There have been repeated clashes between the left and the center of the Democratic Party over the past 50-plus years, especially in the presidential nomination contests of 1968, 1972, 1984, 1992, 2016 and 2020. The post-election debate is now in full flower, with left-wing and centrist Democrats blaming each other for the loss.
The selection of Kamala Harris, a woman of Black and South Asian ancestry as the nominee, may have accentuated the perception of the Democratic Party as more progressive on race and gender and made some voters feel alienated or concerned about the direction of the party.
As my Times colleagues Erica L. Green and Maya King wrote on Nov. 7, in “For Black Women, America Has Revealed to Us Her True Self,”
The worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.
The ascendance within the Democratic Party of well-educated whites holding very liberal views has in fact pushed the party to the left of the mainstream. This intraparty ideological shift raises another question looking toward 2026 and 2028: Have the forces supporting unpopular progressive policies in the general electorate become strong enough to successfully push back against the calls coming from Democratic pragmatists for centrist retrenchment on such issues as immigration, policing and the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion?
In a Nov. 15 article, “Trump Broke the Democrats’ Thermostat,” John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times writes:
The data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade. This has distanced them from the median voter. We see this not only in Democratic voters’ self-reported ideology, but in their views on issues including immigration and whether or not minorities need extra help to succeed in society. Notably, the shift began in 2016. This suggests that Trump’s election radicalized the left, not the right.
The shift to the left was most pronounced among those who identify themselves as “strong Democrats,” those who dominate the activist and agenda-setting wing of the party. Burn-Murdoch cited General Social Survey data to show that this segment of the Democratic electorate reacted most intensely to the election of Donald Trump, which was manifested in their shift on such issues as affirmative action and immigration.
In the case of immigration, for example, strong Democrats were close to the median voter in 2008, supporting cuts in the level of immigration by 20 points, according to Burn-Murdoch. But by 2020, strong Democratic voters had taken a giant step to the left, supporting increased immigration by 40 points, placing them far away from the median voter, whose views remained unchanged.
There are signs that the Democratic Party has not only adopted left orthodoxy on social and cultural issues but that it is also still not prepared to tolerate debate over these choices. This is reflected in the hostility expressed toward Democratic leaders who suggest moderating the party stance on transgender rights — a seemingly peripheral issue, as far as the country as a whole goes, that Trump and other Republicans used to portray Democrats as more concerned with special interests than the public interest.
“You have a choice as a party,” Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, commented in an interview on Nov. 6 with a Texas public radio station — after turnout for the former president helped Texas Republicans win big. “You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.”
Hinojosa then added, “If you are going to ignore the political consequences of these kinds of things, then you’re asking to lose these elections in the manner that we did.”
By the end of the day, Hinojosa reversed himself, posting on X:
I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today. I recognize the pain and frustration my words have caused. In frustration over the G.O.P.’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.
Two days later, Hinojosa announced his retirement, ending 12 years’ service as chairman.
I asked Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, for his assessment of the ability of the Democratic Party to adapt in the wake of defeat. Westwood responded by email:
Parties evolve. In the eight years after their complete loss to Reagan in 1984 the Democrats moved from the ideals of the New Deal to the free market policies of Bill Clinton. It took time, but the party shifted to match the demands of the country.
It will be hard for the modern Democratic Party to shift from coddling white progressive voters to a policy platform that more strongly resonates with a diverse and moderate electorate, but they can do it. The path is clear: cultivate economic centrists and marginalize culture warriors. The problem is that it is not clear that there is a powerful voice within the party who can guide Democrats back to the center.
Westwood, citing poll data from Gallup and Pew, argued that
Parties win elections by aligning with the priorities and values of voters. The Democratic Party, however, often seems to assume that its perspective on social issues is inherently superior and that debate itself is morally and ethically unacceptable.
Westwood added,
It is just the truth that 69 percent of Americans think that kids should play on teams that match their birth gender, that 98 percent of Latinos do not prefer the term Latinx, and that 68 percent of both all adults and of Latinos specifically think ending affirmative action in college admissions is mostly a good thing.
Lanae Erickson is senior vice president for policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank that is premised on the conviction that there is a moderate majority within the Democratic Party electorate and that the party’s cultural and social left is a minority. She replied by email to my queries about prospects for the party:
The good news for the Democratic Party is that the college-educated white voters it has gained are not ideologues, and they would at worst tolerate this shift (to moderation), and more likely welcome it. Unlike the Republican Party, our ideological activists remain a very small proportion of our coalition — overrepresented on social media and louder than the rest, but not representative.
Nearly all Democratic voters, she continued,
still prefer winning over ideological purity, and a move to the middle on cultural issues that keeps our values steady, but acknowledges more nuance instead of casting issues as black and white would create the big tent we need to defeat MAGA forces and move our country forward toward sustainable progress. That’s what our whole coalition really wants.
Despite that, Erickson contended,
We already have plenty of data to conclude one thing: Voters of nearly every demographic and geography rejected what we had on offer because they believed we focused too much on social issues and have moved too far left on both culture and some economic issues.
A Democratic comeback starts with an honest assessment of the damage inflicted by being associated with, or pressured by, the far-left and their ideas — on immigration (open borders), climate (Green New Deal), health care ($33 trillion Medicare-for-All), crime (Defund the Police), and sweeping debt forgiveness only for those who already went to college.
Now that MAGA has taken over American government wholesale, the only way to defeat it next time around is to rebrand Democrats as a more moderate, mainstream party that is in touch with the lives and values of a wide swath of voters, including working-class voters of all races.
There are some political analysts who believe the Democratic Party and its future candidates will be able to move toward the center on cultural issues without facing debilitating opposition from the progressive left.
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who specializes in election and constitutional law, replied by email to my inquiries,
I think the party’s desire to win the presidency will be strong enough — especially after four more years of Trump — to allow the Democratic nominee in 2028 to move to the center on controversial issues (at least in the general election). Biden did this to some extent in 2020, and so did Harris this year (albeit mainly by not talking about thorny issues as opposed to explicitly rejecting more liberal stances).
Stephanopoulos pointed out that even though “a supermajority of Republicans supports stringent abortion limits, Trump took a more moderate position in the campaign,” declaring he would veto legislation calling for a national ban:
If a Republican can do that on abortion — the most high-profile social issue of all — I don’t see why a Democrat couldn’t do so on less salient issues. And note that a candidate has a lot of flexibility in how to frame a Sister Souljah moment. He/she doesn’t have to overtly disagree with a stance that most Democrats support. Instead, the candidate can single out an extreme position that most Democrats oppose, criticize that position, and thereby convey an image of moderation to the electorate.
Some of Stephanopoulos’s professional colleagues are skeptical. Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, wrote by email:
I do think the Democrats could lose again and again because of this predicament that they are in, in that their core voters (and volunteers and donors) want candidates to pass some litmus tests that the median voter does not like.
It certainly won’t be enough for candidates to just focus ads on issues popular with the median voter if it’s very clear to all that the candidates have passed the litmus tests required by the base. On the other hand, who knows what the future holds? Generally speaking, parties don’t like losing, especially again and again.
In a reflection of the competing views over ideology and strategy, some Democratic political operatives warn against the adoption of retrenchment strategies that could further weaken the Democratic coalition, pushing away key constituencies.
Nick Gourevitch, partner and managing director of the Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm that worked on the Biden-Harris campaign, wrote me to say that
Any conversation about the future of the Democratic Party needs to start with theories about how to add voters to our coalition and not subtract voters from it, which is where a lot of the dialogue is today.
The basic theory you are talking about — that the Democratic Party needs to move to the center on cultural issues, and focus more on working class economic issues, in order to win back a more culturally conservative working class, which is mostly white though increasingly diverse. That theory is quite attractive, since it’s easy to look at the Democratic Party of the 1990s and the Democratic Party of today and see that is where the party lost votes.
“But is the path forward the exact path we just came from? I am concerned about the parts of the Democratic coalition — which is still around 50 percent of the country — that we would have to throw under the bus to get there.
Which piece of our coalition, Gourevitch asked,
are we throwing under the bus to get there? The LGBTQ+ rights movement? Suburbanites who want decisive action on gun violence in schools? Young people who care about the climate? Black voters who want to be treated fairly by the police?
One of the early tests of the strength of the center and the left of the Democratic Party will be the selection of a new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which is expected to take place in January or February of 2025.
It is doubtful, however, whether the new D.N.C. chair and other party officials can determine the ideological direction of the party. David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, pointed out in an email that:
Parties are not entirely the masters of their own fate. The rising centrality of conflicts over social identity, D.E.I. initiatives, transgender rights, language policing, tolerance of illegal immigration, ‘fighting the patriarchy,’ and other similar topics over the past decade or so was not principally driven by the preferences or choices of Democratic politicians and professional strategists.
Instead, it mostly reflected the priorities of other influential social actors — some activists and interest groups within the party, for sure, but also a large population of journalists, intellectuals, educators, nonprofit and corporate executives, and celebrities who represent liberalism in the public eye even if they don’t hold formal positions within the Democratic Party.
Democratic politicians, Hopkins argued,
can try to pick ugly public fights with these people to demonstrate their independence from the purist left, as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s, but that’s a risky move sure to be internally divisive and which might even feed abstentions, or defections to the Green Party, among committed progressives.
A less dangerous path, Hopkins continued, “would be for the prominent figures and social institutions that have most strongly promoted culturally progressive ideas in recent years to mute their aggressive advocacy of controversial values and practices.”
Along similar lines, Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, wrote by email that left ideological orthodoxy is
mostly policed by activists and interest groups rather than by the electorate. Polling indicates that there is far more diversity of opinion on issues of sexuality, immigration, and race within Democratic Party identifiers than there is among the activists.
I think candidates espousing somewhat moderate positions on such issues could still win Democratic primaries if they could withstand the opposition of progressive groups. So the key going forward is whether such groups will exercise just a bit of forbearance to candidates in red and purple states.
Noah Smith, a former professor of finance at Stony Brook University who now writes at Noahpinion, has produced an optimistic analysis for the future of the Democratic Party and liberalism generally. On Nov. 15, Smith posted “Liberalism is the Rebellion Now:”
When I was growing up in the 1990s, liberalism — the idea that society should be based around the rights, freedoms, and dignity of individual human beings — was ascendant. Here in the U.S. and in other rich democratic nations, there was little question that we were more free, and our rights better protected, than at any point in our history.
Now, three decades later, Smith argues:
You can feel the decline of liberalism here in the United States. Very few leaders on either side of the aisle talk about freedom anymore. Progressives tend to couch their appeals in terms of justice, conservatives in terms of greatness. Americans still pay lip service to freedom of speech, but no one seems to really want it — Elon Musk has increased X’s censorship on behalf of foreign governments and suppressed content he doesn’t like, while Democratic leaders like Tim Walz and John Kerry have called for legal crackdowns on “hate speech” and “misinformation.”
The significance, Smith continues,
is that liberalism — the dominant global ideology of my youth — is now an underground rebellion. If you believe that individual human freedom and dignity are paramount, you’re now facing a world that wants to crush your ideals and enslave you to the will of various authoritarians. In America, you’re watching powerlessly as Trump remakes the country’s institutions, while in Eurasia you’re warily eyeing the suddenly unchecked power of China and Russia.
Of all the posts he has written, Smith contends, “this one scares me the most,” adding “I wish it was just a bad dream.”
In fact, few things could reinvigorate the center-left and the Democratic Party more than coming to the realization that liberalism in contemporary America is the underdog, and that it is in a fight for its survival.
The left has grown comfortable as it dominates the culture — academia, the media, television entertainment — and as its well-educated constituents remain insulated by their college degrees from the costs of globalization, as the technology revolution ravages less well-off sections of the country.
From roughly the early 1930s to the early 2000s, the Democratic Party challenged institutional power, corporations seeking to suppress workers’ wages and benefits, white Southerners determined to subordinate Black people, men committed to keeping their wives in the kitchen.
The re-election of Donald Trump has opened the door to Democrats once again becoming the insurgent party. The next two years will determine whether the party takes this opportunity or remains mired in conflicts over policies and orthodoxies of little or no relevance to the broader electorate.
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