COLUMBIA, S.C. — If you ask James Clyburn why the Democratic Party has such low approval ratings, he won’t start with the platform. He won’t even start with the candidates. He’ll start with a critique of the chattering class. 

“We pay too much attention to the consulting class and not enough attention to our constituents,” the 85-year-old congressman said in a wide-ranging interview ahead of his annual fish fry this weekend, which has become a rite of passage for every Democrat mulling a presidential run. “Our constituents know what they feel, and we have to pay attention to people’s feelings.” 

For someone who has spent decades inside the machinery of Democratic politics, Clyburn’s prescription is striking. He was the majority whip who counted the votes for the Affordable Care Act, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and the man credited with reviving Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. He has been, in other words, the kind of power broker he’s now critiquing. 

Maybe it’s all that experience that gives him the standing to say out loud what many Democrats only say behind closed doors. His diagnosis: The party is losing a fight over perception that it doesn’t fully understand it’s in — and that’s true despite Democratic overperformance in nearly every race since Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President Donald Trump.

The data isn’t on the party’s side, and Clyburn knows it. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 70% of respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, including 54% of people who voted for Harris. Asked what he would say to Black voters — the party’s most dependable bloc — who feel their loyalty has gone unrewarded, Clyburn didn’t dispute the sentiment. Instead, he reframed it.

“People think that you’re making progress when you’re making headlines,” he said. “You make progress when you make headway. And we have been making headway all across the board, and then we get a lot of criticism because the headlines aren’t there.”

That instinct — do the work, let it stand on its own — is vintage Clyburn. But he also knows the communications failure that comes with it is real and costly. He said he has told colleagues, including Biden, that “there is no substitute for substance,” a line he credits to the Republican civic leader John Gardner. 

The problem is that maxim no longer wins.

“That’s not quite true anymore,” he said, “because of the media ecosystem. Style trumps substance today.”

His prescription, nonetheless, is a return to the basics he believes the consultant class has quietly billed out of the party. 

“We’ve got to listen to [the voters],” he said. And he offered a theory of the case for why the consultants don’t: “They don’t get their percentages out of ground operations; they get it off how much [is spent] on television.”

In his telling, Democrats keep trying to convert voters instead of turning out the ones already in their camp. Clyburn, the preacher’s son, went looking for a metaphor in the church he grew up in. His father preached every Sunday, he said, without expecting the entire congregation to come down to the mourner’s bench — the spot reserved for those ready to be saved. “I don’t think conversion therapy ought to be placed on voters. What you got to do is energize voters.”

A calendar fight

For Clyburn, you can’t energize a base you have misidentified. And right now, he believes his party is making that mistake: The consultant class often conflates the base of the Democratic Party with its louder, progressive wing rather than Black voters, who are often more moderate.

He sees that misidentification at work in the fight over which states should vote first in the presidential nominating process. 

Biden and the Democratic National Committee elevated South Carolina to the first slot in the nation in the 2024 cycle. More recently, party leaders including DNC Chair Ken Martin have signaled the lineup is about to be reshuffled.

Clyburn is not asking for South Carolina to remain first; he’s asking for it to remain first in the South. His argument: It is four distinct political cultures crammed into one inexpensive media market, a place where a candidate can test-drive a message without going broke.

Demoting it, he said, would be “a slap in the face” and a betrayal of the Black voters the party keeps vowing to protect. He draws a direct line between Republican redistricting efforts across the country, which are set to gut Black political representation across the old Confederacy and his own party’s willingness to sideline South Carolina. He worries Democrats are undercutting Black political power even as they accuse Republicans of doing the same.

A map fight

The calendar battle is running parallel to a more immediate one. For several weeks this month, the future of Clyburn’s congressional district hung on whether a handful of Republican state senators would follow President Trump’s lead and eliminate his seat entirely. They didn’t … for now. A gerrymandered map, he acknowledges, is likely coming back. The process isn’t dead — it’s stalled.

“I don’t think you’ll stop the map from coming back, and I don’t know that we should,” he said. His plan is to fight it on the merits, arguing that a 45% Black district is a far smaller racial outlier than the 75% white districts the proposed map would create. He believes some Republican legislators may already see it that way.

The collapse, he said, came down to three converging forces: a Supreme Court ruling two years ago that the existing district passed constitutional muster, thousands of overseas and military ballots already cast in the 2026 cycle and early voting turnout that shattered records.

“Almost 100,000 people have voted” already in the state’s 2026 elections, he said. “What we’re supposed to do? Tell those people, ‘your votes don’t matter’?”

What plainly irritated him was the map’s origins. It was drawn with the help of artificial intelligence and pushed by people who don’t live in South Carolina. 

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“There’s a certain independent streak about them,” he said of his fellow South Carolinians, noting that the same streak made the state both the first to secede from the Union and the first to implement Reconstruction. A few Republicans broke ranks, including one he had never met who called to say his conscience wouldn’t let him vote for it. 

It is, he said, a fight he intends to win. But even as he’s waging it, the phone keeps ringing with calls from people who want to know what comes next.

Looking toward 2028

It is impossible to sit across from Clyburn for long without 2028 entering the room. The fish fry, now in its 35th year, will be attended by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and California Rep. Ro Khanna — two Democrats openly flirting with runs for president. Clyburn’s blessing, as ever, would make any primary fight considerably easier.

He has worked the phones with a long list of potential contenders: Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, among others. He insists, the way kingmakers often do, that he hasn’t picked a favorite. 

Pressed on whether he keeps a list of the possible candidates in order of preference, he offered nothing. “I may have, but I wouldn’t share them with you.”

What he says he’s hunting for is vision. He draws a careful distinction, lifted from his father’s sermons, between that and a dream. He name-checked former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as leaders who drew voters to something larger than just a policy sheet. 

“Find that candidate who can articulate a vision that will appeal to the emotions in the Democratic voters,” he said. His other note for the eventual nominee amounted to a critique of the present: Stop letting Republicans set the terms. “You can’t play the other person’s game.”

One more term?

It’s a game Clyburn knows well. At 85, he is on a glide path to an 18th term in Congress, a fact that invites an obvious question: After the ACA, after electing a president, after everything, why run again? What else is there?

His former counterparts in House Democratic leadership, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, have already announced they are stepping aside this year to make room for younger leaders. Clyburn said he considered doing that, too, then reversed course after sitting down with his three daughters and hearing from constituents terrified of losing the seat to a newcomer right as the redistricting fight loomed. 

“The question was, ‘Who would be best to hold on to this seat: someone brand new, or you with your record and relationships?” Clyburn told MS NOW. 

He bristled at the premise that he owes anyone a goodbye. He wasn’t elected to Congress until he was 52. 

“I didn’t get there when Nancy Pelosi or Steny Hoyer got there,” he said. “So why do I have to leave when they leave?”

He acknowledged a secondary motive that allies have floated privately: the chance to advise Hakeem Jeffries, who would become the first Black speaker if Democrats retake the House — a rise Clyburn helped engineer. A seat in Congress would make him a considerably more powerful kingmaker with a Democratic majority.

For now, Clyburn is doing what he has always done: counting votes, working the occasional Republican and watching November. If turnout holds, he believes, even the strategists in Washington will have to take the hint. 

That, in the end, was the whole case he spent the conversation making: The voters were never the problem.

Eugene Daniels

Eugene Daniels is an MS NOW senior Washington correspondent and co-host of “The Weekend,” which airs on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MS NOW.