What the Democratic Party should do

I’m just an interested amateur, but I said this in an exchange with some people with rather different politics who found it clarifying, so it seems worth capturing. Assuming that we have elections in 2026 and 2028, the Democrats should …

1. … make a persuasively sharp break from their current voice, to get inattentive voters to engage and re-evaluate them. Figures like Sanders, AOC, Walz, and Fetterman are models here, not for their policy agendas but for not sounding like Politicians.
2. … articulate a clear, coherent vision of the better America they want to build, not a preservation or restoration of the status quo ante Trump.
3. … fight hard for that vision, both practically and theatrically. Showing up hard is more important than tactical victory, as conservatives have demonstrated for decades.

What vision?

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate Americans’ appetite for big change. Trump’s success demonstrates that hunger.

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate the appeal of much of the wild-eyed leftist stuff I would include in the vision, if they presented it properly.

I believe that if we get to build a better America, we should swing for the fences to make it a lot better.

But.

Having the break-envision-fight formula displace the vague, tepid practices of the Democratic Party is more important than almost any policy particulars.

More

Later additions expanding the point.

On making a progressive appeal

A follow up a month later, arguing against the case opposing a much more progressive Democratic Party agenda in ’26 & ’28.

I became a serious politics nerd during the mid 2000s, as part of the wave of “netroots progressive” amateur bloggers who opposed the “centrist” turn the Democratic Party took during that era. The Dem establishment remembered Reagan’s movement conservative coalition breaking the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and governing with neoliberal policy, they saw Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy claw back voters who had defected to the Republicans for Reagan: campaigning as a “moderate” and governing as a neolib. Progressives like me thought that trying to woo voters in the supposed center so depressed turnout by the left-leaning Democratic base that it cost Dems more than it gained.

Events in the years that followed unfolded confusingly, so both progressives and the “centrist” Dem establishment had reason to claim vindication. Obama campaigned with a lot of progressive dogwhistles and won. But his policy agenda aligned with the neolibs and he won again. Trump shattered the movement conservative coalition, making Republicans the MAGA party, and won — a reälignment at least as significant as the turn toward neoliberalism, if not bigger. (I have a lot more on that, which animates this read.) Then after a long career as the embodiment of a neolib Dem, Biden defeated Trump in 2020 offering a bland return to “normal”. Then he governed with the most progressive policy agenda since LBJ! But voters never registered the shift, Harris & Dem candidates did not run on it in 2024 — going so far as to accept endorsements by Republicans! — and they lost with lower turnout than in 2020.

Confusing.

“Moderates” in the Dem establishment trying to decide where to go from here say that 2024 proves progressives wrong: enacting (some of) our policy agenda did not win elections. Progressives object that voters didn’t know about any of that policy not least because Harris didn’t run on it. (And 2024 was weird in a bunch of ways. Incumbents around the world got crushed — left, right, and center.)

But progressives should beware doubling down by saying “our agenda didn’t work because we didn’t do it hard enough”. That’s Cope coming from anyone, and we recognize it as shenanigans:

“Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” I came up with this during my long experience of studying the right, and realizing that basically anything that is politically successful is kind of labeled conservatism. Any failure is wiped off the books in this bad faith utterance that well, of course it failed because it wasn’t conservative. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. McCain wasn’t conservative enough. “Bush wasn’t conservative,” you began to hear in 2004, when the wheels came off the bus with Iraq, and all the rest.

But.

Obama in 2008 was the only presidential candidate in generations to even try campaigning on progressive change, and he won. Facing Trump’s promise of crazy boldness, Harris campaigned on moderate restoration, and she lost. I find it perverse to conclude that the progressive pitch is a demonstrated failure.

This post is about how Dems need to offer something bold. So if not the hard moves progressives propose, what?

Against triangulation

Triangulation does not win over “moderates” by offering them something closer to the intermediate policy they prefer. True moderates are rare.

Most people in the “moderate” voting bloc have a bouquet of strong preferences which do not map to the platforms of the two poles of American politics; they find stuff they both like & dislike from both party platforms. When they vote, they decide which of their preferences to prioritize. Triangulation is theatre which neutralizes an issue for some “moderates” who prefer the Republican position. “Bill Clinton is not so bad on X and I do like him better on Y.”

The Dem establishment is mostly made up of geezers who survived the traumatizing collapse of the New Deal coalition in the Reagan era by using triangulation. They have over-learned the lesson, and now think that triangulation is the only move that works. This post is a response to them taking every loss as a demonstration that they need to triangulate harder.

Unlike some lefties, I see sufficiently crafty triangulation still helping in some “purple” state & congressional races. But the pols doing that successfully all combine it with a strong positive case on bread-and-butter policy, demonstrating my thesis that triangulation is not a positive move but a way to neutralize negatives.

Those exceptions aside, I think the Dems need to become fundamentally skeptical of triangulation. Obama successfully ran the opposite playbook, campaigning to the left of his actual policy agenda. Dems are not facing the movement conservatives of the ’90s, they are facing MAGA fascists; the 2016 presidential election demonstrated the difference. Triangulation assumed “moderate” voters seeing news media which liked reporting “Dem X moves right on Y ”; we occupy a radically more fragmented information space now.

And most importantly: 30+ years of triangulation brought us here. We need something different.