Despite the collapse of support for President Trump — whose unfavorable ratings have grown to 59 percent from 43 percent a week after inauguration — voters continue to hold Democrats in greater disfavor than Republicans.
The difference is slight, but still electorally significant. In a May 1 report, Pew Research found Democrats rated 59 percent unfavorable and 39 percent favorable, for a net negative of 20 percentage points; Republicans were at 58 unfavorable, 40 unfavorable and negative 18. Similarly, the RealClearPolitics average of 11 polls conducted from March 12 through May 11 showed Democrats with a net negative 18.8 favorability level and Republicans with negative 17.1.
Is there anything Democrats can do to break free of a deeply polarized political system in which parties are constantly winning and then losing office as voters reflexively turn against those in power?
Two political scientists, David Broockman at the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla at Yale describe a tentative path to strengthen Democratic performance on Election Day.
Their March 11 paper, “Should Moving to the Middle Win Candidates Votes? It Depends Where Voters Are,” provides evidence to suggest that Democrats and Republicans who moderate their views — not across the board but on very specific issues — can substantially improve their general election margins.
To do so, however, would require very liberal Democrats and hard-core conservative Republicans to make some painful policy decisions.
The key for both parties is that candidates must move to the center on issues where they and their party are more extreme than the electorate in which they are running, whether it’s a congressional district, a state or the whole country.
For Democrats, Broockman and Kalla write, that includes moving toward the center on affirmative action, transgender issues, unauthorized immigration, minor crime enforcement, funding and regulating the police, and the environment.
Democrats would, however, lose votes if they moved toward the center on Social Security, Medicaid or where to set the minimum wage.
For Republicans, it includes moderating stands on gay and lesbian issues, health care, the minimum wage, Social Security, immigration enforcement, criminal sentencing and Medicare.
Republicans, however, would perform less well if they moderated on transgender issues, teacher accountability, abortion and the treatment of asylum seekers.
In an email, Kalla noted that “our survey experiment asked respondents about the 2028 presidential election. We also only measured the popularity of issues at the national level.”
That said, Kalla continued, “we’d expect the main takeaway from our study to extrapolate to House and Senate races, even if the specific issues don’t: candidates usually gain vote share by adopting more popular policy positions and lose vote share by adopting less popular policy positions.”
In a competitive election, the gains can be substantial. “A Democratic candidate gains 4.49 percentage points,” Kalla wrote, by moving to the “middle on affirmative action.”
In the 2024 House elections, if 4.5 percent of the vote shifted from Republicans to Democrats, the Democratic Party would have gained 20 or more seats — more than enough to become the majority.
Similarly, if 2024 Democratic Senate candidates increased their vote share by 4.5 points and Republicans lost 4.5 points, Democrats would have carried four more states — Pennsylvania and Ohio, but also Montana and Texas — enough to wrest majority control, 51-49.
Other issues the two authors found that would produce substantial gains for Democrats, were they to move toward the center, include environmental regulation, at 3.06 percent; treatment of asylum seekers, 3.18 percent; and gay and lesbian issues, 3.29 percent.
The authors’ definitions of the left, center and conservative choices on gay and lesbian issues shows how their methodology works.
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Left: “Companies should not be allowed to deny services to individuals because they are gay or lesbian. In addition, schools should include lessons about gays and lesbians in their classes.”
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Center: “Companies should not be allowed to deny services to individuals because they are gay or lesbian. In addition, local schools should be allowed to decide for themselves if they wish to include lessons about gays and lesbians in their classes.”
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Conservative: “Allow businesses to refuse service to or to fire people because they are gay or lesbian. Ban schools from teaching about gays and lesbians in their classes.”
While Broockman and Kalla’s findings appear to lend themselves to extrapolation, Kalla cautioned in his email that “these estimates are from survey-based experiments, and so the exact magnitudes are not a good guide for the magnitude of the gains in the real world. Our main takeaway concerns the relative magnitudes.”
“For absolute magnitudes of the effects of moderation in the real world,” Kalla suggested examining a March 2025 paper, “Ideological Moderation and Success in U.S. Elections, 2020-2022,” by Michael Bailey and Benjamin Reese, political scientists at Georgetown University.
In an email, Bailey returned the compliment, writing, “I’m a big fan of Broockman and Kalla’s work and the paper you reference in particular.” However, Baily wrote:
My interpretation of their results is slightly different than theirs.
In their telling, voters have views on many issues — some of which may be liberal and some of which may be conservative. They find that transgender sports and affirmative action are issues on which Democrats can gain support by moderating and gays/lesbians, health care and minimum wage are issues on which Republicans can gain support by moderating.
Bailey argued that Broockman and Kalla’s results should not be taken
to mean that these are the issues that voters care most about, but rather that these are issues that are relatively easy to understand and hence provide strong signals about the type of person the candidate is.
Very few voters ever say that transgender sports are an important issue. But they know what kind of candidate/person supports transgender sports — and have views about what else that candidate/person supports, which may be too liberal.
In other words, in Bailey’s view:
Broockman and Kalla’s voters seem to be accountants tallying up issue differences across candidates. In my interpretation, voters have limited information and use shortcuts on hot-button issues to infer general political orientation of candidates.
The Bailey-Reese paper examines “the influence of ideological positioning on election outcomes for virtually all general election candidates in the 2020 and 2022 U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial elections” and concludes that “ideological moderation was associated with higher vote shares, especially in competitive and gubernatorial races.”
In the 2020 election, Bailey and Reese found that a Democratic candidate’s shift “from the minimum (most liberal) Democratic ideology to the maximum (most moderate) Democratic ideology” would have resulted in “changes of 1.4, 2.7 and 4 percentage points” in three types of elections, in order: in all races, in competitive models and in fully funded races
In the 2022 election, the same shift “is associated with House Democrats doing 2.1, 3.2 and 5.1 percentage points better in all, competitive and fully funded districts, respectively.”
I asked Democratic strategists and think tank analysts for their take on what the party and its candidates could do to get voters to view them more favorably, including their views on such issues as transgender rights and affirmative action. Their responses varied widely.
Neera Tanden, president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a pro-Democratic think tank, outlined a fairly detailed proposed agenda that directly addressed some of the points made by Broockman and Kalla:
On immigration, we have proposed an immigration agenda that secures the border by reforming asylum and other steps, expands legal immigration while stopping illegal immigration and provides a path to citizenship for people here over a decade.
On crime, we have a plan that provides swift and certain punishments for lawbreakers while investing in prevention, additional police and detectives and crime-fighting strategies that have worked in cities across the country.
If Democrats believe that Trump is an existential threat, Tanden continued, “that means building a big enough coalition that defeats Republicans so clearly that they have to choose between Trumpism and electoral success.”
Doing so, she added,
means that we will need to permit ideological heterodoxy on a lot of issues while maintaining strict adherence on democratic norms. More openness to candidates with mixed choice views in red states. More openness to candidates with mixed views on a whole host of issues.
That will come down to Democratic primary voters in red and purple states thinking more about swing voters than their own policy proclivities. And more leaders willing to expand the policy horizons of what is acceptable for a Democrat.
Others warned that without substantial policy shifts, the current prospects of Democratic gains this year and in 2028 could be quickly washed away in 2030 and 2032.
“Let’s face it: Democrats could be at risk of losing double-digit congressional districts by the time the 2030 census is complete,” Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, wrote by email.
So what is to be done?
Democrats have to reject the extremes and prove they can be trusted to stay in the mainstream. That means acknowledging complexities on social issues and engaging those who are conflicted rather than pushing them away.
It means saying out loud that our asylum system is broken; we must get serious about securing our border; and if someone who is here illegally commits a violent crime, they should be deported. It means demanding accountability for anyone who breaks the law, solving more crimes and getting justice for more victims.
Erickson didn’t hold back:
It means making sure every kid in America can read and do math rather than eliminating advanced courses in the name of equity. It means agreeing that we want sports to be fair and student-athletes to be safe, and that’s why sports associations should be making rules about transgender teens participating in sports, but those rules should be different based on sport, age and level of competition.
It means saying there is no place in this country that a transgender kid can get health care without the involvement of their parents, and that’s as it should be. It means welcoming responsible gun owners into our coalition and owning the value of freedom when it comes to women making decisions about their own health care.
There are, however, some analysts who argue that Democrats who are trying to make significant and reliable gains are trapped in a Sisyphean struggle in which polarization will always block their path.
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, wrote by email that he is
pretty pessimistic that there is anything Democrats can do to regain its status as the default majority party. We’re in an age of deep entrenched partisanship, and our system of single-winner election locks us in a two-party system where both parties have a monopoly on opposition to each other, and a geography that structurally benefits Republicans.
Democrats can win back power in 2028 by being Not-the-Republicans and Not-the-Party-of-Trump. But that power goes away as soon as they win power back, and then 2030 will be the predictable brutal midterm backlash. This is not about policy; it’s about partisan identity.
There is no secret lasting formula to being the dominant majority party for the 2030s or 2040s, because America is too big and diverse to have one dominant national party.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Politics’s Crystal Ball website, shares Drutman’s view, but for different reasons:
Each of the two major parties rests on a large, committed and polarized base. Ticket splitting and party switching have both faded considerably, and there are fewer crosscutting loyalties. Big dominant issues (such as economic distress or unpopular war) no longer appear to cause a large chunk of one party to shift loyalty to the other.
Sabato’s advice to Democrats when asked about social and cultural issues that tend to work against their party:
Give the slip to controversial social issues such as the ones you’ve listed. When they’re brought up on the trail and in debates, call them a distraction meant to take our eyes off the prize. Don’t talk about them, and make it a virtue!
Brag that you are putting them aside for what really matters to most middle-class Americans! Ask party supporters to applaud and cheer your every duck and weave! That’ll work more often than cynics think.
Most of those I contacted argued that these issues have to be addressed directly.
Will Marshall, president and founder of the centrist-Democratic Progressive Policy Institute, argued that the only plausible path toward expanding the universe of Democratic voters “is to build a cross-class coalition that includes a lot more noncollege voters, who constitute a majority of the electorate. That entails changing the party’s self-marginalizing stances on economic redistribution, energy and climate and identity politics.”
Marshall cited an essay published last summer by a colleague, Richard Kahlenberg, director of Housing Policy and the American Identity Project at the institute, “Renewing the Democratic Party.”
After pointing to data on the public’s view of the Democratic Party similar to the poll findings I mentioned at the start of this essay, Kahlenberg argued: “Restoring the primacy of working-class priorities, on issues of culture as well as economics, provides the central path forward for a Democratic Party that wants to build a durable majority and restore its identity as the party of working people.”
But, he continued, as “racial gaps have narrowed in a variety of arenas, and class divides have mostly widened,” Democrats “have doubled down on framing challenges primarily in terms of racial and ethnic identity, rather than economic status.”
So why, Kahlenberg asked, “do Democrats engage in this self-defeating behavior? Two factors stand out.”
One is the shift in power of major Democratic interest groups from “organized labor, with its broad-based concerns about economic inequality” to identity-based interest groups “for people of color, women and the L.G.B.T. community.”
The second “has been the rise of highly educated affluent white liberals, often referred to as ‘the Brahmin Left,’” who “are to the left of people of color on issues of race.”
Kahlenberg noted, “When issues are described in narrow racial terms, they are far less expensive to address and minimize the personal sacrifice required of upper-middle-class white liberals.”
My own view is that the ascendance of white college-educated liberals with comfortable incomes constitutes an immovable barrier, at least for now, to the kind of party reforms and policy shifts that the analysts in these groups want to see.
As the dominant force among party activists, liberals have the power to advance their own interests while blocking the party from taking steps that would in fact improve the results on Election Day.
While the urge to win would seemingly drive Democrats to adopt policy reforms substantially improving their Election Day prospects, the reality is that the party’s activist wing opposes many of those shifts. That wing, in turn, has veto power in party deliberations, or certainly seems to.
In 1996, according to Pew Research, 22 percent of Democratic voters had college degrees and 78 percent did not. By 2024, the share of the Democratic electorate with college degrees — the prime source of the activist wing — had more than doubled, to 45 percent, while those without degrees had fallen to 55 percent.
The steady progression toward a party of the well-educated elite, including many supporters of liberal cultural policies and away from a party of working-class voters more in favor of cultural moderation, suggests that Neera Tanden, Lanae Erickson and Will Marshall have a steep hill to climb.
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