Opinion | This Is How the Democratic Party Beats Trump

Inside the Democratic Party — in its backrooms and its group chats and its conferences and its online flame wars — an increasingly bitter debate has taken hold over what the party needs to do to become capable of beating back Trumpism. Do Democrats need to become more populist? More moderate? more socialist? Do they need to embrace the Abundance agenda? Do they need to produce more vertical video? The answer is yes they do. All of them, but none of them in particular. The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things. In a few days, there will be elections for mayor of New York City, for governor of New Jersey, and for governor of Virginia. As of now, Democrats are leading in all these races. These aren’t unusual leads in what have become reliably Democratic states. You can imagine a world where the violence and corruption of Donald Trump’s first nine months in office. “You’re gambling with World War 3” had led to a collapse in support for him and his party. We’ll see what Election Day actually brings, but we do not look to be in that world. That’s all the more true if you look a year out to the midterms. Democrats are leading by about two and a half points. At about this time in 2017, Democrats were up by about 10 points. Democrats have another problem: They’re going to need to overcome the chain of redistricting Republicans are setting off across the country. “There may be more of a pad here for Republicans” And the Senate — the Senate is even harder for Democrats. They will need to flip four seats in the 2026 midterms to win back the Senate. That means winning in Maine and North Carolina — no easy task — and then winning at least two seats in states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more. The map for Democrats wasn’t always this daunting. Go back to 2010, and 10 of those states had Democratic senators. Today, none of them do. Most of those states seem barely in reach for Democrats. There’s no arguing with this fact: The number of places in which the Democratic Party is competitive has shrunk in American politics. Power is not decided by a popular vote in the electoral college, in the House of Representatives, and particularly in the Senate. It is apportioned by place. This is the problem for Democrats. They don’t just need to win more people — they need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking. If Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayor’s race and Rob Sands wins the Iowa governor’s race next year, “The Democratic and Republican parties don’t solve enough problems to deserve their little shared monopoly.” did the Democratic Party just move left or right? Neither — it got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people and more kinds of places. That is a spirit it needs to embrace not moderation, not progressivism, but in the classic political sense of the term representation. In 1962, Bernard Crick published this strange little book called “In Defense of Politics.” Politics, for Crick, is something precious and specific. It arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions within a territorial unit under Common Rule. I know that’s a mouthful, but that fact of difference he is pointing out is that the reality of difference is not always accepted. There are other forms of social order — tyranny or oligarchy — that actively suppress it. But to practice politics, as Crick defines it, is to accept the reality of difference. That is to say, it is to accept the reality of other people, of how different other people are from you. “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” Genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people. I love that line because the endless fantasy in politics is persuasion without representation. You elect us to represent you, and where we disagree, we will explain to you why you are wrong. The result of that politics tends to be neither persuasion nor representation. People know when you’re not listening to them, and they know how to respond: They stop listening to you. They vote for people who they feel do listen to them. I’m not a pessimist on the possibility of persuasion. But I believe it is rare, maybe impossible outside a context of mutual respect. And if I were to say where the Democratic Party went most wrong over the last decade, it’s there. In too many places, Democrats sought persuasion without representation, and so they got neither. I spent much of the last year talking to the kinds of voters Democrats lament losing. I feel I end up having the same conversation over and over again. They sometimes tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them, but they first describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation. The Democratic Party, they came to believe, doesn’t like them. Many of these people voted for Democrats until a few years ago. They didn’t feel their fundamental beliefs had changed, but they began to feel like deplorables. They began to feel unwanted. “250 million people are not garbage. I can tell you who the real garbage is, but we won’t say that.” When I push on the experiences I had when I would ask which Democrats were they talking about, what exactly had happened, often found they were reacting to a cultural vibe as much or more than a flesh and blood party. They had felt something change, and I knew they were right because something had changed. It had changed on the left, it had changed on the right, but it was diffuse. It wasn’t any one person or any one moment or any one policy. The structure of American life changed in a way that has made the genuine relationships of politics much harder to maintain. I believe the first party that figures out its way out of this trap will be the one able to build a majority in this era. When I grew up in a Republican County an hour South of Angeles, my family subscribed to the Angeles Times and to the extent I heard political commentary, it was on local radio. 2005 was a tough year for public. California State and local taxes are. Good afternoon, Senator McClintock. Good afternoon, Senator Steinberg. Now, the New York Times’ is the largest newspaper by subscribers in California. And a young, politically inclined kid like I was will listen to podcasts like welcome to Pod Save America, I’m Jon Fabbro, I’m Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor. On today’s show, we’ll talk about Donald Trump’s latest musings about doing away with the Constitution to become president for life. Trump, Trump, President Trump, Trump. Talk me through your evolution on Trump. Sure, that kid’s political sensibility will be less distinctly Californian and more relentlessly national. For decades, we have been losing local media and migrating to national media, and that has meant politics everywhere is losing its local character and reflecting national divisions. Then there is the astonishing amount of money politicians need and the places they go to find it. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court decided money was speech. The expenditure limitations are violative of First Amendment guarantees and they are unconstitutional. Campaigns became more expensive, and candidates often needed a whole lot more money than what they can raise in their own states and districts. That means exciting donors who are much further to the left or right than the public, and winning over interest groups that seek their support on policy. Money can polarize, money can corrupt. But either way, it pulls candidates away from their own constituents. That was all true when I moved to Washington to cover politics in 2005. But then something else changed. Well, what we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. 800 million Facebook users are coming to grips with change. This week. It features scrolling newsfeeds and snazzier pictures. By showing you older tweets it thinks you care about right. On top of your current feed, we’re not going to touch the phones. Can’t touch it no matter what happens. It’s a serious problem. It really is. How much time do you spend doing this. The average smartphone user scrolls the equivalent of 78 miles a year. That’s three marathons. We all know this changed politics, but for all the words that had been spilled on it, I think we still miss how fundamentally it is altered the day to day work of politics. Since the 2024 election, there’s been a lot of talk on the Democratic side about the power of the so-called groups. There are interest groups. There are a lot of advocacy groups, a lot of parts of the Democratic Party that really thought things were fine. They’re more extreme than many of their constituents. The progressive advocacy organizations and nonprofits that have arguably pushed Democrats to the left. I’ve used that term before. I’ve talked about the groups, but I think it is imprecise. The real thing we’re talking about here is what might be called the Professional political classes. The people in the groups are the same people who staff or drive all the other parts of progressive politics. One year you’re with a nonprofit, then you’re on a campaign, then you’re in the White House, then you’re back at a group. You’re followed on X or blue sky by left leaning journalists like me, by producers at MSNBC, or by breaking news reporters at Politico. It’s not a bunch of groups. It’s a professional community that exists largely online. And so that professional community’s culture and its attention is governed not by its own values or goals, but by the decisions of the corporations and oligarchs who own the social media platforms, who designed them to further their own profits or their own politics. The conversation’s pulsing across. These platforms are shaped not by civic values, but by the hacks that keep people scrolling. Nuanced opinions get compressed into viral slogans. Attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices and the algorithms they love conflict and inspiration and outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11. Social media has thrown everyone involved at every level of politics, in every place, into the same algorithmic Thunderdome. It collapsed distance and profession and time because no matter where we are or when we are, we can always be online together. We always know what our most online peers are thinking. They come to set the culture of their respective political classes, and there is nothing that most of us fear like being out of step with our peers. This has affected the Democratic and Republican parties in different ways. Let me start with the Democrats. From 2012 to 2024, Democrats moved sharply left on virtually every issue. They often did so, believing they were finally representing communities that had long suffered from too little representation. This was what they were told by the online voices and by the professional groups that claimed to represent those communities. But it went wrong. Democrats became more uncompromising on immigration and lost support among Hispanic voters. They moved left on guns and student loans and climate. And lost ground with young voters. They moved left on race and lost ground with Black voters. They’ve left on education and lost ground with Asian-American voters. They move left on economics and lost ground with working class voters. The only major group where Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12 year period was college educated white voters. If you judged Democratic politics expressively by what it was saying it stood in solidarity with the struggling and marginalized as never before. If you judged it consequentially, it was breaking faith with those it had vowed to represent and protect. Online politics is expressive. You need to say what will win favor with the highly online voices that dominate your side of the algorithm offline. You need to win elections. I sued EPA and I’ll take dead aim at the cap and trade bill because it’s bad for West Virginia. Yes that was Manchin shooting the cap and trade bill. The Democrats have been trying to pass with a rifle, but Manchin, 12 years later, was the key vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest green energy investment in American history. This is a great day because this is a balanced bill. Expressively the progressives, Manchin was just a constant irritant. Consequentially, he was the Democrats most remarkable underperformer. He made their majority possible by winning elections. No Democrats should have been able to win in a state that the president and the previous election won by 42 points. The opposite party win. Never happened. Never happened. The most important question the party needed to be asking in that era was where do they find more Joe manchin’s? How do they make more. Joe Manchin’s possible. But today’s Democratic Party, particularly its online culture, has taken forms of disagreement and difference. It once held inside its tent and pushed them outside. West Virginia’s most prominent Democrat changed his registration to independent today. There are fewer and fewer people like you in the Senate. I mean, is that my colleagues will say, Thank God. Yes they would. Including some in your former party. Oh, many of my former party. In 2010, when the Affordable Care Act passed, the crucial vote in the Senate came from Ben Nelson, a pro-life Democrat, after winning fresh concessions to limit the availability of abortions. But I would have not voted for this bill and would not vote for this bill without those provisions. There were then roughly 40 pro-life Democrats serving in the House. Crafting compromises across these disagreements was hard, but Democrats were able to pass Obamacare, which expanded reproductive health coverage and remains the greatest Democratic policy accomplishment of the 21st century. We are done. That same Democratic Party, with all of its internal disagreements, it had the votes to confirm Supreme Court justices who would and did in their time, protect Roe. I’ve been in a debate recently about whether Democrats should run pro-life candidates in red states, in much the way that Republicans run pro-choice candidates like Susan Collins and Larry Hogan in blue states. I think I was taken aback to hear people say, in response to this argument, that I just wanted to throw reproductive rights overboard. So I want to say this clearly, no, I don’t. I thought past episodes I’ve done on abortion episodes I’ve done in the context of my own family has been through should have shown that. But what I want is a Democratic Party big enough and strong enough to protect reproductive rights. And I feel our politics on this have failed because they have failed. We cannot protect or restore reproductive freedom if the coalition that cares about that cannot compete in more places. But this point is not about any one issue. It’s about a broader approach to politics. Different places have different politics, and to win in them, politicians have to represent the people who live in them. That means representing views Democrats now find to be anathema on immigration or guns or trade or climate or trans rights. But one worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country truly, deeply disagrees with them. Polls show that the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is too liberal increased sharply between 2012 and 2024. The percentage of voters saying the Republican Party is too conservative fell during that same period. Even now, after the aggression and the outrages and the violations of Trump’s second administration, that gap has not fully closed. I would like to believe that all Democrats need to do to win back these voters is embrace an agenda. I’m already comfortable with economic populism or abundance or both. But I don’t think it’s true. A study by the Center for working class politics found that in key Rust Belt states, when you attached the Democratic label to a candidate running on an economic populist platform, that candidate lost 11 to 16 points in support. That’s how Sherrod Brown, once one of the strongest economic populists in the party, lost his Ohio Senate seat to Republican car dealer who had to settle more than a dozen lawsuits for wage theft. Jared Golden is a Democrat from Maine. In 2024, he edged out a victory in a district, Donald Trump won by nearly 10 points. Working with Republicans to secure the border and standing with law enforcement against defunding the police. I’m Jared Golden, and I approve this message because you deserve a Congressman as independent as you. No other Democrat in Congress, not one, has survived in a pro-trump district. He is declaring victory, admitting it was his toughest election yet. Now, in what strikes me as an absolutely insane turn of events, golden is facing a primary challenge. Golden even said he was O.K with Donald Trump becoming president again instead of learning from Democrats like golden. Democrats who are successfully representing voters who are otherwise moving towards Donald Trump. Some progressives want to purge him because we can do better than bad and worse. I don’t think the Democratic Party should just move, right. It is good, in my view, that AOC and Zoran Mamdani run as Democrats, and that Bernie Sanders has become a leader in the Democratic Party. It is good that you can be an out and out Democratic socialist in today’s Democratic Party, but what happened over the past 15 years is a Democratic Party made room on its left and closed down on its right for all the talk of a Democrat should learn from Sanders or Mamdani, and it should learn things from Sanders and Mamdani. There should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. People are valid in their anger. And it is a fool’s errand to try to talk somebody out of their feelings. That is not that’s not a good idea. But you also can affirm the validity of their feelings and also present a productive strategy for resolving some of those, the drivers of that anger or that fear or Sarah McBride. You can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation. You can’t change people if you exclude them. And I will just say you can’t have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism. The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy. It’s a feature of democracy. And Yes, that is hard and difficult. But again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair. The Democratic Party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement. It should treat that disagreement as more welcome. It should be looking for a gut level affinity with more of this country. Moderating on this or that issue is more straightforward than finding ways to radiate respect and interest in people who disagree with you, and people you’ve come to feel far away from. It is a building of genuine relationships and politics, not the taking of positions. That is truly hard. But that’s also the part that is beautiful. It’s a privilege to do that work, not a concession. We are more able to admit complexity and extend generosity when we see others as part of our community. Working to widen that circle of empathy, to widen our circle of belonging is both morally and politically good. Whatever the problems are on the left, there is something truly frightening brewing on the right. Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interests, that’s absolutely the case. And that’s the only way the country is going to stay together. That’s my concern. And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that is organized Jewry in America. Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, not a small job, said on a text thread leaked to Politico that he had, quote, Nazi streak. A separate text thread of young Republican leaders leaked to Politico had messages about sending enemies to the gas chambers and one saying, quote, I love Hitler. Ingrassia had to withdraw his nomination, but Vice President JD Vance has dismissed coverage of the young Republicans messages as pearl clutching. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is caused to ruin their lives. Look, I don’t want to ruin anybody’s life either, but these were recent statements by adults who were vying for leadership in political organizations with official ties to the Republican Party. There is no rule of civic generosity or political practice that Trumpism has not broken. And for many I on the left, it’s created a sense that there is no sense in trying to appeal to the median voter. No sense in moderation. No sense in any of the old rules of politics. Look at how extreme the right has become. Yet they have thrived in this telling. Trump understands what the Democrats don’t. Nothing matters anymore except attention. But a few things are wrong with that. Trump did moderate the Republican Party in crucial areas Medicare, Social Security, trade. And the simple truth is, Democrats can’t win the way Trump and the Republicans do. Trump and the Republicans lead a coalition built on overwhelming strength in rural counties. America’s place based politics gives rural places disproportionate political power. Trump and the Republicans can hold power with a smaller coalition than Democrats can. And then there’s this. Democrats shouldn’t want to win the way Republicans do. This country could break. The abyss is dark and it is deep. And America other countries, has fallen into it before and can again. I see the simple fact of a free and fair politics is much more of an achievement, something much more precious and difficult to preserve. I no longer take it, or the habits of citizenship or politics to preserve it for granted. We cannot trust that Providence, or some innate American exceptionalism protects us from calamity. It doesn’t. Over the past year, I’ve found myself obsessively reading histories of liberalism, looking for something, even though I didn’t know exactly what illiberalism is winning right now. But there’s nothing unusual about that. By modern standards, virtually every pesticide was illiberal. Rule that we now call them illiberal. That exclusion and domination and state suppression have been made strange enough to demand a label. That is the unlikely achievement. But how did liberalism do it. For most of my life, when I called myself a liberal, I meant basically someone who believed in universal health care and the right to form a union and racial equality and Social Security. But in its oldest forms, liberalism was built on a virtue that we rarely talk about today to the ancient Romans, being free required more than a Republican Constitution. It also required citizens who practice liberalitas, which referred to a noble and generous way of thinking and acting towards one’s fellow citizens. The word liberalitas became liberality. Liberality proposed. It demanded a different way of relating across disagreement and division. It flowered into religious tolerance when that idea was truly radical. It built towards liberalism’s great insight. Liberalism’s first idea. Conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable if tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order. Conflict could nevertheless bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange. Today, finding ways to turn our disagreements into exchange, into something fruitful rather than something destructive seems almost fanciful. I saw a poll a few weeks ago that struck me. It asked Americans what they thought the top problem facing the country was. Number one was the economy. That was what I expected. But number two wasn’t immigration or inflation or democracy or even Donald Trump. It was political division. In that same poll, 64 percent of the country said they think were too divided to solve our problems anymore. They’re not wrong. Now, the project of America feels to many impossible. And not just on the left. I hear it every time JD Vance or Stephen Miller speaks. I hear it when Trump says, I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I want to hear that. I hear something scary. But I also hear an opening, an opportunity. I keep coming back to something, Crick writes. The moral consensus of a free state is not something mysteriously prior to or above politics. It is the activity, the civilizing activity of politics itself, something to be valued almost as a pearl beyond price. In America, for all our sins, our injustice, our oppression, a freer state emerged through the practice of politics. It did not do so painlessly. It did not do so bloodlessly. But it did happen. And for a time. It gave us confidence in ourselves and in our system. It showed what could emerge from genuine relationships between people who were genuinely other people. And I think it still could again.