Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America. 

“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”

Slotkin said that she experienced this personally on her campaign, giving an example of an event with a group of Pakistani-American doctors she assumed would be reliable voters for Vice President Kamala Harris, but were actually all voting for Trump. She said the Democratic Party has also made mistaken assumptions about Latino and African American voters.

“You’ve got to appeal to people’s core issues regardless of their historical voting patterns, and you can’t get lazy,” Slotkin said. “And I think Donald Trump was not lazy.”

She described pocketbook issues as the key question in the race, and said her campaign had tackled the issue head-on. Voters, she said, were “confused” about what Democrats’ priorities were, especially at the presidential level, following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race.

Slotkin, whose state contains significant Jewish and Arab and Muslim communities both animated by the war in Gaza and U.S. government policy toward Israel, said that it’s “hard to overstate how much [the issue] roiled people.”

She said that “there was no one who was 100% happy with me” on the issue, and that she took flak from both sides for every statement she put out, but she said that she tried to “keep the lines of communication really wide open with as many people as possible, even if that meant calling people who were mad.”

The newly elected senator described the Jewish and Arab and Muslim community experiences as a “mirror image” of each other and emphasized that she expressed “empathy and understanding” for both.

The communities, she said, are “feeling the same thing: average Americans don’t care about our dead” — appearing to refer to the Israelis killed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and the Palestinians killed in Israeli operations since then — “No one cares about the security situation for my family… They’re fearing for antisemitism or Islamophobia. They’re wondering what their kids’ experience is going to be like at university.”

Her comments appearing to draw equivalency between the two communities’ concerns echo perceptions and criticisms she faced on the campaign trail that she was trying to play both sides of the conflict, waffling to appeal to different audiences, rather than taking definitive stances.

On the webinar, she also expressed specific concern about left-wing antisemitism.

Slotkin ultimately won several key Arab and Muslim communities where the Harris campaign struggled, including Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.

Slotkin did not say definitively how she plans to vote on any of Trump’s nominees for key national security positions, saying she plans to be “as objective and as open-minded as I can.” She added, however, that it’s important that the people in these roles must have “competence and character.”

“The head of the CIA, the DNI, the secretary of defense, the head of the FBI are making life-and-death security decisions on behalf of the American people,” Slotkin said. “And if they do a crappy job or don’t have the right interest or are advocating for the wrong interests, people can die. American citizens can be less safe. So there should be a pretty high bar on these folks, but I’m going to take each of them as they come.”

She indicated that she sees Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as a reasonable and traditional choice for secretary of state, adding that “every president deserves to have their own people.”

Slotkin said that she’s been concerned by some of the accusations of misconduct against Secretary of Defense-nominee Pete Hegseth, but said that her greater concern is whether he would deploy U.S. troops in ways contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

Looking ahead to the incoming Trump administration, Slotkin emphasized the need for Jewish groups to “prioritize” and focus on votes and policies that people take rather than individual statements. She said that will be her strategy toward Trump — not responding to every statement he makes.

“I’m going to look at each issue and say, is it a strategic or a tactical threat? Is it long term or short term? If it’s a long-term threat to the interests I care about, the second question is, is it reversible or irreversible?” Slotkin said.

Addressing the Jewish community, she emphasized the need for “new and open-minded thinking,” on issues like Trump’s efforts toward Middle East peace.

“We can’t be against progress, even if it’s [Trump] who suggests it,” Slotkin said. “The Abraham Accords did good things. They came from an administration I don’t love, but I’m not going to be against progress just to be mad because I don’t enjoy Donald Trump and his leadership.”