Democrats Are Field-Testing New Ways to Talk About the Epstein Scandal

Democrats have been publicly conflicted about how much to talk about Jeffrey Epstein on the campaign trail this year, with some worried a continued focus on the convicted sex offender and his political connections distracts from a winning platform centered on affordability.

Now a growing faction in the party is asking: Why not discuss both?

Some Democrats are now attempting to link the rolling Epstein scandal with the kitchen-table issues voters have traditionally prioritized. This wing of the party is pushing to establish the Epstein saga as emblematic of the Trump administration’s failure to address other issues the country faces.

“We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. You remember that? But this is a government of, by and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection this year, said at a Georgia campaign rally on Saturday. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”

Ossoff is known to walk on a purple-state tightrope. But his embrace of these us-versus-them talking points illustrates that the antiestablishment take on the Epstein scandal isn’t limited to his party’s progressive vanguard. Ossoff did not comment for this piece, but some strategists say his rhetoric offers a potent midterm message — if Democrats more broadly are willing to take it up.

Faiz Shakir, a progressive strategist and former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign manager, said Democrats focusing on the legal process of file releases and the administration’s transparency failures “doesn’t do justice to what the main mission is.”

“Ossoff is on the right track, which is to say, I need to connect this thing, this saga, to something deeper about who fights for you and who doesn’t fight for you, who understands your life, who doesn’t understand your life,” Shakir said. “It’s going to be critical that people are able to take this out of partisan terms and move it into a place of persuasion.”

Bill Neidhardt, a political consultant with Middle Seat, a progressive firm, said Ossoff’s rhetoric is “100% the right move.”

“He’s right to take that populist tone and to show he’s on the side of Georgians and not the sides of the elite,” Neidhardt said, adding that it fits into the kind of “aggressive, populist economic message” he believes Democrats need to embrace to take back congressional majorities.

While Ossoff field-tests that rhetoric in the Southern battleground of Georgia, the progressive wing of his party sees the Epstein scandal as an indictment of the billionaire class and the wealth inequality that they’ve spent years railing against.

“What we should do is just tell the story of what it is,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is the embodiment of the American concentration of wealth; when it becomes so extreme, this concentration of wealth becomes put in the hands of such few people that they know each other and they find themselves above the law.”

The Democratic National Committee’s stance on Epstein isn’t far off from that, either. It’s making a concerted effort to bridge the gap between Democrats’ ongoing fight over redactions and the party’s broader economic offensive.

“The more Trump and his Department of Justice continue to stonewall and protect Jeffrey Epstein’s circle of elites, the more Americans can see that Trump is only interested in himself and the billionaires he surrounds himself with — not in lowering costs,” Kendall Witmer, DNC’s rapid response director, said in a statement.

Not all Democrats are convinced that conflating a high-profile sex trafficking ring with economic messaging will win them any political points.

“We should be focused on affordability and health care. The American people are struggling. Things have become unaffordable. You know, those are things people want to hear about. This is also an important issue, and we should talk about it, but at the same time, it isn’t the biggest issue for the American people,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who won a competitive race in Florida.

“The cost of rent has nothing to do about Epstein,” he added.

Some simply said the Epstein issue wasn’t top-of-mind in their districts. Rep. Jennifer McClellan said that what she hears most about from constituents and voters is “ICE and immigration, health care,” not Epstein.

“When people do ask about the Epstein files, I think that we owe it to the survivors to get as much transparency and hold people accountable,” McClellan explained.

And some are focused on procedure. When asked how he thought his party should message about the Epstein issue, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, said he thought Democrats should continue “demanding the DOJ to release all the files.”

“The American public wants full transparency, and until we get the names of the men who are responsible for the harm, we’re not gonna stop,” Garcia said. “Justice for the survivors, to me, is the most important thing. And then transparency is the second piece.”

Several polls conducted last year indicated bipartisan and independent outrage at the federal government over the Epstein files among likely voters. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS last month, before the latest tranche of files, shows much of that discontent remains, with just 6% of Americans saying that they were satisfied with the information the government had released.

Some progressives argue that tying the matter to other issues Americans are upset about — like health care and the rising cost of goods — makes sense, even if it might seem challenging.

“The scope of his involvement with governments and business elites is worth hammering home. I think people kind of get it. They’re not pushing on a locked door here. They’re pushing on a quite open door,” said Jeff Hauser, the founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project. “The challenge is more to consistently invoke it when it’s not immediately before them, to invoke Epstein in conversations where Epstein is not obviously going to be part of it. Democrats are sometimes extremely earnest and linear, and so they limit certain conversations to certain conversations.”

And some leaders of groups on the left are now arguing that not only is it a messaging opportunity, but an opportunity for some bloodletting within their party.

“Poll after poll shows that voters still disapprove of the Democrats. The Epstein files give them an opportunity to demonstrate that they are focused on protecting the powerless from corrupt elites,” Sean Vitka, the executive director of Demand Progress, an anti-corporate activist group, said in a statement. “Going forward, the Democrats need to ditch the out-of-touch advisors in their ranks, some of whom are connected to Jeffrey Epstein, and aggressively pursue accountability, truth and justice for the victims and survivors — regardless of party.”

Some were even more blunt.

“If Democrats want to have the moral high ground, they must, by necessity, take shots at people in their own party, and take shots at funders specifically in their party,” said Erica Payne, a former Democratic strategist and founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of investors and business leaders who advocate for higher taxes for the wealthy. “If they pretend that it’s one side and not the other, they will be unsuccessful in their efforts. And it’s time for Bill Clinton to be thrown under the bus.”

The push to weaponize the Epstein scandal comes at a volatile moment for Democrats. Off-year elections handed them wins, ginning up optimism ahead of 2026, and generic ballot polls have them holding around a 6 percentage-point advantage among likely voters as of last month. Another poll from last month by Fox News of voters shows Democrats holding a similar lead, as well as a commanding 19 percentage-point lead on affordability.

Several congressional Democrats whom NOTUS spoke with for this story lamented how the Epstein issue has exacerbated the public’s cynicism toward all politics. Rep. Sarah McBride, a freshman, noted that there’s a widespread perception “that both parties are unwilling to hold the powerful and the wealthy to account.”

That means there’s a real risk of people — especially independent voters — viewing this scandal as a plague-of-both-houses issue, one Democratic strategist and pollster, Evan Roth Smith, warned.

“Most people outside of the political world, their primary reaction to this is one of just horror at the crimes, right? That so many prominent people were part of, or at least adjacent to, really terrible crimes of human trafficking, sexual abuse,” Smith said. “As soon as you pull it onto familiar, patently political territory, you do get people who start to tune out or start to question the message because of the messenger.”