to early-primary South Carolina — the surest sign yet he’s looking to be a 2028 contender. Meanwhile, he has established a weekly routine of jetting from a CNN appearance, where he is an on-air contributor, to back home in Chicago, where he cranks out columns for The Wall Street Journal and records a handful of podcasts a week, including one about fly-fishing, his favorite pastime.
The notion that he is merely trying to troll the Democratic presidential field and rein them back toward the center has given way to the idea that he is actually serious about running himself.
“He is out there throwing ideas out and traveling and being provocative and stirring the pot and moving the debate, and I don’t think it’s a prelude to a podcast,” says David Axelrod, the former senior adviser to President Barack Obama who worked with Emanuel when he was Obama’s chief of staff.