In this episode of “The Opinions,” David Leonhardt, the editorial director of the editorial board, asks the Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg what Democrats are doing right, what they’re doing wrong and what they should consider doing next.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the editorial director of the New York Times editorial board.
When I ask Democratic voters how they feel about their party’s performance since President Trump took office in January, I tend to hear a lot of negative responses, words like “confused,” “out of touch” and, above all, “weak.” Some of those critiques are accurate, but there is also a reason to believe that the Democrats may be doing a better job as Trump’s opposition party than many people recognize. After all, Trump’s approval rating has significantly declined since he took office. That’s a sign that some of the Democratic critiques are landing, and if you look at Congress right now, you’ll see the Democrats are largely united while Republicans are bickering about what to include in their big budget bill.
Democrats, to be clear, do have a lot of problems. They don’t control a single branch of government and their party is even less popular than Trump is today. On “The Opinions,” we’re going to talk about what the party is doing right, what it’s doing wrong and what it should consider doing next. We have a great guest to talk about these issues today, my colleague Michelle Goldberg, a Times Opinion columnist who’s reported extensively on the Democrats’ response to Trump. Michelle, welcome to the show.
Michelle Goldberg: Hi, David. Thanks for having me.
Leonhardt: Let’s get into it. It’s a cliché — a famous cliché — to say that the Democrats can never get anything right. There’s a joke about the media always writing “Dems in disarray.” So let’s defy the cliché and start by talking about what the party has done right in the four months since Trump took office again. What do you think is on that list?
Goldberg: Before we do that — and I’m going to do that — I do want to take issue with the notion that Trump’s falling approval rating is necessarily connected to the Democrats’ performance. First of all, I think that Trump’s falling approval ratings are connected to his insane tariff strategy, and also that the more people see of Trump, the less often they like him. When he’s not in power, people project all these ideas onto him, and then when they see the kind of chaos and cruelty that he brings — some people obviously love it — but you always sort of see some erosion.
Leonhardt: That’s fair. Can I just make one point in response to that, which is I’m not really sure how else we can measure the Democrats’ performance other than Trump’s approval rating. And I do think it’s possible it’s completely disconnected from the Democrats, but I also think if they can bring his approval rating down or if his approval rating does come down, it is going to be bad for Trump.
Goldberg: Yeah, of course. Of course it is. I just think that Trump has probably done more to bring his approval rating down at this point than the Democrats have.
Leonhardt: I agree with that. With that said, what do you think the Democrats have done right?
Goldberg: Well, I think certain Democrats have been doing the right thing. So I’ll name a couple, and this isn’t necessarily to say that I think that their political approach is the one that the party as a whole needs to adopt going forward. I should just say that obviously Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been really strong in going out into the country, showing the scale of opposition to Trump even in red states, kind of putting together with Bernie Sanders these massive rallies and connecting Trump’s corruption and autocratic tendencies to these policies that are going to make a lot of voters, including a lot of his own voters, worse off financially.
Leonhardt: I think you just made a really important distinction there, if I can jump in, which is what A.O.C. and Bernie are doing is really valuable. They are demonstrating that there is substantial opposition to Trump in a very visible way. These big rallies — and we know this has worked before — worked to help defeat his attempt to repeal Obamacare when people got out there to town hall meetings. That isn’t necessarily saying that the A.O.C.-Bernie approach should be the future of the Democratic Party in every way, but I think a lot of moderates have gotten wrong the fact that what A.O.C. and Bernie are doing is important and valuable.
Goldberg: I just think people are so scared and desperate and want to see leadership that, to them, speaks to the scale of the emergency.
We’re taping this on Friday. I wrote this column about Democrats and Biden’s cognitive decline, and I got so many angry emails from readers, saying: Why are you focusing on looking backward? Don’t you understand the scale of the disaster that has befallen us? And you know, those people — the scale of the loss and the grief that they feel, which I understand because I feel it, too, that I assumed, for all my cynicism about American politics, that I was going to die in a liberal democracy that wasn’t that far removed from the one I was born into — those people just feel leaderless, and this isn’t really a question of left versus right. It’s more sort of passivity versus fighting.
Anyone who can show that they understand what 45 percent of Americans who feel like they are living in a kind of hellish, emergent dictatorship — anyone who can speak to them, say that they’re there with them, that they’re going to do what they can to stand up for them — I think that Governor Pritzker in Illinois is doing this. I think that Senator Chris Murphy is doing this, and I think more Democrats need to be doing this.
Leonhardt: What else do you think the party’s getting right?
Goldberg: So, a couple of other things. I think that Hakeem Jeffries has been very good at keeping his caucus together to make sure that they’re not giving Republicans votes to help pass some of these harmful bills that they’re trying to shove through with their very narrow majority. I think that Chris Van Hollen took a risk that really paid off by going to El Salvador and pursuing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and when Van Hollen went down to El Salvador there was some skepticism among Democrats and pundits that immigration is one of Trump’s better issues, so why are we highlighting the salience of it? And why should Democrats align with this person who obviously shouldn’t have been deported to El Salvador but isn’t the kind of person that you want to make the poster boy for asylum cases?
But I think that he took a risk, he drew attention to this atrocity, and if you look at the polling, it has moved. Immigration has stopped being such a great issue for Donald Trump, and in some polls he’s actually underwater on it. And majorities of people believe that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be returned. We’re going to talk about this idea of how much Democrats need to moderate, and obviously you do need to be somewhat in line with public opinion, but I think Democrats also need to understand that public opinion isn’t a static thing and that they have some agency in shaping it.
Leonhardt: OK. What do you think the party’s done wrong?
Goldberg: I think that there was a lot of shell shock when Trump was elected, especially because he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote. And that led to this period of intense self-flagellation and also passivity. I think that that left a lot of people feeling really leaderless.
I’ve had some off-the-record conversations with Democrats, and I divide off-the-record conversations with Democrats into two groups: There’s people who really get the scale of the threat that we’re facing, the scale of the potential transformation of the country and the regime that we’re governed by. And then there are people who think that Trump is just like a kind of worse Republican, and who basically think that things are going to bump along some version of normal. I think that the latter people might think I’m hysterical, but I think they’re suffering from a catastrophic lack of imagination.
Leonhardt: So I actually agree with you in large part about the scale of the threat. I did not think that I would be living in a version of the United States where the threat to democracy was as big as it is today. So for me, that actually is an argument about why the Democrats need to be particularly rigorous and introspective about why they are so unpopular among so many voters. Because essentially, out of our two political parties, Democrats are the party that has shown a real commitment to small-D democracy. And if voters are rejecting them for other reasons, it’s a really big problem for our country. So I want to ask you ——
Goldberg: Well, can I ask you: What’s your theory for why they’re so unpopular?
Leonhardt: I think there’s a mix of things. I think some of it is bad luck. I think you can argue that a bunch of the inflation stuff is bad luck that afflicted ruling parties in much of the world, both right and left. And then I think there are two other factors that the Democrats inflicted on themselves. One is Joe Biden’s age and the denial about that. And that is backward-looking, but I think it was a huge problem for the party over the last couple of years and probably still has some lingering wounds, although it’s also something that really is in the rearview mirror.
And then there’s the fact that the party really got out of step on a whole bunch of big issues with public opinion in a really big way. Republicans are out of step on abortion, as you and I have talked about, clearly. But the list of issues in which the Democratic Party got out of step with the public opinion might be longer, and the extent to which the Democratic Party moved so far — I don’t even know if “left” is the right word — but so far left, if you want to describe it that way, on immigration, way out of step with the American people, was just a huge problem in this election. Do you think that’s unfair?
Goldberg: No, I don’t think it’s unfair, but I think that you’re missing something. I think that there’s another reason why they’re so unpopular. I don’t discount any of the ones that you just listed. But if you look at the polls, Democrats are really unpopular with Democrats. That’s part of the reason why their approval ratings are at historic lows, and they’re unpopular with Democrats because they don’t think they’re fighting hard enough. Not because they want them to triangulate more, but because they want them to stand up more.
Leonhardt: I think, to win elections, they’re going to have to bring along not only Democrats who want them to fight harder but also the swing voters who think the party got out of step. And what I think is interesting — you got at this earlier, and I think it’s a really important distinction — you can fight hard and still not be on an ideological extreme. And when I look at the Democrats who won really tough races in places that Trump also won, I see two things.
They don’t come off as weak. In fact, they come off as quite strong and tough and, often, populist. They also come across as moderate on a bunch of issues. I want to play audio from a couple of things and get your response to them. The first is Ruben Gallego, the Democratic senator from Arizona who won that state, even though Trump ended up winning it by more than five percentage points over Kamala Harris.
Here’s Senator Gallego.
Audio clip of Ruben Gallego: When the Democrats basically dropped the ball on the chaos on the border for many years, we essentially lost the debate on immigration reform for years because the everyday voter doesn’t trust us on the border and on immigration reform, because for years they saw that chaos on the border and we did nothing. The Biden administration finally moved, but by then it had been so long and the damage had been done.
Goldberg: So I think he’s obviously right on the politics. I guess the one thing that enrages me about this debate, especially when people are like, Well, you have to give Trump credit for closing the border, is what we have to sacrifice to do that. So when Biden finally acted on the border, he basically shut down the asylum process. That was the cost of containing the chaos at the border in the absence of legislation that would give you the resources to vastly scale up the personnel that you would need to hear all these claims and weed out the ones that were bogus.
And because our legislative system is so dysfunctional, the way that Biden finally got on top of this was to give up something that I think is pretty sacred and is a pretty big loss. You can argue that that was necessary, maybe it is, but we don’t talk enough about why it was so hard to control the border without the sort of resources that were required while still honoring this thing that I thought was beautiful and sacred about this country, which is that we were a refuge for many people and now we’re not. So if that’s something that we have to give up to stave off fascism, I am open to that argument. I think it might be true, but I also think it’s a tragedy.
Leonhardt: I think it would be a tragedy, too. I’m hopeful we don’t have to give it up.
Goldberg: But we gave it up.
Leonhardt: We have given it up for now. I think the slight reason for optimism is presidents tend to produce backlashes to their policies. I think Trump’s presidency will make Americans more favorable toward immigration than they were when he took office. I do think we have to solve a really hard problem, which is, given modern transportation networks, huge numbers of people can make it to this country and claim asylum, and we have to figure out how to distinguish between those who would like to move here and those who are legitimate candidates for asylum.
Goldberg: Right, but that’s actually not that insoluble a problem if you just put the resources into hiring the people to screen them. That’s been the thing that we can’t do.
Leonhardt: And that will take a lot more resources. We mentioned Gallego: He actually has just come out with an immigration plan, which calls for many more border agents who have more authority to make asylum decisions. There are details there that people will debate, but something like that — along with more pathways to legalization, which is what his plan also calls for, and a path to citizenship for Dreamers and others — should be the long-term solution.
Goldberg: Right. So actually, the interesting thing is that I don’t know if there’s any daylight between Gallego’s position and that of a lot of progressives. The really different thing is his affect. I was in Arizona a bunch in the run-up to the 2024 election, and Gallego is a Marine, he’s Latino, he’s a normal person, he’s charismatic. I think that that stuff goes a pretty long way.
I tend to think that a lot of the Democrats’ problems can be solved through candidate recruitment, and just recruiting people who come from the communities that they want to represent, who sort of are fluent in the cultural norms of the places that they come from. I think that’s very different — and I think you probably agree with this — it’s very different than, say, a governor, Gavin Newsom, who is doing this really pitiful and thirsty triangulation to try to appeal to some mythical group of voters who are sort of skeptical of Trump but really want to hear from Charlie Kirk.
Leonhardt: Yeah, I mean, I would be very surprised if Newsom — or, for that matter, Harris — ended up being the Democrats’ next presidential nominee.
Goldberg: Me, too.
Leonhardt: Your point that a lot of this is about messaging brings me to another Democrat who won in a place where Trump won, which is Elissa Slotkin, who was a House member. Now she’s a senator from Michigan, she won a very narrow race in Michigan, and she has criticized the party for being weak and woke. Let’s play a clip from her as well.
Audio clip of Elissa Slotkin: I’m from the Midwest, and for us, leaders like our coaches are — they’ve got some alpha energy to them, and I think we’ve lost some of that in the party, and I want to see that come back.
Leonhardt: What do you think of that critique?
Goldberg: I think it’s basically right. I would like to hear her be more specific about what are the elements of wokeness that she wants to jettison. I’m all for getting rid of newfangled alienating language. If you look at the Democrats who have won in places that Trump also won, they’re not necessarily anti-trans. John Fetterman definitely isn’t. Andy Beshear definitely isn’t. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t. They differ from the party on various different issues, and I think that there’s probably some inherent value in demonstrating independence, but it’s hard to say what is the style of moderation that unites all of the Democrats who win in red districts.
I mean, what do you see as being the thing that ties them together?
Leonhardt: I agree with that. I don’t think there’s any particular issue that’s necessarily important for Democrats to moderate on, maybe with the exception of immigration. I think there’s a version of elite social liberalism that is very unpopular in this country and was ascendant, I don’t know, roughly from 2016 to 2021. We can dispute the exact dates. I think it’s important for Democrats in tough places to pick a fight, or maybe two fights, with that version of elite social liberalism that’s unpopular. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be on some technocratic policy grounds, and I don’t think it has to be on any one issue.
If you think about the ones you’ve mentioned, like Gluesenkamp Perez, the House member from Washington, she voted against student debt relief, and that sent a signal. And so I do think it’s important for these Democrats to pick a fight.
Goldberg: I guess so. Yes, maybe you might be right, as an electoral matter. I do think there’s a pundit brain that thinks that one of the most important moments in modern American politics was Bill Clinton denouncing Sister Souljah during his first presidential campaign. You constantly hear this refrain that Democrats need this Sister Souljah moment to put distance between themselves and the party, and I think if you go back and look at the Sister Souljah speech, it was in a speech to a civil rights group, and he had at that point already developed a lot of deep relationships and credibility with a lot of Black leaders.
Clinton wasn’t necessarily trying to — he was trying to demonstrate his independence, but he also wasn’t sneering at them or trying to stick a finger in their eye. And I do think that there is a kind of pundit brain that wants to see Democrats constantly punching left, scorning a big chunk of the Democratic electorate. And again, I’m torn, because I understand the need to show independence on a lot of these things, but I actually think there’s something weak about constantly wanting to show that you’re not like these voters. There’s another axis that voters, I think, judge people on and that we also should try to evaluate them on, which is authenticity versus inauthenticity.
There’s certainly candidates for whom it’s really authentic to them to be scornful of certain kinds of liberal social mores. I’m thinking of Dan Osborn. He’s not a Democrat; he was running as an independent. He’s going to be running again in 2026. But he ran this very, very interesting independent race, and came really close in Nebraska. He really is this kind of union guy and really does have this chip on his shoulder — and I say that in a good way, actually, about people that he regards as coastal elitists. And I think that’s fine if that’s really where you are. But I also think that there is something to be said for standing up for your actual beliefs and your actual voters and the people who support you. And refusing to do that can also look really weak.
Leonhardt: I completely agree. I think the critique of punditocracy is really important and authenticity is really vital. I think what a lot of moderate Democrats would say in response to that is that the left part of the party has made this mistake of assuming that it is correct on the issues on everything ——
Goldberg: Well, everybody thinks they’re correct. I mean, if you didn’t think you were correct, they wouldn’t be your views.
Leonhardt: Absolutely right, but I just want to say it is entirely possible for there to be Democrats who have Ruben Gallego’s views about immigration, not because you think you need to do it to win elections but because you genuinely think that the openness of Joe Biden’s immigration policy was a problem. I think you and I might disagree a little bit on that, and that’s OK ——
Goldberg: It’s not even that I think it was ——
Leonhardt: I’m saying that people who have more moderate, hawkish views on the border, they might genuinely have those views, and thus be more in line with the American people. Rather than that, they secretly want the Biden immigration policy, but they’re doing something else in order to win.
Goldberg: Right, but that’s what I mean when I talk about the key being a kind of candidate recruitment, as opposed to candidate triangulation.
Leonhardt: Yes. OK, let’s end by looking forward. Like you, I’m really worried about the state of American democracy. How are you feeling about what’s important to happen before the 2026 midterms? What should people be doing now and in the coming months to try to protect what you and I hold so dear about the American democratic system?
Goldberg: First of all, I think it’s really important to make people realize that they’re not alone and they’re not marginal in being horrified by this, especially if they live outside of really blue enclaves. That’s why I think it’s so important to be doing these town halls in Republican districts that you see a couple of Democrats doing — way more Democrats should be doing that. Democratic senators should be doing those town halls in the red districts in their own states, talking to the people that they represent whose own representatives are hiding from them.
And the other corollary of that is it both demonstrates a certain amount of aggressiveness but it also just brings people together in real life, and there’s no substitute for that. Protesting can sometimes feel kind of futile when you have an administration that really doesn’t care what half of the country thinks. But protests, especially when they reach a certain critical mass, can really capture the public imagination and change the conversation. And so you have these protests, they’re getting bigger and bigger, they’re getting more frequent. At some point, I think they will reach a critical mass.
Leonhardt: And I think it’s important to say that there’s a lot of historical evidence that protest can work. It can shift the debate, as you’ve said. It can even influence judicial decisions. There’s evidence to that. And so watching cable television probably is futile, and tweeting may well be futile, but actually attending town hall meetings and attending protests really ——
Goldberg: Yeah, calling your congressman — like, all that stuff makes a difference.
Leonhardt: It does. And I think that is exactly the right note to end this conversation. Michelle, thank you so much for coming on.
Goldberg: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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