The Path Back for Democrats

How policy ideas can help us achieve our political goals

It’s been almost a year since Democrats lost a presidential election by two points against a divisive and unpopular candidate. The party is powerless in Washington and appears rudderless to the public. As one political commentator writes, “on almost every major question in Washington today, the choice isn’t whether to move in a Republican or Democratic direction, but how far in a Republican direction to move.” Top pollsters and strategists note that while the public is growing more skeptical of the GOP, it isn’t translating into support for Democrats because Democrats are failing to make an affirmative case for themselves. Democrats have not provided “a coherent alternative account of how the nation might solve its problems…[and] have become captive of the most shrill voices in the party,” another observer adds. The survey data confirms the party’s grim image: an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that just 34% of the public has a positive view of the Democratic Party, down from 42% a year earlier.

A sobering summary of where things stand today? No—all these quotes and data points are from 2005, a year after George W. Bush was re-elected and won majorities in both houses of Congress.[1] Three years later, in the 2008 election, Barack Obama won in a historic landslide and racked up a 79-seat majority in the House and a 60-40 majority in the Senate.

I thought of this over the last week as I read similar doomsaying about the 2025 iteration of the Democratic Party. In an interview with interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times last week, Ezra Klein lamented:

[O]ne of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail.

I am probably not the person who knows how to do things differently. I have ideas that are about abundance and ideas that are about liberalism, and we can talk about them, but whatever it is, it shouldn’t just be drifting forward.

If you want to talk about what looks to me like despair and pessimism, it isn’t that a couple random people on both sides, as you know, have picked up guns. It is that the people in actual power who are sane and are clear thinking are doing almost nothing differently. They’re failing and rethinking nothing, at least not on any profound level. And I actually find that very worrying.

Klein is not alone. Echoing those 2005 commentators, Matt Yglesias recently noted that even as Trump and the GOP are getting poor marks for their governance, they remain more trusted than Democrats on many key issues so frustration with Republicans isn’t guaranteed to translate into electoral support for Democrats. He argued that the key is for the party to become “broadly less progressive on ~everything except Israel where moving left would be good.” Other prominent people in the party have recently called for softening the party’s stances on a woman’s right to choose and on gun control, following widespread calls for the party to “shift right” on immigration, crime, and trans issues.

I want to make three points about this important debate, looking back at the experience of the last 20 years.

First, while we are in a dangerous moment as Trump uses the tools of government to go after his enemies and stifle dissent, things can change quickly in politics and we can come back from this as a party and a country. From 2005-08, Bush prompted backlash with an unpopular Social Security privatization effort, bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina, continued to pour money and troops into an unpopular war effort in Iraq, and presided over the beginnings of the worst financial crisis in generations. His disastrous governance opened the door for Democrats to reverse their poor standing with the public and regain power decisively. The task before us today is more difficult given the right-wing judiciary, the lack of meaningful GOP opposition to Trump’s moves in Congress, and the media environment, but it is not impossible and we should not succumb to fatalism.

Second, a strategy to “shift right” on most policy is unlikely to improve the party’s standing or electoral prospects.

As a starting point, much of the poor current standing of the Democratic Party comes from frustration among Democrats. “Many Democrats see their party as ‘weak’ or ‘ineffective,” a July AP poll found. Thirty-five percent of Democrats described their party in negative terms. It’s likely that softening the party’s stance on core priorities—especially priorities that are broadly popular like a woman’s right to choose and basic gun control—would exacerbate this problem and feed the view that the party is weak and stands for nothing. It also risks demotivating Democratic voters in the run up to a crucial midterm election.

The recent history also should give us pause. Did Obama win in 2008 and revive the Democratic brand by tacking to the right? No. He was seen as the more progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. And his 2008 general election platform was clearly to the left of the Kerry 2004 campaign’s platform on nearly every issue, including social and cultural issues:

• War in Iraq: Kerry famously voted for the war (before voting against it), while Obama opposed the war from the beginning.

• Immigration: Kerry supported a path to “legal status” (short of citizenship), while Obama backed a path to citizenship.

• Crime: Kerry’s platform was standard tough-on-crime orthodoxy while Obama opposed mandatory minimums for drug offenders, called for reducing racial disparities in sentencing, and highlighted the importance of rehabilitation programs.

• Healthcare: Kerry ran on incremental expansion of existing health insurance programs while Obama ran on the promise of universal coverage and a public option.

• Taxes: Both Kerry and Obama supported higher taxes on the rich, but Obama ran explicitly on addressing “income inequality,” proposed expanding refundable tax credits for very low-income people, and talked about the tax code in terms of promoting “fairness” while Kerry leaned more on “fiscal responsibility.”

• Climate change: Kerry supported cap-and-trade and some clean energy investment while Obama ran much more aggressively on these issues, calling climate change “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation” and promising a green economy.

The GOP story is instructive too. When they were down and out after losing the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee famously recommended that the party shift to the center on immigration and embrace comprehensive immigration reform as a way to improve its standing with Hispanic and other minority voters. Trump very obviously did not do that on his way to victory in 2016 and 2024, making serious inroads with minority voters along the way.

Finally, while many people have panned Biden’s 2020 campaign for shifting left entering the general election by adopting key planks of both the Warren and Sanders campaign platforms, Biden 2020 was the one time Democrats beat Trump in three tries. He ran clearly to the left of Clinton 2016 and beat Trump in a COVID-era election year in which incumbents generally fared well across the globe.

By contrast—and conceding there were a thousand complicating factors—both Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024 shifted right in the general election (and were hailed for doing so at the time), and then lost.

I recognize that each election is different. I also recognize the value of letting certain candidates deviate from the party line in states or districts where doing so will actually gain them more votes than it loses them. But after every losing election, the savvy pundit recommendation is that the party as a whole should shift to the center on the issues, and history shows that is not in fact what has translated to a stronger party brand or wins at the ballot box. While I don’t think the answer to our current problems is necessarily to “shift left” on every policy issue or to simply rehash our long-standing priorities, the case for a blanket shift to the right is weak.

That brings me my third point: instead of obsessing over whether to move left vs. moving right on policy, we should focus on developing and promoting ideas that are salient, memorable, and responsive to the problems voters want us to solve.

Democrats have a problem conveying what we want to accomplish as a party. When Donald Trump wanted to push a middle-class tax cut, he didn’t say he was going to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit by 15%. He said he wanted “no tax on tips.” When Trump wanted to communicate a tough-on-the-border policy, he didn’t announce a policy of stepping up border enforcement funding by 100% or increasing border apprehensions by 50%. He said he was going to build a wall on the border and make Mexico pay for it. The Democratic version of this would have been a 12-point document called “reorienting our approach to border security.”

The political goal of policy proposals should be to memorably convey a compelling vision for the country that is responsive to what people want from their government. As a party, our goal now should be to fight tooth-and-nail against Trump’s harmful and unpopular agenda while also identifying proposals that meet those criteria so we can articulate a competing vision. If cost of living is the top issue for voters, what is the most salient agenda we can offer on that? Zohran Mamdani succeeded in doing this with a catchy three-point plan—free buses, freeze the rent, public grocery stores—that hit the main pain points of transportation, housing, and groceries. If you think that won’t work at the national level, what is your cost-of-living agenda that is as memorable?

Part of the goal of this Substack is to try to develop those ideas, looking back on what has worked and what hasn’t. I hope that becomes a main focus of the party too. As history teaches us, we can recover quickly from the precarious position we are in today. But overly simplistic “left vs. right” thinking will make it harder to do so.

---

[1] I didn’t want to spoil the surprise with hyperlinks to the quotes in the first paragraph, so here they are. The first quote is from Ronald Brownstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times on April 4, 2005. The statement about top pollsters and strategists refers to a memo from James Carville, Robert Shrum, and Stan Greenberg summarized in this July 9, 2005 Washington Post piece by David S. Broder. The quote about not offering a “coherent alternative account of how the nation might solve its problems” is from a David Ignatius piece in the Washington Post from August 18, 2005. And the polling data is available here, from October 2005.