We are more than 1,200 days away from the 2028 presidential election, but the Democratic presidential primary is already well underway. The likely candidates are fund-raising, hosting campaign rallies, starting podcasts and staking out ideological lanes.
Candidates will try to carve out distinct political identities, but one challenge unites them all: Their party is historically unpopular. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is 22 percentage points underwater — 60 percent of respondents view it unfavorably, 38 favorably. Apart from the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency, that is by far the lowest it’s been during the more than 30 years Pew Research has collected data.
The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps, moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition — one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause — the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.
It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump.
To be clear, the blueprint I refer to is not the one Mr. Trump has used to violate democratic norms and destabilize American institutions, but rather the one for resetting how Americans view a party and its leaders.
In January 2013, at the time of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were deeply unpopular. Conservative thought leaders like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove advocated comprehensive immigration reform as a pathway back to a majority. By the summer, the base’s backlash to the idea was itself so comprehensive that many of them were forced to retreat.
For the 2016 primary, Republicans had their own two camps: party favorites, like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, and Tea Partyers, like Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, who were committed to a rightward tack.
The problem for the Rubio-Bush camp was that Republican voters had already rejected moderation on issues of importance to them like immigration. The problem for the Cruz-Walker camp was that their approach meant emphasizing some of the party’s least-popular positions, like cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
The innovation of Mr. Trump was to reject the choice between these two camps. He ran to the right of his party on immigration (proposing mass deportation and a border wall) and to the left of his party on government spending (proposing no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, more money for infrastructure and universal health insurance).
This allowed him to shore up a key portion of the primary electorate for whom immigration was the most important issue, while appealing to a broader electorate for whom the economy was the most important issue.
He didn’t stop there. He criticized the Republican-led invasion of Iraq and George W. Bush. He went after Mitt Romney and John McCain. The message was clear: No matter where you stood on the political spectrum, if you had a grievance with the status quo G.O.P., Mr. Trump was your guy.
Despite taking extreme positions throughout the campaign, on Election Day 2016, Mr. Trump appeared to voters as the less ideologically extreme of the two options. They also viewed him as significantly less conservative than any Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush.
That should not be so surprising. Voters who code as moderate in polling are usually not people who take the middle position on every issue but instead take the right-wing position on some and the left-wing position on others. They also tend to find both parties distasteful.
Running against your own party from both the left and the right, and more broadly against both parties, allows you to frustrate voters’ perceptions of you. For Mr. Trump, this approach had the long-term effect of not just giving him distance from an unpopular Republican Party. Over time, perceptions of the G.O.P. shifted and allowed the party to win over voters that even 2013-era immigration-reform-supporting Sean Hannity could never have imagined.
In theory, this could work for a Democrat. Democratic primary voters have shown more deference to the party establishment over the past decade, but patience may be wearing thin. In 2024, the party stood by a deeply unpopular president despite clear signs that Democratic voters did not think he was suited to another term. Now only about two-thirds of self-described Democrats have a favorable view of their party.
Likewise, Democrats will need to appeal to voters in states currently written off by the party if they hope to actually legislate while in power. Redefining what it means to be a Democrat will give those voters a chance to reconsider how they vote.
There’s another argument for this strategy, too. It has worked for Democrats before. When Bill Clinton ran in 1992, the Democratic Party could hardly have been more demoralized. Republicans had won a rare third consecutive term in the White House, and ambitious Democrats declined to even run in the primary because a fourth term seemed so ensured. Mr. Clinton’s innovation was to run to the left on health care (proposing a universal health care plan far more progressive than the Affordable Care Act) and to the right on crime and government spending (eventually passing crime and welfare bills). This helped reorient politics enough to win Democrats the popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.
The point is that any ambitious Democrats positioning themselves for 2028 shouldn’t think about picking between moderate and progressive lanes. They should pick both. They should also feel comfortable attacking the Democratic Party for its recent failures.
Voters’ views can change a lot in two years, but today that might look something like running on the right on immigration and on the left on health care. Health care is one of the single most important issues to Democrats. The party is also more trusted than the G.O.P. on the issue. Republicans are still more trusted on immigration, and it is a top issue to Americans overall. Such a strategy could also include, for example, a conservative critique of the debt and deficit, and a liberal critique of housing affordability. The state of the economy in 2027 and early 2028 will largely determine the winning message there.
The same goes for social issues: Assert that the goal is for all people to be treated with dignity and that Democrats got carried away with ideas that ultimately didn’t further that goal.
Non-policy characteristics like personal biography and communication style have also played a big role in Mr. Trump’s success. It may be harder for future candidates to learn lessons from Mr. Trump in this regard because they are authentic to him — but authenticity itself may be the larger lesson. It will be far easier for candidates less connected to the status quo Democratic Party to authentically run against it than some of the current well-known favorites.
To be truly successful, the next Democratic nominee will transform how Americans view the Democratic Party as a whole, leading the way to winning voters not currently viewed as “gettable” in states that have been written off.
Galen Druke, a former podcast host and reporter at FiveThirtyEight, is the host of the “GD Politics” podcast.
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