Democrats Search Their Souls
The Democrats took a licking in 2024. It wasn't as bad as 1972 or 1984, but it was a licking nonetheless. Their decades-long lock on the popular-vote majority shattered as they lost all the presidential battleground states as well as the Senate. So far, party leaders have reached no clear consensus about how to face the new reality that Republicans are not only holding their own in red and battleground states, but making impressive inroads into blue ones, especially among Latinos.
Of course, if the Trump administration stumbles, the Democrats could regain the Congress in 2026 and the presidency in 2028. Such is the beauty of a two-party system. But victories based on opponents' mistakes do not amount to reestablishing a stable electoral majority. Accomplishing this will require the Democratic Party to search its soul.
A handful of thoughtful public figures — including lawmakers like Representative Seth Moulton and Senator John Fetterman, scholars like Ruy Teixeira and Michael Lind, and political activists like Doug Sosnik and Will Marshall, among others — are trying to do just that. But most of them were making incisive arguments well before the 2024 debacle, all of which went unheeded. The dominant Democratic voices, especially those of party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, remain mired in the status quo.
Much is blamed on "messaging." "The policies that we support and the message that we have [are] not wrong," protested newly elected Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Ken Martin in an interview. "It is a messaging problem and a brand problem....[V]oters are not connecting our policies with their lives." Ben Wikler, the runner-up for DNC chair, echoed those sentiments: "[T]here were millions of Americans who didn't know that we were fighting for working families," he observed. "And if we are going to correct that, we need to communicate everywhere."
But the idea that only messaging and branding cost Democrats the 2024 elections implies that a more articulate defense of illegal immigration, massive overspending, and transgender athletes' competing in women's sports would have made these positions more palatable to the millions of voters the party lost. That seems unlikely. According to a recent New York Times poll, a significant proportion of the American public does not rank highly what it sees as the Democratic Party's priorities — particularly climate change and progressive social issues. Likewise, a Quinnipiac University poll conducted at the outset of Trump's second term found that Democrats commanded a disapproval rating of 57%. Rather than dragooning voters into affirming its priorities, the party might do well to consider better connecting its priorities to those of voters.
Former president Joe Biden, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other voices on the left are articulating another theme, captured in the term oligarchy. Democrats, they argue, will rebound by fighting the class struggle — by attacking the fat cats at the top. This has been a staple of Democratic Party rhetoric since the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s and early 1900s. Bryan is, incidentally, the only presidential candidate of either party to lose three times. The only Democrat to successfully rail against the rich on behalf of the dispossessed was Franklin Roosevelt, during his run for reelection in 1936. In his nomination-acceptance speech that year, he hurled hand grenades at the "economic royalists":
[T]he privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine.
So immense was Roosevelt's popularity at the time that he could probably have won on a platform of banning baseball and Coca-Cola. After reelection, he retreated from such incendiary rhetoric.
To make the oligarchy polemic stick, Democrats would have to disown their own oligarchy: the elite universities, most of the mainstream print and streaming media, and their own well-nourished Hollywood, technology, and financier fat cats. They would then have to demonstrate to ordinary people that the woes they face — high mortgages, high rents, crime, poor education — are the result of economic tyranny.
Rather than pursuing these dead ends, Democrats would benefit from a look at the last time their party underwent serious introspection after a crushing loss. The resulting recalibration not only carried the Democrats back into power, it also improved American governance overall.
THE NEW DEMOCRATS
In the wake of the Reagan landslide of 1984, a cadre of Democratic congressmen, staffers, and think tankers challenged party orthodoxy, offering a multi-faceted counter-agenda. They called themselves "New Democrats."
Al From, a key figure of the movement, identified Congressman Gillis Long as its godfather. Though he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Long took a bold step for a representative from rural Louisiana by voting to expand the House Rules Committee, thereby limiting the autocratic power of its arch-conservative chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia. This move caused Long to lose reelection, though he subsequently benefited from the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which enabled him to mobilize newly enfranchised black voters to regain his House seat in 1972. In 1981, he began the first of his two terms as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
Long chose Al From to be his deputy. A trained journalist, From was the former staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, chaired by Senator Ed Muskie. Long and From were determined to restore the caucus's role as a serious policy-debating forum, which it had been in the 1960s and early '70s. The caucus became the locus for implementing the New Democrats' intellectual credo. Among those who advanced New Democrat arguments at caucus meetings were Al Gore, William Gray, Geraldine Ferraro, Martin Frost, Les Aspin, and Tony Coelho.
As the movement gained steam (especially after Walter Mondale's defeat), New Democrats were joined by some prominent Democratic senators and governors, including Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, Charles Robb of Virginia, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Lawton Chiles of Florida, and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. They quickly realized that their message would not resonate unless they formed an organization capable of disseminating that message and mobilizing support for it. Accordingly, they and a collection of like-minded donors and policy intellectuals founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Richard Gephardt served briefly as the first chair. He was succeeded by Charles Robb, who was followed by Sam Nunn. Its fourth chair was none other than Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
The New Democrats did not reject the heritage of the New Deal and the Great Society, continuing to defend the achievements of Social Security, Medicare, civil-rights legislation, and environmental regulation. But they realized their party had become the defender of the status quo — the party of fossilized bureaucracy and powerful labor, education, and civil-rights organizations that fed off government largesse. Democrats had lost touch with the voters on a host of vital matters, including crime, addiction, welfare dependency, declining educational achievement, and national defense. They chose the label "new" to emphasize their dissatisfaction with the existing party.
The New Democrats' outlook was steeped in traditional American virtues. Harking back to the Old Testament and the Puritan founding, they proclaimed a "new covenant" with American citizens. Congressional Republicans, of course, would famously offer a "Contract with America" between Congress and the voters in 1994. But a covenant is not a mere contract; it is a promise that cannot be broken. In proclaiming their covenant, New Democrats were urging Americans to recognize that citizenship entails not just rights and privileges, but also obligations and duties.
The DLC capsulized its guiding principles in three words — responsibility, opportunity, and community — and crafted policy recommendations to support these tenets. Its first explicit deviation from Democratic Party orthodoxy was on international trade. Under pressure from manufacturing unions, the party had turned protectionist. The New Democrats, by contrast, emerged as vociferous free traders. The United States was experiencing a massive trade deficit at the time, due primarily to an overvalued dollar and high interest rates. The DLC issued a report calling for depreciating the dollar and lowering interest rates, and opposed any effort by Democrats to push for higher tariffs.
The DLC defended its free-trade policy as one that advanced opportunity and responsibility. Free trade, they argued, was vital to economic growth, and therefore necessary for expanding economic opportunity. And since the trade deficit could only be sustained with borrowed money, pursuing free trade with other countries was responsible.
The New Democrats also grounded their support for a stronger national defense in a claim of responsibility. Since the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party had declared itself the party of peace. Democrats in the House opposed increased defense spending, and all the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted for a nuclear freeze. In 1982, many Democratic congressional candidates supported the freeze, with soon-to-be presidential candidate Walter Mondale also endorsing it. But with the Soviets acting ever more bellicose in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the New Democrats considered this anti-defense posture irresponsible.
The responsibility and community themes gained their most forceful expression in what Al From deemed the cornerstone of the New Democrat project: national service. From recognized that the now-defunct military draft, while obviously controversial, had nonetheless reminded all young men that they bore an obligation to serve their country. In 1988, the DLC issued a landmark report, Citizenship and National Service, that called for voluntary national service devoted to civic purposes. Service would not be entirely voluntary, however: Federal financial aid for college students would be predicated on it.
The DLC championed several other programs that reflected New Democrats' core principles, including welfare reform, school choice, community policing, youth apprenticeships, and opposition to racial quotas. It further antagonized organized labor — which it had already alienated by pushing for greater international competition — by opposing a raise in the minimum wage. The DLC argued that by increasing prices for consumers, such a hike would harm poor people most of all. Instead, it recommended a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a policy that incentivizes work among low-income individuals.
ENTER CLINTON
New ideas remain on the drawing board if not given life by political victory. What transformed the New Democrats from a coven of policy intellectuals and outlier politicians into something greater was Bill Clinton's willingness to serve as DLC chair.
Like Gillis Long and Charles Robb, Clinton was a moderate liberal from the South who opposed racism. He gave up the chair to run for president, but his campaign fit squarely in the New Democrat mold. In the announcement of his candidacy, Clinton coined the phrase "new covenant," and proposed a new Student Bill of Rights that incorporated DLC national-service principles. He declared "a plan to end welfare as we know it," committing to make a work-oriented, anti-dependency welfare-reform bill a central objective of his administration. Al From did not join the Clinton campaign team, but he remained a close advisor to the candidate, pressing him to ignore advice from members of his team and congressional leaders to tone down his support for DLC initiatives.
More than any political figure since Ronald Reagan, Clinton understood the virtue of ostentatious words and action. Recognizing that Democrats' softness on crime ranked among his greatest electoral liabilities, he interrupted his campaign to fly back to Arkansas to turn down a death-row inmate's appeal for a stay of execution. But the most dramatic moment of the campaign occurred after he secured the nomination and before the convention.
In May 1992, Sister Souljah — a black activist, author, and hip-hop artist — was asked by the Washington Post whether the violence perpetrated by the 1992 Los Angeles rioters was "a wise, reasoned action." She replied: "Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?...So, if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?" Around the same time, she released a music video that included the line: "If there are any good white people, I haven't met them."
One imagines that Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale would have denounced her statements, but would have felt obliged to soften this dissent by reminding the public of all the atrocities committed against black people in America. Instead, Clinton issued a blunt, one-sentence rebuttal: "If you took the words 'white' and 'black,' and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech." To this day, when a politician refutes an outrageous position taken by a supposed ally, it is referred to as "a Sister Souljah Moment."
Despite the forthrightness of his campaign, Clinton largely failed to govern as a New Democrat. His administration saw some major New Democrat triumphs, most notably NAFTA, a trade deal that passed thanks to strong Republican support. He also signed AmeriCorps into law and tapped his vice president, fellow New Democrat Al Gore, to lead a major effort to "reinvent government." Clinton presided over an era of responsible budgets, as the federal government ran in the black. However, his major political defeats — indeed, the loss of both houses of Congress — largely occurred thanks to his deviations from the New Democrats' agenda.
One such misstep was Clinton's move to end the ban on gays in the military. His directive did not openly invite homosexuals to join the military, but it forbade military officials from inquiring about a person's sexual orientation or requiring them to reveal that information. Former DLC chair Sam Nunn, now chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, led the unsuccessful opposition to ending the ban. Other New Democrats didn't necessarily share Nunn's animus, but they saw Clinton's directive as a distraction from the key policy changes they were seeking. Taking such a bold stand on a divisive cultural issue was exactly what they were urging fellow Democrats not to do.
More disappointing was Clinton's failure to put welfare reform at the top of his agenda. Instead, he chose health care, establishing a task force on the subject chaired by his wife, Hillary Clinton. The task force presented a plan that was not in keeping with the New Democrat spirit, consisting instead of complex rules and regulations that promised to increase federal intrusion in an already highly regulated industry. Welfare reform did ultimately take place, but only in the form of the Republican bill passed after the GOP gained congressional control in the 1994 elections. Rather than stepping up as its champion, Clinton twice vetoed it, signing on only after Republicans agreed to drop proposed changes to Medicaid from the bill. In doing so, he gave away the issue at the heart of the New Democrats' vision.
LESSONS LEARNED
In 1986, DLC chair Charles Robb declared that "while racial discrimination has by no means vanished from our society, it's time to shift the primary focus from racism — the traditional enemy without — to self-defeating patterns of behavior — the enemy within." Those remarks were as bold and insightful in 1986 as they would be today. Indeed, the soul searching sparked by the New Democrats offers many valuable lessons to latter-day liberals.
Democrats in 2025 can learn much from their predecessors' insistence on social obligation. While Clinton's ambivalence enabled Republicans to receive the credit for welfare reform, its core concept — tying welfare benefits to work requirements — came from the New Democrats. A similar spirit inspired the national-service plan. Young people, the New Democrats believed, were not entitled to federal financial aid; they had to serve their community in order to receive it.
The New Democrats further recognized that the education system had become so ossified that only outside competition could reinvigorate it, hence the need for charter schools. They were aware of the dangers posed by our tyrannical enemies, and wanted Democrats to stand for national security instead of being the party of peace. New Democrats would not have approved of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's frontal attack on the administrative state, but in their time, they saw that the federal bureaucracy had become hidebound, and sought out innovative and constitutionally legitimate means for making it more responsive and efficient.
So why didn't the New Democrats enjoy greater success? Two interrelated causes stand out: entrenched interests in Congress and lack of leadership.
On the first point, the most powerful members of Congress opposed most of the New Democrats' agenda. A Democratic majority in the House, beholden to interest groups and organized labor, opposed NAFTA. Higher-education institutions, fearing that many students would shirk a national-service obligation and thus diminish the pool of financial aid, diluted the New Democrats' robust vision of national service. The welfare establishment opposed welfare reform. For all their public-spirited rhetoric, these organizations fixated on their own narrow interests. Unions did not want their members' jobs threatened by foreign competition. Teachers' unions did not want their members' jobs threatened by diminished funding. Welfare organizations did not want to see jobs and grants eliminated by a reduction in the welfare rolls.
In the face of such determined opposition, greater success would have required similarly determined presidential leadership — something Clinton did not provide. He stuck to his guns on NAFTA and the budget but retreated on national service and welfare reform. His fixation on health care contributed significantly to the 1994 electoral debacle, when he lost control of both houses of Congress for his last six years in office.
The potential reasons for Clinton's failure on these issues are too numerous to receive full consideration here. Perhaps he prioritized health care over welfare reform because he needed to reward his wife, who had stood by him so steadfastly during the 1992-campaign sex scandals. Perhaps he was always a conventional liberal wolf in New Democrat clothing — the unlikeliest explanation.
More plausibly, he may have simply been overwhelmed by the power of the orthodox Democrats. According to journalist Joe Klein, "the Clinton inner circle seemed dominated by anachronistic liberals — the young Stephanopolites and the Hillary cadre." The only highly placed defender of New Democrat principles was Vice President Al Gore. Clinton put Gore in command of a cherished New Democrat effort, the reinventing-government task force, dedicated to reforming the ossified federal bureaucracy in an "entrepreneurial spirit." Though this initiative fit the New Democrats' vision, it also neatly sidelined Gore from the rest of the administration's policy deliberations.
The New Democrats worked within the Democratic coalition because they understood the futility of launching a third party, a truth borne out by No Labels' failure to field a presidential ticket in 2024. Unfortunately, they sought to shift the paradigm within an organization that, despite its terrible electoral defeats, remained unprepared to make a needed transformation.
It would be wrong to call New Democrats moderates, for their proposals were bold, even radical. If anything, they might have garnered more victories had they leaned further into their principles. Perhaps if Al Gore had run a forthrightly New Democrat campaign in 2000, he would have won the presidency. If he had also recruited like-minded congressional candidates for open and winnable seats, he might have carried in a Congress more receptive to New Democrat policies. Indeed, opinion polls showed — and continue to show — that most voters, including a significant number of Democrats, support the New Democrat agenda.
NEW DEMOCRACY FOR OUR TIMES
Thirty years later, the country faces many of the same woes as the New Democrats, but matters have worsened. After a brief renaissance, the quality of life in most big cities has declined. This is due in large measure to a retreat from "broken windows" policing, an inability to cope with homelessness, and an influx of illegal immigrants. Urban public education continues to be dreadful despite the billions poured into it each year, while higher education has lost its sense of mission. National security, stable under Clinton, is imperiled in a way not seen since the Cold War. Welfare reform, while a wise step, hasn't solved everything: The policies of the '90s helped coax mothers on public assistance back into the workforce but failed to forcefully address the now-severe problem of low labor-participation rates among men.
Those who seek a reasonable alternative to the failed Democratic and Republican orthodoxies of the 21st century would do well to recur to New Democrat principles as summarized in the triad of opportunity, responsibility, and community. At present, neither party advances these aims.
The Trump administration defends its anti-government tsunami as necessary to promote opportunity, and it has a case. Stringent land-use regulation stifles real-estate development, making it harder for the working and middle classes to afford quality housing. The need to comply with onerous environmental reviews and regulations delays many industrial and infrastructural developments that promise to expand economic opportunities. Limits on the sale of internal-combustion automobiles deprive would-be car owners of the opportunity to purchase the car that best fits their needs. In the social realm, the insistence that males be allowed to compete in women's sports robs girls and women of the opportunity to participate on a fair playing field.
Yet in the name of opportunity, the Trump administration has acted irresponsibly. It has not fully complied with court rulings holding that certain efforts to deregulate and depopulate government violate existing statutes, regulations, and contractual commitments. At best, the subliminal message of its blunderbuss attack on the bureaucracy is, "we can use methods of dubious legal and constitutional legitimacy because the courts will reign us in."
The survival of a democratic republic depends on uncoerced responsible behavior by public officials and citizens alike. If the president can act recklessly because he is subject to judicially imposed restraints, what's to keep us mere mortals from doing the same?
The Democrats, in their declared pursuit of opportunity, undermine responsibility, community, and even opportunity itself. Although support for defunding the police has waned, in many cities and states, progressive mayors, legislators, prosecutors, and judges continue to obstruct prosecutions and put dangerous criminals back on the streets. Reluctance or even outright failure to prosecute petty crimes like shoplifting and vandalism undermines the economic prospects of local businesses. Sanctuary-city policies shelter criminal illegal immigrants from capture, even as these individuals harm vulnerable communities in which many lawful immigrants live. Tepid institutional responses to anti-Semitic demonstrations on college campuses deprive students (not just Jewish ones) of the opportunity to pursue their studies.
Democrats could self-correct at any time with the help of their own party's heritage, but many progressives are loath to do so. To them, the New Democrat approach seems too Republican in its concern for restraining government intrusion and limiting misguided handouts. But the New Democrats of the late 20th century were genuine Democrats: They opposed Ronald Reagan's quip that "government is the problem," instead supporting the broad rubric of economic, environmental, and civil-rights regulation that Democratic Party leadership had helped construct over decades.
What distinguished them from orthodox Democrats is that the former had a clear standard for determining when a particular rule or subsidy served the public good, and when it did not. They recognized the need for a strong government to enforce the common rules that help ensure the general welfare. Catching tax evaders, stock manipulators, Medicaid fraudsters, polluters, and phony disability claimants requires more government, and therefore more federal employees, not fewer. The same is true for protecting such crucial public assets as national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, and for many other vital public tasks. New Democrats spoke and acted against government waste and abuse precisely because they valued government's proper role so highly.
BACK TO BASICS
So what can latter-day New Democrats do to further responsibility, opportunity, and community?
Beginning with a focus on responsibility, they can start by revisiting the signature '90s issue of welfare reform. Sustaining the high-wire acrobatics that our society and economy perform requires a safety net. However, this safety net needs repair in order to encourage greater responsibility among those caught in its web.
The welfare-reform law of 1996 accomplished this for single mothers. Today, we must do the same for single fathers, to push them to be responsible parents and workers. Single men are eligible for considerable assistance via food stamps and Medicaid. Those benefits should be tied to work requirements and the reliable provision of child support. Such changes would also bolster community by providing single mothers with the support they need to be better parents and neighbors.
The criminal-justice system also needs responsibility-oriented reform. In this case, a major public figure has emerged to champion the cause. New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch is a New Democrat whether she knows it or not. She has revived the broken-windows policing strategy, which rests on the demonstrable proposition that such petty crimes as vandalism, squeegeeing, and panhandling make the streets appear dangerous, which drives away precisely those pedestrians who in sufficient numbers would make sidewalks safer.
Tisch's return to broken-windows policing derives from the mentorship of that excellent public servant, William Bratton. He in turn owes an intellectual debt to the great social scientist James Q. Wilson and his co-author George Kelling, who first made the case for a broken-windows approach. Wilson was hardly a New Democrat, but his incisive critique of policing and pragmatic reform proposals show that social scientists can, if not wedded to progressivism, contribute to efforts to restore responsibility and community.
Homelessness policy requires an equally rigorous approach. Because mental institutions in the mid-20th century often suffered from inadequate resources and staffing, reformers resolved to close them and return many of the mentally ill to the streets. Even those institutions that remained open were barred from admitting persons without their consent unless they were considered dangerous. Deinstitutionalization swept the nation as reforms gained support from liberals who opposed these institutions as well as conservatives eager to save money. But today, the homelessness epidemic blights every major American city, while local leaders shrink from any measure that might appear coercive.
This is foolish. Since a large proportion of the homeless are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or both, policymakers cannot simply pretend they are rational actors. It's time to reconsider the failed approach of the past half-century in radical fashion.
Reinstitutionalization stands the best chance of enactment if advanced by Democrats, who run most big cities, rather than Republicans, who would likely balk at the hefty price tag of such an endeavor. The New Democrats of the late 20th century never hesitated to spend public money for the right cause, and neither should today's iteration. In the case of reinstitutionalization, reduced expenditures on homelessness and lightened demand on police and courts would partially offset the policy's costs, all while making American metropolises safer, cleaner places.
Policies that expand opportunity often augment responsibility and community along the way. Likewise, when community institutions suffer, opportunity tends to flag as well. Schools — the most significant opportunity-oriented institutions — demonstrate this truth.
Poor educational attainment handicaps students in the world of work. The frequent failure of our public schools is not the result of inadequate spending, as per-pupil expenditures in failing schools are often quite high, or a dearth of curricular innovations. The problem stems from progressives' push to soften or otherwise eliminate disciplinary measures that punish poorly behaved students.
No teaching approach can succeed if classrooms and hallways are chaotic and dangerous. If the majority of students are to obtain the knowledge and skills that will enable them to get decent jobs, incorrigible disrupters must be suspended or expelled. Meanwhile, instructors must encourage the merely boisterous students to maintain decorum and perhaps even learn something.
Teachers have an interest in supporting efforts that promote discipline, which would improve their working conditions and remove sources of stress and even danger. Like all reforms, tight discipline has unfortunate latent consequences: Expulsion of consistent offenders, for instance, will require putting more dangerous young people on the streets. But this is not an educational problem; it's a law-enforcement problem that a return to broken-windows policing could help ameliorate.
When asked about how to fix higher education, my late esteemed colleague Christopher Bruell replied, "give more Fs." He recognized that the fundamental problem with higher education is its lack of seriousness. The humanities and social sciences have descended into frivolity and fatuous moralism abetted by government. High levels of federal financial aid enable colleges to continually raise tuition and, in turn, to engorge their administrations. At the extreme, Washington University in St. Louis has more administrators than students. Even Ohio State University, a public institution, has almost 500 administrators per 1,000 students.
This bloat stems partly from administrative burdens that attend compliance with ever-increasing government regulations. However, even more of it comes from administrators themselves. They over-interpret the regulations, and often impose additional strictures on faculty and students to satisfy their own ideological agendas. Such impositions include anti-racism oaths, word bans (e.g., forbidding the expression "melting pot"), and the denial of due process to those accused of sexual harassment.
The Trump administration is leading the attack on this front. As with welfare reform, the Democratic Party has allowed the opposition to gain credit for confronting unpopular practices. By prioritizing some identity groups for ideological reasons, it has allowed itself to be outflanked as the party of opportunity for all.
BEYOND SOUL SEARCHING
The misguided utterances of current Democratic leaders quoted earlier, blaming their woes on messaging, highlight the challenge facing today's New Democrats. The party they occupy is led by officeholders and officials beholden to organized labor (particularly public-employee unions), the philanthropic complex, and progressive public-advocacy groups. Contemporary New Democrats also face a headache their predecessors didn't, in the form of influential LGBTQ organizations and the election of ever more progressive local, state, and federal officeholders.
Yet even as today's New Democrats swim against these toxic currents, they should recognize, as the earlier New Democrats did, that being more than a gaggle of politically marginal policy intellectuals will require winning elections. This in turn will require compromise. The moderate gains made by the original New Democrats occurred because they enjoyed support from various representatives, governors, and above all, President Clinton. While Clinton disappointed them at many points, they knew this to be the nature of political life.
Likewise, today's New Democrats will always have to back some candidates who do not fully support their vision. Sometimes what looks like selling out can actually be a shrewd way to balance the demands of different party constituencies. Compromise may bring only minor victories, but small gains are real gains.
If Clintonesque candidates appear, New Democrats must wholeheartedly support them, understanding that a strong measure of disappointment is in the offing. As it happens, there are a handful of incumbents currently challenging Democratic orthodoxy who would benefit from more vigorous New Democrat support. Congressman Seth Moulton, Senator John Fetterman, and mayors Cherelle Parker and Daniel Lurie are impressive examples. Governor Jared Polis is forging a prudent path in Colorado, while Kentucky governor Andy Beshear has proven that Democrats who listen to voters can win even under adverse political conditions. Andrew Cuomo, currently running for mayor of New York City, has been forced by the nature of his opposition to endorse many New Democrat initiatives. If he wins, New Democrats should push for him to deliver on such pledges and reward him with support if he does.
These figures are not full-fledged New Democrats. However, their evident ability to connect with moderate voters suggests an openness to moving in that direction.
REGAINING TRUST
Both orthodox and New Democrats recognize the necessity of winning back the working class. Thus far, however, all the orthodox have to offer are vehement criticisms of oligarchs. They fail to recognize how much of the loss of worker support is due to progressive Democratic attacks on those voters' dignity.
Many working people are religious, patriotic, and weary of the pace of cultural change this century. They do not agree that love of country, church, and traditional family life makes them ignorant bigots. Democrats don't seem to have learned this in 2024: Recently, all 45 Democratic senators voted against a bill to ban federal support for schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women's sports, thus continuing to alienate the very voters their party wants to win back.
If latter-day New Democrats can convince the party to avoid cultural condescension, they might find the strident opposition of organized labor greatly lessened relative to what it was in the 1980s. Unlike progressive non-profits that are creatures of their donors and staff, unions require labor leaders to face elections. The past successes of member-driven reform movements in the Mine Workers, Auto Workers, and Teamsters unions demonstrate that if members become sufficiently exercised, they can topple entrenched leadership.
Such pressure from below made a mark on this past election cycle. The Teamsters declined to back Kamala Harris once it became clear that a solid majority of members were opposed to doing so. If labor leaders wish to bring their members back into the Democratic fold, they will need to support Democratic candidates who do not give cultural offense. New Democrats can take advantage of this exigency and urge labor leaders to support such candidates. If that fails, they can work with reform elements in major industrial unions to depose inflexible leaders.
Today's New Democrats must also improve on their predecessors' grassroots efforts. The DLC tried to establish local branches, but it remained essentially Washington-centric. Given that it was founded largely by U.S. representatives and senators, along with former congressional staffers, this is not surprising. But Washington is where Democratic orthodoxy is most firmly entrenched.
Local branches of whatever new DLC-esque organization comes into being should become involved in local political efforts. They shouldn't allow Republicans to receive the credit when grassroots pressure leads to valuable educational and criminal-justice reforms. New Democrats can advance such causes more effectively than the GOP because they do not carry the extremist baggage that hampers too many Republican-affiliated grassroots organizations. There need be no tinge of racism in New Democrat-supported neighborhood efforts to control crime, for instance. Ramping up grassroots involvement can win New Democrats more adherents as they make good on their commitment to improving communities.
The New Democrats' greatest asset is that their policy stands are more in tune with public opinion than those of orthodox Democrats. This means that when they survive the primaries, their electoral chances are good. Unfortunately, the primary process is stacked in favor of the dominant party coalition, largely because its members and supporters can be mobilized more readily.
That advantage, however, diminishes in states that conduct open primaries. When registered voters can vote in any party primary they choose, New Democrat candidates have a real chance to enlist the support of independent voters and even disaffected moderate Republicans. Fifteen states have fully open primaries, seven allow unaffiliated voters to vote in either party primary, and four allow voters to cross party lines, though they may have to reregister each time. Thus, more than half the states provide decent opportunities to mobilize voters in support of candidates less tied to party orthodoxy. A New Democrat resurgence will depend on finding candidates who can do this and vigorously assisting them in the demanding but not hopeless open-primary process.
It's a dark moment for the Democratic Party. But in our political system, a shellacking is often needed to prompt introspection, which spurs the sort of reform that can lead to victory once again. If chastened Democrats choose to heed the lessons that their New Democrat forebears can teach them, their future — and that of the entire country — may gradually appear less bleak.
