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On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that the Democratic Party “became very intolerant, very judgmental of people who thought differently than us on social and cultural issues and other tough subjects like guns and climate.” And the party should be more centered around economic issues while allowing internal debates “on other social and cultural issues,” but the party has created a lot of litmus tests and become “pretty exclusionary, and is shrinking, not growing.”

Murphy stated, “[W]e became very intolerant, very judgmental of people who thought differently than us on social and cultural issues and other tough subjects like guns and climate. I think we should return to the party we were in the ’70s and ’80s, when we had economics as the tent pole, and then we let people in who thought differently than us on other social and cultural issues, and we fought out those debates inside that tent. That’s a difficult thing for the Democratic Party to do, because we have applied a lot of litmus tests over the years. But those litmus tests have added up to a party that is pretty exclusionary, and is shrinking, not growing.”

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