Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) suggested that some voters’ frustration toward the federal government is valid, as many support the work of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Elon Musk, who oversees DOGE, has an approval rating of 49% for his work downsizing the federal government, according to a poll that surveyed 1,321 people with a margin of error of 2.98%. Assessing what this means for the Democratic Party, Khanna recalled the results of the 2024 presidential election, in which Democrats lost due to how its party became “the party of the status quo.”

“People are upset in this country, and they’re right to be upset,” Khanna said on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom. “Jobs were offshored, industries were hollowed out, China is winning in so many of these new industries, and the income gap has increased in the United States. We need to acknowledge that, then we need to get outside of D.C., into the heartland, into different parts of the country, and share our vision of how we’re going to help bring these communities back up, how we’re going to create economic success, and that would be much more effective.”

Khanna added that the Democratic Party can “absolutely” come back in future elections. However, he argued the party needs to evolve from its current offering to voters, which is just “the same old status quo.”

“We will come back if we have a vision recognizing that a lot has gone wrong for working and middle-class Americans, and we need a positive vision about what we’re going to do for their economic success and their community’s economic success,” Khanna said.

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Under a month into President Donald Trump’s second term, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York argued that the Democratic Party does not have the “hysteria” that it benefited from in Trump’s first four years. York said that any attempt to impeach Trump, which Democrats achieved twice during Trump’s first presidential term, is “not going to happen” anytime in the near future.

Meanwhile, former Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) suggested that the Democratic Party’s current strategy of working against DOGE is not doing the party any favors by “missing the boat” on the winning issue of cutting government waste.