When Texas Republicans announced last month that they would redraw congressional maps for the explicit purpose of picking up five seats currently held by Democrats, they shocked the Democratic Party into action. Within days, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has spent his post-White House career fighting to end gerrymandering, said he was done playing by the rules. It was time to rig the maps, too.
“Progressives and Democrats are uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power in ways that Republicans are not,” Mr. Holder said. “And that time has got to be over. We need to be unabashed in our desire to acquire power, and then to use power.”
Other leaders have also unburdened themselves. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said as she fully embraced ultra-partisan gerrymandering in her state. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, declared it was time for his party to be reborn. “This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight,” said Mr. Martin, flanked by Texas Democrats who had fled Austin for a hotel in suburban Chicago to thwart their conservative adversaries. “This is a new Democratic Party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”
Democratic voters may be wondering what took so long. When asked to describe their party, a full quarter of Democrats used words like “weak,” “ineffective” or “apathetic,” according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only two in 10 Democrats had positive things to say about the Democratic Party.
Perhaps this moment mollifies some of those voters. But it also undermines the moral story that the party has been broadcasting about itself through multiple election cycles — that the Democratic Party is the party that follows the rules, even when no one else does. While Republicans — in the Trump era, especially — may engage in degrading democracy for partisan ends, Democrats insist they are answering a higher call, with fealty above all to principle and procedure. As Michelle Obama famously put it in 2016 at the Democratic National Convention, “When they go low, we go high.”
Political scientists and historians have observed that while the modern Republican Party became more ruthless about defeating its political enemies, breaking whatever norms were required, Democrats effectively stood in place, hoping for a return to bipartisan comity and defending the status quo that their opponents were smashing. The Democrats became the party of procedure.
“They’re ambivalent about brass knuckles,” said Daniel Schlozman, co-author of “The Hollow Parties” and professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
Recent developments around gerrymandering suggest that the party is beginning to surrender an attitude that has defined it for decades. But a more profound transformation will require a shift in how the party conceives of itself. For generations, the Democrats’ love of procedure has wound its way into the party’s voter base, its leaders and its governing philosophy. To really change would require a return to a party that barely exists in living memory.
From Machine Bosses to Technocrats
The Democratic Party has long had two distinct political styles. To borrow Mr. Martin’s formulation, it’s the knives versus the pencils.
For more than a century, a more ruthless, transactional model dominated Democratic politics, for better and for worse. But since the 1970s, the experts with the pencils have come to run the show. And it is increasingly clear that this model has hindered the party’s ability to deliver, even to its most loyal supporters.
The story of how the Democrats became the party of procedure follows the party’s transformation into the political home of the professional class. These are voters with college and graduate degrees — the winners of the meritocracy — who now form a large portion of the party, as it bleeds support each election cycle from the working class.
Voters worried about democracy are quite reasonably responding to President Trump’s ceaseless violations of ethics and the Republican Party’s brazen power grabs. The more the right shatters political norms, the more Democrats have felt called to defend them.
Whether these Democrats know it or not, they are also trying to uphold a distinguished tradition of political reform, dating to the turn of the 20th century, when the original Progressive movement took aim at the Gilded Age corruption that dominated the country’s politics.
Some of the most aggressive gerrymandering in American history occurred after the Civil War, as the parties vied for control of the nation. In Northern industrial cities, Democratic party bosses built a new style of urban machine politics greased by the exchange of money and personal favors. These Democrats, often from Irish families placed low in society by prejudice, hustled for every shred of their influence and aggressively broke the rules.
“Most had to earn their way, through trial by campaign combat, for themselves or for someone higher in the party hierarchy,” the historian Jon Grinspan writes in his book “The Age of Acrimony.” “Though laughably far from a meritocracy, the campaign-obsessed culture at least rewarded a skill, preferring the kind of unstoppably social animals who could mesmerize a town square, saloon, or schoolhouse.”
By the early 1900s progressive reformers had enjoyed some success in replacing this culture of graft with one that prized order and expertise. The notion of “good government” began to take root, alongside the rise of independent newspapers exposing corporate and political corruption. Technocrats entered the picture. In Wisconsin, the Progressive governor Robert La Follette introduced into American politics the notion of consulting university professors to refine policymaking, turning governance into a craft led by the highly educated. “Expert knowledge tempered by democracy was the objective,” The Atlantic wrote in a 1924 profile of La Follette.
Democrats began to adopt this style into their politics. The New Deal coalition under President Franklin Roosevelt managed to merge the party’s urban white ethnic base with an expert reformer class in Washington that defeated both the Great Depression and Nazi Germany. But even as he allowed technocrats into his administration, President Roosevelt was a cutthroat practitioner of politics. No power grab was too outlandish if it helped him achieve his aims. As he wrote in a 1940 letter to Congress: “Substantial justice remains a higher aim for our civilization than technical legalism.”
By the 1970s, though, the New Deal coalition was coming apart as segregationist Southerners fell away to the Republican Party and union membership began its long decline amid deindustrialization.
Meanwhile, the rise of higher education in America offered an entirely new cohort of voters. In 1970, 11 percent of Americans had a bachelor’s degree or higher. By 2010, this figure was nearly 30 percent. And these voters had a particular way of seeing the world and themselves: rational, meritocratic, enlightened.
Soon the need for moral integrity and technical mastery to run a complex government became not just a mode for governing but also ends in themselves. Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of Democratic leaders arrived to tout these values to voters, more so than their Republican rivals. Experience in gnarly hand-to-hand political combat was fading out. Expertise, ideally honed at an elite university, was in.
President Barack Obama, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review who taught constitutional law, was the apotheosis of this new order, argues Lily Geismer, a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.” In 2012, Mr. Obama resoundingly won re-election with the support of professional-class voters. And he ushered in a peak era of expertise in Washington, with technocrats trying to turn policy knobs to just the right level or to “nudge” Americans toward better decisions. The unspoken assumption was that some issues were simply too complicated for regular people to understand, and so it was best for them not to get involved.
“These kinds of Democrats fear mass participation. That’s what they’re afraid of. Instead, you tweak the system,” Professor Geismer said, adding that these elites tend to be the very people who have benefited most from the status quo. “You believe in ideas of democracy, but it’s a much more rarefied version.”
During the Obama administration, this version of democracy seemed to involve an unyielding faith in bipartisanship, even as Republicans were growing fiercer in their tactics. Perhaps no example was more telling than Senator Mitch McConnell’s successful gambit in 2016 to block Mr. Obama from nominating Merrick Garland — chosen because the president believed his moderate views might make him a palatable candidate to Republicans — to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
“The reality of the situation, one that never quite hit home with the Obama team, was that the technocratic, consensus-driven, bipartisan approach to government favored by the president and by professional-class liberals was simply no match for Republican obstruction,” Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, writes in an essay titled “The Professional-Class Presidency of Barack Obama.” “It wasn’t that Republicans were stronger or more powerful than Democrats; they were simply employing a different mode of politics.”
Elite Politics vs. Mass Politics
Mr. Trump’s brash arrival on the political scene forced public conversations about the role of rules and norms in American life. The president has made clear his disinterest in expertise and politesse; Democrats have, until now, largely responded by defending such values. Just look at the 2024 presidential election, as Kamala Harris’s campaign tried to show its decency by celebrating endorsements from Republicans like Liz Cheney.
There was one sign of change, however. Lawyers, the people literally trained on rules and procedure, had become so dominant in the Democratic Party that every presidential and vice-presidential nominee on the ticket since Jimmy Carter in 1976 had attended law school. Last year, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a former high school teacher, was the first to break the streak.
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters believe that it’s the Democrats who are throwing norms out the window, saying they have taken extraordinary and inappropriate measures to defeat him: impeachments, investigations, criminal charges. Yet even these were all in the mode of lawyering. The public, lost in a sea of procedural fine print, struggled to locate the larger point. The efforts barely dented Mr. Trump’s support.
The vow to start gerrymandering is a sign that the party is trying to channel its more combative roots. So far, though, the Democrats are still reacting to a Republican-hatched scheme, rather than formulating their own hard-boiled agenda. Some scholars and activists believe that exercising power may well require going further.
In a book from 2018, “It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics,” David Faris, a political science professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago, proposed a number of ideas like expanding the Supreme Court, breaking California into a number of states, winning statehood for Washington, D.C., or enlarging the House of Representatives. Such proposals in the past have caused many liberal elites to blanch. But in order to regain power, Democratic leaders may have to decide how much they can afford to keep fussing over these judgments.
A more difficult issue for the party may not just be about how Democrats fight, but about what they might fight for. By embracing a high-minded, technical style of governance, the party has diminished its ability to excite the public with ideas that tangibly affect people’s lives. Meanwhile, campaign promises that do have mass appeal — whether they are from Mr. Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — are often vetted and laughed out of the classroom by the party’s leaders and in-house technocrats. While Democrats dismissed as absurd fantasy Mr. Trump’s promise to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and sanded off the details of their own immigration policy, voters merely heard that Mr. Trump would make the border a top priority.
“You get this mishmash of policies that are technically more rigorous than what Republicans offer. But whether it’s Trump or Sanders, the policies are simple and at least I can remember them,” said Timothy Shenk, professor of history at George Washington University and author of “Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.” “In real-world politics that counts so much more than the compendium of policies that are so massive you have no idea what’s actually going to happen.”
Professor Shenk described the elite Democratic approach to politics as: “We deserve an ‘A’ from politics because we’ve ticked all the boxes. Are you proud of me, professor?”
One of the Democratic Party’s primary concerns right now, headed into the midterms and then the 2028 elections, is how to regain its footing among the working-class voters who have drifted toward the new Trump coalition.
The party has not completely lost touch with those outside the professional class. Most poor Americans still vote Democratic. The trouble is that they don’t show up at the polls nearly as much as those with money.
This was not always so. Measured by voter participation, the most corrupt era of American politics was arguably also the most engaged. Voters felt more connected to their parties in part because they could expect a hand if they lost a job or a bit of money for meals if they were hungry. In the late 19th century, turnout during presidential elections averaged 77 percent. It was especially high among the working class, immigrants, young people and Northern Black voters. After middle-class reformers swept through, voter participation dropped by nearly one-third, especially among the working class, and never recovered.
But recent events in New York City show one way to claw back some of the old spirit. The fight within the party over the mayor’s race there has become so bitter in part because it’s about much more than who runs America’s largest city. It’s about what mode of politics the party wants to choose.
Mr. Mamdani may present a new path, outside the party’s comfort zone. He is a savvy and entertaining political combatant who mercilessly criticizes his opponents. His broad promises to make life in New York more affordable have elicited the expected disdain from the technocratic wing of the party. But among voters, he is so far acting as a rare bridge between the working and middle classes. A liberal arts college graduate and the son of a professor, Mr. Mamdani has attracted not just young, highly educated New Yorkers like himself, but also immigrants who have tilted toward Mr. Trump. Turnout during the mayoral primary was the highest since 1989.
For decades, many of the best minds in the Democratic Party have said that they knew what they were doing, if only everyone else would do as they were told. When not enough voters listened, and their opponents began to break the rules, they appealed to the legal system. The legal system did not listen. Now the path of procedure seems to have reached its end point. As Democrats try to put down their pencils, they will find out if they remember how to use the knives.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.
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