Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, ‘Democrats Don’t Need to Become G.O.P. Lite’, NYTimes, July 18, 2025.
The claim that a revival may be near at hand might seem bizarre, given that the party is at its weakest point in at least half a century. It is all but shut out of power in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Its popularity is at a record low, according to a report by Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization. Since 2022, according to Gallup, more Americans identify and lean Republican than Democratic, the first time that has been true since 1991. [...]
Despite this, Democrats have an opening. The Trump administration’s wall-to-wall incompetence, and the human suffering that is resulting from it, will become more and more obvious. Disenchantment with President Trump and his party is already spreading. But can Democrats exploit the opportunity?
To help figure out an answer, we conducted written interviews with 19 Democrats, from progressives to centrists. They included officeholders, analysts, strategists and state party chairs chosen because they represent a range of views and experiences and have given careful thought to how the Democratic Party needs to change. We also plowed through a stack of white papers, articles and published interviews.
Once more, a chicken in every pot:
Although the party is not yet where it needs to be, especially on cultural issues, it is moving toward a consensus that makes good strategic and economic sense. It can become something it has not been for years: the party of prosperity. Mr. Trump and his beggar-thy-neighbor policies, exacerbated by his politics of vengeance, are abandoning the high ground of prosperity. Both wings of the Democratic Party — its center and its left — have a good inkling of how to capture it. [...]
Those we spoke to harbor no illusions about their party’s plight. Many voters doubt that the party cares about them or fights for them; they can’t name tangible ways Democrats have helped them. Democrats are viewed as the party of big government and the status quo, both of which are deeply out of favor. “Historically, Democratic successes under leaders like former Presidents Clinton and Obama were driven by their roles as disrupters of the status quo,” Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former presidential campaign manager, told us. Today’s Democrats are seen as being in thrall to progressive, elite special-interest groups.
Reinvent government (for real this time):
Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate think tank, put it this way: Democrats “need to get serious about reinventing government again. One big reason Bidenomics didn’t land with working families is that they don’t think the federal government works for their benefit or can deliver on its promises. By reflexively defending underperforming public institutions — from public schools to ossified federal agencies — Democrats only cement their identification with a broken status quo.”
Affordability:
Still, we found considerable agreement on the economic direction the Democratic Party needs to take: stress affordability, show respect for the dignity of work and reorient around working Americans’ economic aspirations. Affordability was virtually a mantra. [...]
Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, for example, recommends chartering new cities (with at least five million apartments and five Hoover Dams’ worth of nuclear power); building 1,000 vocational-technical high schools and “surging” high-dose tutoring to public-school students; taxing junk food like sugary beverages to fund community health centers; and more. Mr. Marshall calls for a suite of reforms to help working people and small businesses get ahead — for example, by reducing regressive taxes on work, fighting exclusionary zoning, cutting regulations that make it hard to start small businesses, supporting apprenticeships and “learn and earn” instead of student debt relief and “college for all,” and transferring more regulatory authority to local governments. Neither of those agendas sounds like today’s timid Democratic Party.
However, the “Democrats cannot advance any agenda [...] if they sound like space aliens when talking about American culture.”
“The policy must flow from the culture,” Michael Wear, who served in Mr. Obama’s first term, told us, “and the two have to be close enough that the culture affirms the policy more than undermines it.” As Ms. Jayapal put it, policy and culture “are both incredibly important and must be used together as a strategy to bring back our base.”
But the Democrats are less focused on just how to address cultural issues.
Still, our admittedly unscientific survey suggests that Democrats are readier to adjust their policy prescriptions than their cultural messaging. We believe they need to be pro-police while also anti-police abuse. They need to be pro-parent and pro-child by, for example, embracing charter schools and sensible parental notification rules, supporting bans on smartphones in school, raising the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 and supporting childhood vaccines. Democrats need to acknowledge that biological sex isn’t chosen or changeable while insisting on compassionate treatment of trans people. And they need to take a strong stand against illegal immigration while continuing to push for rational and generous legal immigration reform.
Since 1951 Gallup has been asking which party “will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous”? Between the late 1970s and 2024 “prosperity has largely been a horse race between the two parties. But in 2024, Republicans enjoyed a six-point lead on the question — enough to pull their relatively unpopular presidential candidate across the finish line.” However:
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and policies are remarkably unconcerned with economic growth. Instead, they emphasize a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog worldview holding that more for me (or America) means less for you (or the rest of the world).
Derek Thompson, a co-author (with the Opinion columnist Ezra Klein) of the recent book “Abundance,” said in an interview with the online magazine Zeteo that Mr. Trump exemplifies a scarcity mind-set. “So, for example, he sees the U.S. doesn’t have enough manufacturing and he says what we need is less trade,” according to Mr. Thompson. “Or he says the U.S. doesn’t have enough housing, so what we need are fewer immigrants. Or what the U.S. has is an issue with our debt, so what we need isn’t growth but we need to catastrophically cut everything that government does, especially for the neediest and most marginalized. This is a situation where every time he’s identifying something Americans don’t have enough of, he’s taking away something that we need.”
Mamdani:
Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and self-described democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary for mayor last month in New York by campaigning “relentlessly against New York’s spiraling affordability crisis,” as Nicholas Fandos reported in The Times. Mr. Mamdani’s justly famous video about “halalflation” made a classic — and in this case, accurate — progressive supply-side case: Crony capitalism rigs the system to raise the prices you pay.
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