EXCLUSIVE – A seasoned reporter and self-described lifelong Democrat was so fed up by her party’s failures with the working class that she’s considering jumping into the fray herself.
Hanna Trudo, a former reporter for The Hill who’s also made stops at such sites as The Daily Beast, Wired, The New Republic and Politico, is mulling a run for the First Congressional District in her home state of New Hampshire. The seat, currently occupied by Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H., is opening up next year as Pappas runs for U.S. Senate to replace outgoing Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.
Trudo, a fourth-generation, millennial New Hampshire native, has reported extensively on the Democratic Party’s left flank during her journalism career. And to hear her put it, she’s gotten tired of them not delivering for a base of voters that started flocking to President Donald Trump over the past decade.
“I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but being from New Hampshire, from a working-class family, a lot of the issues that I’ve reported on over the years in terms of the progressive wing of the party, and even the centrists and the moderates, it’s oftentimes a failure in my view to address the needs of working-class people,” she told Fox News Digital. “And so when we wonder why Democrats keep losing, to me, the answers are sort of obvious. When you’re not able to deliver on what people are asking you to deliver on, you lose.”
Trudo, who’s been in journalism since 2012, said she was considering leaving the profession even before Trump was re-elected last year. The president’s win, buoyed by his continued strength with working-class voters flocking to Republicans, crystallized to Democrats like Trudo that her party’s leadership had become hopelessly out of touch.
“There’s a big disconnect from the D.C. punditry that I’ve seen and observed up close, and the strategist and the consultant class and the donor class, to what actual Democrats, working-class people, of all parties, frankly, what they want,” she said.
Trudo is the latest mainstream media figure who’s gotten wrapped up in Democratic Party politics. CNN’s John Avlon lost his bid for Congress as a Democrat in New York in 2024, and ex-ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd launched an ill-fated campaign for Lieutenant Governor as a Democrat in Texas in 2021. Former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera ran an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2020, and President Barack Obama’s second press secretary was longtime Time Magazine editor Jay Carney.
Last year, former NPR editor Uri Berliner revealed he found in 2021 that registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans 87 to zero in the outlet’s Washington office.
“I think we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t come to the table with our own biases,” Trudo said about being a journalist with strong political opinions. “My bias has always been not necessarily towards Democrats, but towards the working-class issues, which Democrats, in terms of what I’ve covered, have been the ones talking about these things as long as I’ve been in journalism. So to me, it’s always been sort of prioritizing that.”
Asked by Fox News Digital if Americans concerned about liberal media bias had a point, Trudo said it was a good question.
“I’ve debated it a lot over the years,” she said. “I do think we have to be really careful. And not so much left versus right. I do think we have to be on the side of truth. And maybe that sounds cliché, but I genuinely believe that. I think we have to be able to call out things as true, period.”
Trudo, an admirer of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called him the Democratic Party’s current leader last month. She noted his and Ocasio-Cortez’s headline-grabbing “Fighting Oligarchy” tour is the kind of proactive politics that’s capturing the angry mood of the country.
However, Trudo, who has no set timeline for when she’ll decide about running for Congress, bristled at the “Democratic socialist” label for herself, saying she prefers “working-class Democrat” who embraces economic populism.
Sanders won the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, the former in a landslide over Hillary Clinton that served as notice that his far-left populism resonated with the grassroots. The state, which has one of the country’s highest-percentage White populations, is known for its fiscal conservatism and social liberalism that can make it difficult to pigeon-hole politically.
FOUR MONTHS INTO TRUMP’S SECOND TERM, DEMOCRATS REMAIN DEEPLY PESSIMISTIC ABOUT THEIR PARTY
Trump lost New Hampshire all three times he ran for the White House, and it sports two Democratic U.S. Senators, but the state’s current governor is Republican Kelly Ayotte and the GOP controls the legislature.
“I think in New Hampshire in particular, there’s sort of this disconnect between the leaders that we elect within the party and the actual mood of the people,” Trudo said. “It’s always kind of interesting to see this pull towards the middle or towards the centrist approach in a state whose motto is quite literally ‘Live Free or Die.’”
Trudo said she’s worried most about social programs like Medicaid and Social Security being under attack by Republicans and wants Democrats to pursue economic populism to regain credibility with voters.
“They hear platitudes,” she said. “They hear working across the aisle… I’ve covered Congress, I’ve covered Democrats for 10 years professionally. So I’m very well aware of the sort of electoral calculations that come into play when we talk about these kinds of things. But I think it’s going to take someone who’s not beholden to the inter-party dialog, because so often that has failed. It’s definitely failed people here.”
As she mulls jumping into the race officially, Democrats are going through a wrenching period as reports of a White House cover-up of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in office dominate headlines.
Meanwhile, Trump is more accessible to the media than ever, while also antagonizing the press at every opportunity.
While critical of Trump over his anti-media rhetoric, Trudo said she applauds accessibility, and she’ll talk to anybody to get her message out, something she feels her fellow Democrats have been too scared to do.
“I think we see a big part of the problem with Democrats is that closed-off mentality,” she told Fox News Digital. “People go in very rehearsed to interviews. They have specific sound bites that they want to get their point across. They don’t want to say anything controversial or off the cuff. And it’s alienated a lot of people in the party.”
A day after she spoke with Fox News Digital, the conservative Ruthless Podcast accused Trudo of “ghosting” them on an interview after she’d offered in an X post on May 5 to speak to the hosts.
The show’s hosts said they reached out multiple times after her public offer to come on the program, and she ignored them.
“Like most politicians, she’s saying one thing and doing another. We have many questions and plan to keep asking until the truth is revealed,” Ruthless co-host John Ashbrook told Fox News Digital.
Trudo didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
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