The Democratic Party is looking for a scapegoat for its disastrous 2024 election performance. As ever, no shortage of pundits and party operatives are punching left. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres accused his colleagues of “pandering” to the “far left.” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton scolded the party for, apparently, being too considerate of trans kids, whom Republicans targeted with at least $17 million worth of ads. “I have two little girls,” he told The New York Times for a November 7 story on how the party was relating to its losses. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for Harry Reid and John Fetterman, recently expanded this line of argument into an op-ed for the Times, earning plaudits from former Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau. He argues that Democrats are “crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power,” and too eager to please “liberal and progressive interest groups” that “impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal.” As examples, he cited positions on trans rights and immigration that Harris adopted during her presidential primary campaign in 2019, that had been advocated for by the likes of the ACLU and the Sunrise Movement, and that Republicans ran attack ads about this cycle.
Jentleson’s prescription for Democratic victory boils down to resisting the influence of groups like Sunrise and the ACLU and running campaigns that avoid unpopular messages. Democrats should stick to “tried and tested” pitches like protecting Social Security, lowering prescription drug prices, and protecting abortion rights. “In politics,” he writes, “winning elections is the moral imperative. You go into this business to change people’s lives for the better. That means changing policy, and to change policy you have to win.”
The irony here is that Jentleson is describing a campaign that looks a lot like the one that Harris ran, and lost. As progressives quickly pointed out in response, in 2024 Harris did indeed say no to the kinds of groups he mentioned, leaning on celebrity endorsements and vague pronouncements of “joy.” The special interests that were most influential this cycle weren’t progressives but AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACS, and Uber, whose former chief counsel Tony West (Harris’s brother-in-law) urged the candidate to moderate her message so as to better appeal to corporate interests.
As journalist Dan Denvir wrote before the election, Democrats this cycle fell back on an old playbook of trying to outflank Republicans on immigration. They championed a bill chock-full of the right’s preferred policies, like expanding ICE detention capacity and restricting asylum, then campaigned on the fact that the GOP voted it down when Trump told them to. Having previously called Trump’s border wall a “medieval vanity project,” Harris then pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building it. As Denvir writes, “Given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The ‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.”
What precisely might Harris have said to better convince voters that she would be adequately tough on immigration? And if her fatal flaws in Jentleson’s view mostly come down to things she said in the 2020 primary, does that mean that all candidates should ignore the realities of the race that they’re currently in—including in relatively progressive seats—so as to avoid Republican blowback if they run for something else in the future? The trouble with the “moderation” pitch isn’t just that it ignores the reality of the election that just happened. It also leaves Democrats playing catch-up in debates whose terms are perpetually set by Republicans, whatever the real-world consequences. The demand that the party embrace whatever positions happen to be popular at the moment imagines public opinion as exogenous to the work of politics. What precisely is the “moral imperative” to win elections if Democrats are merely choosing the correct position among the options that the right lays out for them?
Those punching left aren’t making an original argument. Way back in the 1970s, the so-called Watergate Babies—Gary Hart, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas, and more—decried the Democratic Party’s allegiance to the special interests who pushed for and were aided by Great Society programs, including feminist groups and labor unions. It’s telling that this jab is always squarely aimed at the left. Jentleson approvingly cites Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a “Blue Dog” Democrat who won an impressive reelection fight against her far-right Republican opponent in the Portland suburbs. What works well in certain districts isn’t a national strategy, though. Less than 10 percent of House districts are now considered competitive. Centrist and right-leaning Blue Dogs have also steadily lost seats since the 2010 midterms, when just 23 of that coalition’s 54 members were reelected. Prior to this year’s election, the caucus had just 10 members.
Orienting the party toward winning over particular sets of so-called moderates every four years seems unlikely to help the end goal of building a durable governing majority—yet that’s precisely what Democrats have done. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put it before Trump was elected, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Harris—who tacked right on immigration, campaigned with Liz Cheney, and boasted about booming oil and gas production—proceeded to lose all of the states Schumer mentioned except for Illinois. Roughly the same number of registered Republicans voted for her as had voted for Biden in 2020.
It’s entirely possible that Harris still wouldn’t have won if she’d listened more to progressive interest groups’ messaging advice; she might even have done worse. That’s partly because the Democratic Party’s problem isn’t messaging so much as the fact that its highest-profile leaders (including Harris) don’t seem to believe anything they say—centrist, progressive, or otherwise.
In the lead-up to this election, Harris and other leading Democrats decried Trump and MAGA Republicans as an existential threat to American democracy; now, newly elected House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pledged to find “common ground” with them. That waffling and incoherence is less of a comms issue than a structural one. The “Democratic Party” isn’t a distinct entity to be won but a somewhat random collection of politicians, staffers, and consultants aligned behind the loose goal of their own gainful employment, either via winning elections or telling people how to do so. Even if Democrats did have more institutional integrity, they would still find it challenging to simultaneously be a party of big business and organized labor, as they’ve long aspired to be. They would still struggle to turn out Arab voters in key swing states while sending Israel weapons to bomb their families in the Middle East. More often than not, these constituencies’ interests are fundamentally opposed to one another; no amount of smart messaging, or berating voters, can fully solve that.
On some level, then, Jentleson is right to point to coalition management as a problem for the Democrats. But the solution isn’t to box out left-leaning constituency groups and leave politics up to supposedly more sober-minded pollsters and consultants, who have an obvious material interest in this argument. Debates over Democratic Party messaging obscure a thornier, more substantive one over who it is that party ought to represent. Campaigning on economic populism to appeal to the voters feeling the pain of high rents and insurance rates would piss off big donors in the finance and real estate sectors; actually enacting that agenda would require electoral majorities big enough to withstand the wrath of the country’s most powerful industries, which might be difficult to attain without those big donors.
There’s no easy way out of this bind. Continuing to tack right, blame the left, and then tack even farther right as a corrective—hemorrhaging reliable Democratic constituencies along the way—doesn’t seem like a promising solution. If the Democratic Party is to have any kind of future, it can’t just keep doing battle on fields Republicans choose; voters who want to vote for the GOP’s positions will vote for the GOP. Democrats will need to convince ever-growing majorities why it’s better to be governed by them every single year, at all levels of government—not just why the alternative is scarier. To do that they’ll have to influence public opinion rather than just respond to it.
