The most obvious thing in politics is often the hardest to admit: If you lose an election, the best thing that you can do to make sure you win the next one is to find a message that puts you closer to the median voter than you were the last time around.
This is not the only way to win, because your message may turn out to be less important than macroeconomic conditions or a cascade of scandals or an unexpected U.F.O. invasion. But repositioning is one of the most important things that you can actually control, the clearest means of showing the public that you’ve learned from the rebuke, and the natural way to persuade a swing voter to swing the other way.
However, to move to the center is, by definition, to move in the direction of the other party, toward the hated enemy and away from your most passionate supporters. Nobody wants to do that! Which is why, in times of political defeat, there is a bottomless appetite for prescriptions that reassure the defeated party members that they just need to be truer to themselves, more effective, more ruthless. And no ambitious politician wants to be the first to throw cold water on these hopes.
This is the psychological spot where many Democrats find themselves today. It is completely obvious that the party lost in 2024 because it overcommitted to a range of unpopular left-wing positions, some of which yielded disastrous policy results (like the Biden migration wave) while others merely persuaded constituencies that had voted Democratic in the past (like blue-collar Midwesterners or culturally conservative Latino men) that the party now cared more about climate change and various academic fixations than cheap energy and good-paying jobs.
If for some reason you don’t find this obvious, I recommend spending some time with the new report “Deciding to Win,” from the center-left group Welcome, which tries to make an exhaustive data-driven case for the diagnosis I’ve just offered.
But since I already think that case ought to be plain to anyone with eyes, I’ve been more struck by the response from the authors’ fellow Democrats — and not just from professional activists, but from pundits and pollsters and academics, often extremely intelligent people, who are deeply committed to telling any other story besides the obvious one.
Sometimes these stories seek to minimize the stakes of Democratic positioning: Moderation is only worth a few points at the polls; individual campaigns don’t really move the needle. Sometimes they propose some other, much larger problem as the thing that needs to be addressed instead — the entire digital media environment, the two-party system in the age of polarization. But in each case, the purpose is evasion, with some other thing — which may even be a true-ish thing — put forward to obscure or minimize the truth that the Democratic Party would benefit substantially from moving somewhat to the right.
I recognize this conversation because it was how many conservatives talked to one another in the Tea Party era, when a Republican Party shattered by the Iraq War and the financial crisis convinced itself that George W. Bush had come to grief only because he was a big-government liberal, and what the country really wanted was a more rigorous form of government-cutting conservatism.
We have not yet reached Tea Party levels of insurgent action inside the Democratic coalition yet, but the atmosphere is clearly there — a constant demand for “fighters,” a willingness to stick with toxic candidates in winnable elections, an environment where even moderate politicians just don’t want to pick fights with the party’s base.
Like the Tea Party, a Democratic Party that goes in this direction can have some successes. A period of insurgency will surface talented politicians (as it did with Marco Rubio and Rand Paul and others in the G.O.P.) as well as progressive versions of Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell. A shift away from wokeness toward bread-and-butter issues could make even a left-wing Democratic Party more appealing. The House will be winnable no matter what. And the Trumpian Republican Party has enough problems acting moderate — or simply normal, these days — that some path back to the White House will be open to the Democrats in 2028.
But the Tea Party’s provisional successes ultimately crashed into the hard reality that America did not want to be governed by a party that talked about the economy like Ayn Rand’s John Galt.
Similarly, I don’t see how a “fighting” Democratic Party can hope to win back the Senate, let alone build what every fighting liberal claims to want — the kind of durable majority that could actually marginalize Trumpism and populism — if it doesn’t admit to itself that what happened in 2024 wasn’t just about Joe Biden’s age or Elon Musk’s algorithm. It was also an ideological referendum, and progressivism lost.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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