On a squinty bright, unreasonably warm January day in downtown Concord, New Hampshire, I kept hearing the weirdest thing: “I’m deciding between McCain and Obama.”
It was the 2008 presidential primary, I was working for the local congressman, and we were spending the day talking with voters. A surprising number of them were telling us that they were equally attracted to two candidates who my boss privately described as “slightly ideologically different, in that one’s to the left of JFK and the other’s to the right of Atilla the Hun.”
For these voters, the election clearly wasn’t about ideology, policy, or party. It was about the thing they wanted most, and where both candidates were giving off a similar vibe: change. What was resonating wasn’t any particular agenda or set of issues, but rather a desire for things to be different.
There’s a lesson in that for today’s Democratic Party.
Change has been a burgeoning theme in American politics for decades—since 1979, the median percentage of us who are dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” has been 70 percent. And if there’s one consistent takeaway from the past year of public opinion research, it’s that voters want change more than ever.
But now “change” has taken on a bitter edge. Fifty-three percent of 2024 voters told pollster David Shor that things are going so poorly in America that what is needed goes beyond mere change—they want a “shock to the system.” Three-quarters told Navigator Research last month that the American political and economic system needs major changes or “should be torn down completely.” Even 27 percent of voters who supported Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to see “complete and total upheaval” in how the country is run (and 71 percent of Trump voters) according to AP-NORC exit polling.
So, the problem for Democrats is that there is clearly one, foundational, driving idea that most voters seem to agree on, and they’ve gotten themselves on the wrong side of it. Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager on Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign: put it perfectly last week: “if you think the system is broken, we’ve been the ones defending it.”
What’s worse is that President Donald Trump‘s rampage through our government, our values, and our very minds has put Democrats in a bind: even if they agree on the problem, how can they recapture being leaders on change while defending American institutions that desperately need protection right now? Voters may think that Trump has gone too far, but at a gut level they’re still basically hungry for major disruption.
Noted political analyst Ruy Texeira thinks there may be no answer: he sees it as a stark, one-or-the-other choice between being the “party of restoration” or the “party of change.” But his colleague Michael Baharaeen argues that there may be a way to thread the needle, “to acknowledge voters’ frustrations with these institutions and the political system more broadly, and to offer a vision for how to fix (rather than destroy) them.”
That’s a tall order. But if it’s possible, it’s a must-do, and Democrats can make a start by recognizing three guidelines. It just so happens that they line up with the famous political “haiku” that James Carville used to focus Bill Clinton‘s 1992 presidential campaign: “Change vs. more of the same; the economy, stupid; don’t forget health care.
First, Democrats need to not be such Democrats about this: you don’t need a brilliant, 10-page Elizabeth Warren-esque policy plan to “end quintile disparity” to get right with voters at a basic level about the need for change…and the stark difference with Trump’s version of it. The reason Carville led his mantra with “change vs. more of the same” was to remind his own campaign to boil things down. So keep it simple stupids: stand for change. And yes, Americans can probably handle the nuance of Democrats saying, “America definitely needs an extreme home makeover, but let’s hire a contractor, not an arsonist.”
Second, Democrats do need to describe what parts of the system need to change. That’s where “the economy, stupid” comes in. Trump has been politically successful for one major reason: because he tapped the vein of real economic pain that Americans are feeling.
The response has to be less wrestling, more jujitsu. Instead of fighting over whether that pain is real, Democrats should channel it and redirect their focus to the core problem driving Americans’ distress: that opportunity for all but a few has stalled. Low- and medium-income workers have had no increase in purchasing power for decades. That’s largely because there’s no income ladder within many segments of the economy anymore. People feel dead-ended, and justifiably so.
What needs to change to fix that? There have been a lot of great ideas bubbling up around how to start building things again, and thereby unlock more income opportunity, upward mobility, and a better standard of living. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that Democrats need to be the party of “abundance“—which means going after excessive regulation so America can construct housing, energy generation, transportation, and public works. Marc Dunkelman offers a similar idea that we need to cut through the red tape of process and legalism to get more done. Both are offering the idea that Democrats are the party of giving people the chance to build more, earn more, and enjoy more of the things they need.
Of course, that means fixing what government does, reining in advocacy groups, and cutting back on legal review to supercharge our incomes and our lifestyle. That’s going to mean fights with power centers in your own party. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Voters will only believe you’re serious—and change their image of you—if you’re willing to upset a few of your own apple carts.
Finally, there’s the third piece: don’t forget health care. Health care resonated 30 years ago for the same reason it does today: it’s a major source of cost, and cost is the major source of stress. Voters have just finished screaming at the top of their lungs that they are being strangled by the cost of living and desperately want to see change. So why not make the key costs for the middle class like health care, childcare, education, and housing the key part of your change message? Make it the top mission of the government to lower costs in those areas and pare back parts of the government that aren’t lowering people’s costs.
Again, these are starting points, necessary, but far from sufficient. The most important thing is that Democrats must embrace the idea and get going. It’s like the old joke: how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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