Even with Donald Trump’s approval rating in the toilet and Democrats ahead in generic ballot polling for the House of Representatives, Democrats are steep underdogs to capture a majority of Senate seats.
To regain majority control of the Senate, of the 35 seats on the ballot in November, Democrats must win four controlled by Republicans and there are very few obvious states that are within reach for a Democratic candidate. So if they take the House but fall short in the Senate, party leaders will probably just blame it all on a bad map, i.e., a difficult list of Senate seats on this year’s slate. The problem for Democrats is that all the maps are bad — pick a year, the map will be tough.
Sure, Democrats have done an impressive job over the past decade, winning seats in places that Mr. Trump has won two out of three times — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
But the party’s brand has become so toxic to overcome in so many places that Democrats have often simply given up on the party’s label and instead throw their support behind independents like Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Seth Bodnar in Montana.
Another — better — idea might be for Democrats to try to change their brand. How would they do that? We know that, in general, more moderate candidates tend to do better.
But the advice to appear more moderate is both frustratingly vague and out of step with the mood of a base that increasingly demands tough fighters. Still, politicians can do better if they abandon unpopular issue positions while sticking to their guns on more popular ones — and that’s whether or not they cultivate an image as moderate per se.
This applies to all politicians — not just Democrats. Consider the current president. In 2016, he muted one of, if not the, most potent Democratic attack issues, Republican support for Medicare cuts, by changing the G.O.P.’s position on that issue. He also backed down from past Republican support for Social Security cuts and conceded that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. He walked away from previous Republican opposition to same-sex marriage and allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly in the military. In his 2024 bid, Mr. Trump did it again, when, after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, he promised not to restrict abortion rights.
By changing what Republicans stood for, Mr. Trump changed the party brand. Changing the brand helped to turn former swing states like Iowa and Ohio into solid red states.
A new paper from the political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla offers some guidance on how Democrats might do the same. They recently conducted a survey experiment where they polled voters about potential candidates, but attributed different policy views to them. They found out that which positions they attributed to candidates made a meaningful difference in how voters saw them and their willingness to vote for them.
For candidates from both parties, changing policy positions gained votes on average, but with significant issue-by-issue differences — on some topics, being more moderate actually backfired.
The two biggest vote-shifting issues for Democrats are both related to race. Dropping support for the use of race as a factor in college admissions and racial targeting of small business assistance moved voters a great deal. So did embracing merit pay for K-12 teachers, backing off teaching gay and lesbian themes in school, welcoming fewer asylum seekers, being tougher on minor crimes, plus being more open to fossil-fuel production, restricting gender transition for children and sticking to biological sex as the criteria for sports teams.
For Republicans, moderating on employment discrimination for gay and lesbian workers, on health care and on the minimum wage moves the needle. For Democrats, it’s a good idea to stay strongly progressive on defending Social Security benefits, on the virtues of skilled immigrants and on the minimum wage.
Many progressives who acknowledge that Democrats’ views on some of these issues are unpopular suggest that rather than catering to the voters, it would be wiser to expect political leaders to lead and shift public opinion. But this is very hard to do.
Take affirmative action. In 2020, California Democrats devised a ballot initiative to reverse the state’s constitutional ban on race-conscious college admissions. This was a blue state in a generally strong year for Democrats nationwide. Every major Democrat in the state — the governor, both senators, Nancy Pelosi, the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles — endorsed the initiative. It nonetheless failed with less than 43 percent of the vote. If incumbent Democrats in California can’t persuade voters to shift their minds on this issue, there’s no way non-incumbents pitching themselves to swing voters will pull it off.
In practice, most Democrats don’t run ads on progressive views on these topics and they don’t feature them in their campaign speeches. That suggests that they know that these are losers.
But they also tend not to abandon the unpopular positions. Instead, they talk around them. James Talarico, the talented Democrat running in Texas, likes to say that trans people are a numerically tiny share of the population and “the only minority destroying America is the billionaires.” In blue states like Virginia and New Jersey, where Democratic gubernatorial candidates won handily in the face of Republican culture war attacks last fall, this kind of evasive maneuver is good enough.
To get a Senate majority, though, Democrats need to win over genuinely skeptical voters in red states. Even very talented politicians like Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Zach Wahls or Josh Turek in Iowa will struggle to do that with evasive moves. The alternate strategy of genuinely changing positions on issues to ones that more voters agree with is a strategy that’s become underrated, relative to vibes and superficial signifiers of identity.
Iowa was won twice in a row by the Black guy with a professorial demeanor from Chicago and then three times sequentially by the silver-spoon real estate tycoon from New York. Neither fit the part perfectly, but both catered to the actual views of voters who like the existing social-safety net but worry Democrats will sacrifice their well-being to serve narrow special interests or small minorities.
Many Democratic politicians who want the party to change nonetheless shy away from details. Senator Elissa Slotkin acknowledged that many voters perceived the party as “weak and woke,” and many of her colleagues in Congress have heard similar things. But neither she nor they particularly wants to tempt backlash by articulating a non-woke stance on specific issues.
The view that the downside risk of intraparty contentiousness and blowback isn’t worth the upside of appealing to swing voters is relatively new. In the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama questioned whether his daughters deserved a boost in college admissions and affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman; as president, he took on teachers’ unions over questions of pay and seniority and espoused an all-of-the-above energy strategy that environmental groups didn’t love.
Post-Obama Democrats have become much more ideologically rigid, which in practice makes it very hard to win large majorities and drive policy change.
On some of these topics, the orthodox progressive view is not even strongly supported by base Democrats. In their survey, Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla found that fewer than 50 percent of Democratic Party primary voters agree with orthodox progressive support for admitting more asylum seekers, requiring gender self-identification to determine assignment to sports teams or opposing merit pay for teachers.
Beyond that, no matter what your views, it takes majorities to pass laws and do things. There is no real benefit to upholding an ideology orthodoxy that can’t win.
But to change, moderate Democrats will also need to tap another lever that Mr. Trump himself used to remake his party — ferocious partisanship. Candidate Trump ditched many orthodox conservative issue positions, but rarely came across as wishy-washy, weak or soft on his political foes. He was always a hardcore warrior who championed his base against their enemies on the left. But he did that while changing course on high-impact issues where the conservative stance was very unpopular.
Today’s rank-and-file Democrats also want fighters, but the point of fighting is to win — and winners will need to pair fighting spirit with willingness to cross some of today’s progressive ideological taboos.
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger” and writes at Slow Boring.
Source photograph by bazilfoto, via Getty Images.
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