The path forward for Common Sense Democrats

Lighting the runway

I published “A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto” on November 12, full of pep and vim in the wake of the election, and started fleshing out the nine points with individual pieces during the transition.

By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, I have to admit that my enthusiasm for completing the project was flagging. The sheer volume of Trump news is hard to cope with, his fans on social media are incredibly obnoxious, and while some of the news he generates is trivial or even reflects ideas that I think are pretty reasonable, so much of it is morally horrific. Beyond the specifics of Trump, though, the nature of partisan politics is that after Republicans win, they tend to start doing things like moving a bill that cuts trillions in social safety benefits for low-income families in order to partially offset the cost of a regressive tax cut. That’s a very important issue, and it’s also precisely the kind of issue that tends to unite Democrats across factional lines.

Bernie Sanders’s line on this is completely correct, in a way that makes squabbling and infighting and factional line-drawing seem irrelevant:

What brings me back down to Earth and reminds me that sorting out some of these factional disagreements is actually important to winning, is that even though I believe Democrats can regroup and fight and win on these topics where we have consensus, the reality is that 2025 is not 2017. And I think most of the conventional wisdom is missing the obvious reason.

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton lost the election, but Barack Obama was popular. He was, in fact, much more popular than Trump. You could characterize Clinton’s electoral weakness as sexism or the result of James Comey and the media screwing her on the emails or as a reasonable response to some of her idiosyncratic choices.

But “Hey guys, this is bad!” was a perfectly reasonable political response to Trump’s ascendancy in a world where the public expressed a strong preference for his predecessor.

Kamala Harris lost this past November. A lot of people both in the center of the party and on its left flank want to characterize this primarily as a question of tactical errors or campaign mechanics. But while Harris’s campaign was imperfect (whose isn’t?), they delivered on the two key goals of making Harris more popular than she was before she took over the nomination and making her more popular than Joe Biden. But Biden was (and remains) very unpopular, and this was not just a question of his age.

The public wanted a significant policy departure from Biden.

And I think that to succeed in the future, Democrats need to articulate a break with Bidenism, just as George W. Bush promised a new “compassionate” conservatism and Trump promised a break with Bush-style neoconservatism. But right now, it seems that to many Democrats, the only intellectually or psychologically available alternative to Bidenism is to move even further left. And so I think it actually is important for Democrats to chart an alternative course forward — one that can deliver the kinds of change the country is going to need.

Defining the goal

Part of charting that course is defining the goal a little bit more clearly than tends to follow a narrow look back at the 2024 election.

One way I would put this is that while Harris was pretty close to beating Trump, Senate Democrats were nowhere near winning a majority. The 2026 Senate map isn’t especially favorable either, and neither is 2028. And that’s because as currently constituted, there isn’t any such thing as a favorable Senate map. I encouraged people to donate to Independent candidate Dan Osborn in the 2024 cycle, which I think was a good idea. What’s fascinating to me, though, is that most mainstream Democrats were also favorably inclined toward Osborn. And not only that, left-wing outlets like The Intercept and Drop Site gave Osborn favorable coverage as a populist outsider, even as he broke with the left on all kinds of issues and ran a campaign that was narrowly progressive only on labor and Social Security. As a result, Osborn overperformed the partisan fundamentals — just not by enough to win in a state as conservative as Nebraska in a bad year for Democrats.

But importantly, I don’t think it’s actually true that the “run a guy with no D next to his name” gambit worked magic here. Osborn ran ahead of Harris, but the biggest overperformer of the 2024 cycle was Republican Larry Hogan in Maryland — he just had a strong brand as a moderate.

If we in some sense agree that the post-2012 iteration of the Democratic Party doesn’t have a viable path to a Senate majority, then we should be talking about remaking the party into one that would have such a path. That means both repositioning the national brand to something more broadly appealing, and also being more open-minded about recruitment.

These two things are interconnected.

I think even most people on the left agree that it wouldn’t make a ton of sense for a candidate to run in a state like North Dakota as a strident proponent of curtailing fossil fuel extraction or DEI programming. But it also doesn’t really make sense to recruit candidates who are moderate on those issues if Democrats, as a party, are going to say that climate change will lead to human extinction or that all DEI critics are aiming to re-impose segregation. If the center of the party is less strident, the tent can expand at the margins of the coalition, Democrats will win more races, and they’ll ultimately have more opportunities to enact economic policies that are good for non-white people and zero-carbon energy.

Similarly, Democrats can only address certain issues if they can win elections at least some of the time in very conservative states. Medicaid expansion came to Louisiana because a Democrat got elected governor there. To bring it to Georgia and Texas and Florida, Democrats need to be able to win in those states, too. They need to be able to win in Alabama and Mississippi. Of course, no matter what Democrats do, they’ll be underdogs in those states. But there’s a difference between having a 25 percent shot of winning and a 5 percent shot.

And finally, you want the states where Democrats do have an easy time winning elections to be successful hubs of growth. In some ways, I think the discourse around blue state governance is too harsh at times. Coastal America has some real virtues, starting with higher life expectancy and better public health outcomes. We are better (a bit ironically) at crime control. We have a lot of high-wage jobs and dynamic, successful multinational companies. What’s aggravating is that despite these strengths, we don’t have fast growth rates and in many cases are actually losing people.

“Get 51 percent in a presidential election rather than 49 percent” is an important goal, one that’s attainable through different means and maybe just takes a little good luck. But I don’t think that’s the right goal. Democrats should aim to be in a position to win Senate majorities without desperate gambits, to meaningfully contest state offices in all fifty states, and to make blue areas thriving magnets for people and capital requires a bigger program of party renewal.

To an extent, I think all nine points in the manifesto are relevant to all these goals. But point nine is clearly what mattered most in the most recent presidential election, while I think three, four, and five speak to what has made the Senate map unworkable, one and eight speak to what a relevant agenda in deep red states might look like, while two, six, and seven speak most clearly to actual governance of the blue areas.

Liberalism restored and regained

Ironically, while the American people had not rejected Barack Obama’s legacy eight years ago, the leaders of American progressive politics had.

The 2016 election was very narrow and admitted itself of lots of plausible explanations, ranging from “polling error led to some tactical missteps” to “people were more upset about the surge of unaccompanied minors at the border than we realized” to “moderating on Medicare was a smart idea from Trump” to “we got screwed by James Comey,” “Black Lives Matter was politically dicey,” “Hillary shouldn’t have done those buck-raking speeches if she was planning to run for office,” “it was a mistake to run an Iraq War supporter,” and beyond.

But as millions of Americans took to the streets to protest Trump, a group of intellectuals, funders, and Clinton campaign insiders went with the story that Trump winning was a rejection of “neoliberalism” and called for a whole new, much more left-wing approach to almost every issue.

The theory was that identity politics would mobilize Black and Hispanic voters, that young people were highly motivated by a politics of hostility to fossil fuel extraction, and that new economic doctrines that downplayed growth and economic expertise would reverse Trump’s gains with the white working class.

None of this panned out, because none of the premises were correct. Even the razor-thin Senate majority of 2021-22 was, in retrospect, built on the backs of an older, more big tent iteration of the Democratic Party that won seats in places like Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio by recruiting candidates who (at the time) did not share progressive views on immigration and climate. The lost opportunity of this period was the chance to pursue the reverse strategy and build intellectual bridges to traditional free market conservatives and libertarians who were alienated by Trump’s bizarre trade policy ideas, disregard for the rule of law, and ignorance of the benefits of international labor mobility. Trump’s unpopularity and post-January 6th toxicity could have been an opportunity to consolidate a vital new center of American politics. But it was instead taken as an opportunity to roll the dice on undisciplined politics and a policymaking process dominated by interest group giveaways.

It did not work, and the American people actually did reject Biden-era governance.

So unlike the needless post-Obama ideological pivot, Democrats now actually do need a pivot. A pivot away from the fuzzy semi-embrace of central planning and modern monetary theory and degrowth environmentalism and race essentialism back to good old-fashioned American liberalism. Liberalism believes in free markets and individual rights, but also takes seriously the need to protect the vulnerable with a social safety net and some reasonable regulations. The goal is broadly rising living standards, opportunity for everyone, and effective, honest government that delivers good value for the taxpayers’ money. There is no magic formula for winning all elections all the time, but this is a basic framework that Democrats can adapt to keep themselves in the game in all kinds of places.

Lighting the runway

While on one level, watching the Trump administration take shape has dimmed my enthusiasm for factional politics, on another, it’s reminding me why it’s important.

Trump is, if nothing else, a shining example of the importance of individual agency in American politics and world affairs. He single-handedly remade the image of the Republican Party by winning the 2016 primary. In the face of the backlash to Dobbs, he ditched the GOP’s longstanding commitment to a national abortion ban. Under the weight of conventional wisdom about the nature and meaning of populism, he decided that what he actually wanted to do was align himself closely with the richest man in the world and a coterie of venture capitalists. People make decisions. Things happen. One of the things I’ve changed my mind about over the past twenty years is that while there are clearly structural factors at play, fundamentally, polarization is a choice and not a fact of nature.

An awkward fact for Yglesias Thought is that Joe Biden won the 2020 primary.

I would have a cleaner shot at winning the post-2024 discourse battle if we were talking about the failure of the Elizabeth Warren administration. But while it’s true that she had incredible influence over Biden administration personnel, it’s also true that the top decision-makers were all guys (and, to an extent, Anita Dunn) who were preaching the gospel of moderation and pragmatism before I came along.

But in their governing choices, President Biden and his team abandoned most of the domestic policy legacy of Senator Biden and Vice President Biden in favor of a strange new synthesis.

And I think it’s ultimately encouraging for Common Sense Democrats that Joe Biden won the 2020 primary.

Elected officials sometimes tell me that if they did X or Y or Z, they’d be at risk of losing a primary. I’m skeptical. It’s true that AOC and a couple of other Squad members successfully exploited a mismatch between an incumbent Democrat and his district to elect leftists. But more recently, moderates also knocked off a couple of Squad members in primaries. There are no guarantees in life, and you can lose primaries in either direction. Incumbents who work hard and hustle rarely do.

And again, Joe Biden won the 2020 primary. Most Democrats really dislike Donald Trump and do not share leftist intellectuals’ antipathy to Clinton and Obama. Most Democrats are highly motivated by their desire to preserve the social safety net, to protect abortion rights, and to defeat the MAGA movement. It would require at this point a certain boldness of thought — and certainly a thick skin — to run against the party establishment with a moderate rather than leftist inflection. But I think the pathway is relatively clear. Because the 2018 and 2022 cycles went well for Democrats, there is plenty of talent on the bench. And because the senior party leadership discredited itself with its handling of Biden’s age, there is plenty of openness to outsider figures. People keep asking me who I think is the favorite for 2028 or who is my personal favorite. The answer is, it depends.

Those of us in the broad community of yackers — not just professional columnists but everyone who talks in public on the internet about politics — have limited ability to influence the future course of events. One of the things we can do, though, is light the runway and show a broad range of elected officials and candidates for office a viable path. Ultimately, only officials and candidates themselves can land the plane. But I think there’s an agenda here that makes sense, both as a path to winning elections and as a blueprint for governing. And I hope someone flies in our direction.