What can we learn from politicians who overperform

Their ideas aren't always good, but independent-mindedness pays off and winning is worth it

I have often urged Democratic Party leaders, progressive nonprofit leaders, and rank-and-file Trump haters to pay more attention to the words and deeds of elected officials who are better than average at winning the votes of ticket-splitters.

People like Susan Collins, Andy Beshear, Laura Kelly, and Larry Hogan aren’t running way ahead of the national ticket because of rizz or by mobilizing the base. They all have, in their own ways, forged reputations for being moderate and independent-minded. Even exceptions that test the rule — like Bernie Sanders before the 2024 cycle — confirm it. The version of Sanders who ran ahead of national tickets formally disaffiliated from the national party and positioned himself to the right of most Democrats on guns and immigration, while expressing skepticism toward identity politics. His path toward convincing voters of his independent-mindedness was unusual, but it reflected a genuine independence. When he adopted more conventionally progressive stances, he became less popular and ran behind Kamala Harris, as did Elizabeth Warren and the members of the Squad.

But two recent events complicate the “be more like the winners” analysis:

• One is that Jared Golden of Maine, probably the top electoral performer in the House, has chosen to stand out from the pack by defending Trump’s tariffs and sponsoring a bill that would turn Trump’s global 10 percent tariff into an actual law.

• The other is that Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Golden’s fellow Blue Dog and a Slow Boring favorite, went on the Ezra Klein show and offered some peculiar thoughts regarding the value of modern prosperity and regular garbage collection.

I think this complicates the analysis in two ways. One is that for all I’ve praised these two members over the years, I don’t think the national Democratic Party should run on protectionism or a Khmer Rouge attitude toward city-dwellers. The other is that there’s a different kind of moderate politics — of which this Jake Auchincloss tweet about nuclear-powered YIMBYism is emblematic — that resonates a lot with me. But I think that abundance-pilled moderate Democrats need to acknowledge that this is not how Blue Dogs in the rural north talk and that this probably tells us something electorally relevant about places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio.

I do worry about overcorrection in the other direction. But it’s true that an agenda that centers the problems of the densest, deepest blue, highest income metro areas in the country is not going to resonate with people living in conservative rural areas. And what might work for Democrats in rural areas is probably not going to work as an urban reform agenda.

But this mostly just comes down to two banal (but important) points. One is that different districts are different, so the specific heterodoxies that are most electorally useful will vary from place to place. The other is that candidates themselves differ. I think that many elected officials have gotten into a bad habit of excessive conformism and outsourcing too much of their thinking to ideological bad actors. But if everyone loosens up, embraces heterodoxy, and is more willing to “be themselves” rather than a centrally programmed messaging robot, they’re all going to sound different.

The concept of the big tent, meanwhile, extends in both directions.

I’m of course happiest to defend a heterodox stance when I think it’s right on the merits. Golden’s views on trade, by contrast, I strongly disagree with. But that’s how a big tent works: Golden’s views are dramatically closer to mine than are the views of any Republican who might possibly represent this very Trump-y district, so I am thrilled to have him and to some extent, need to accept that he probably knows what he’s doing and that the right choice is to let Jared cook.

Golden’s progressive conservatism

There’s more meat in the MGP interview than in anything Golden has said, because he doesn’t really engage with the national press. But I know his congressional district pretty well and have spent time there on and off for decades, so I think I can speak more clearly as to what’s going on there. This is a classic Obama-Trump district full of secular non-college white voters who traditionally backed Democrats, but flipped to Trump. It’s a state with union-friendly labor laws and a strong union tradition.

In other words, the swing voters of Golden’s district:

• Regard Trump as different from the average Republican in a good way

• Have generally positive associations with the idea of “old-fashioned Democrats”

And I think this explains a lot of Golden’s hottest takes. In the 2024 campaign, he said that he’s not a Trump supporter, but he also doesn’t believe that Trump is a threat to American democracy. You could imagine a different kind of swing district, maybe in the Atlanta suburbs, where people have traditional allegiances to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, but some big doubts about Trump. This would be a terrible message in that kind of district, where you’d want to lean into those Trump-specific doubts.

My sense is that most people who voted for Obama over Romney and then Clinton over Trump feel that Trump is much worse than Romney. So they intuitively “get” the political profile of the Trump-skeptical Sunbelt swing district, while the psychology of the rural north swing district eludes them a little. It makes their skin crawl to hear Golden say that maybe Trump’s not so bad. But I think it makes perfect sense if you think about it.

By the same token, for most of my life, left-wing Democrats and people aligned with labor unions have been critical of free trade, and for most of my life, I have disagreed with them. My view was the moderate view, and theirs was the progressive view.

Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs and his cult-like grip on the Republican Party has to some extent, realigned public perceptions of the issue. Now, most left-critics of globalization go out of their way to distinguish their criticism of free trade from Trump’s criticism of free trade, because they don’t want to find themselves discredited within the Democratic Party. But if you’re representing a district with lots of ancestral Democrats who now vote for Trump, it makes more sense to play it the way Golden has with his “Trump is on to something, the libs don’t get it” pitch. Golden has taken to calling himself a “progressive conservative,” which I think is a catchphrase he picked up from Canadians. But it makes sense — he’s the kind of old-school progressive Democrat who’s so pro-union he’s endorsed by the police union.

Many strands of abundance

I’ve never been to MGP’s district, and I don’t understand the Pacific Northwest all that well. Her electoral base includes suburbs of Portland, but it’s a district that Trump wins because numerically, the “suburbs of Portland” part isn’t all that compared to the district’s rural hinterland. Perez lives in the rural hinterland and plays up that aspect of her persona. This involves a kind of performative ruralism that, in many ways, is antithetical to the techno-futurism of an Auchincloss.

That said, last week, the Democratic caucus was roiled by a controversy over emissions regulations on cars.

The Biden EPA granted California a waiver allowing them to impose stricter emissions regulations than the national rules. But the California market is so large that, especially with some other blue states piggybacking on the California standard, it can drag the entire national market. Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get rid of that waiver without needing to overcome a Senate filibuster. There is a legal question as to whether a waiver from a regulation is CRA-able, but fundamentally, this is a policy question: Do we want regulations that create cross-subsidies for electric cars driven by higher prices for buyers of traditional cars?

Basically every frontline Democrat (including Perez and Golden) joined with the Republicans on the CRA vote, because voters care more about the cost of living than they do about climate change.

This kind of appliance regulation isn’t the centerpiece of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. But a big part of the broader intellectual ecosystem of abundance is, in fact, pushing back on climate doomerism and the politics of limits. The Blue Dogs were all on the letter opposing the Biden administration’s misguided LNG export pause. And Perez has her own version of a bipartisan housing supply bill, focused on training more people to work in the building trades.

I think the swing district version of abundance is probably closer to Ruben Gallego’s pledge to help you “get a job so you become rich” and can buy “a big ass truck” than it is to anything you’ll read on Slow Boring or that would be interesting to Ezra Klein fans in Brooklyn or California. But there is a genuine common thread here. And not for nothing, but if you look at the Democratic members of the new Abundance-themed caucus, you’ll find both blue district ref ormers (Auchincloss, Ritchie Torres, Joe Neguse, Scott Peters, Brittany Pettersen) and some of the Democrats’ best electoral performers (Kristen McDonald Rivet, Sharice Davids, Adam Gray, Pat Ryan, George Whitesides).

So the abundance pitch has some political juice.

The primacy of values

What I do think is true is that if you look at politicians who are good at winning elections, the connection to “this person is thoughtful about complex matters of public policy” is pretty tenuous.

In some ways, making good policy is an underrated aspect of politics. Voters really do prefer good outcomes, and delivering good outcomes is hard because governance is complicated. But a back-bench minority party House member doesn’t actually have an opportunity to govern. And even senior members of the majority party have fairly limited influence on policy. I never want to be heard as saying that good ideas are irrelevant, but legislators are mostly engaged in position-taking, and as long as what you say to the voters sounds good, that’s probably good enough.

Which is why I think that in purely political terms, the most important thing that politicians who overperform do is position-taking on questions of moral and cultural values.

Again, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bernie Sanders got away with being unusually left-wing on a lot of economic questions as long as he distanced himself from liberal cultural values on guns and immigration. That’s what I think roughly all the over-performing Democrats have in common — some mix of tough on crime, tough on illegal immigration, distance from identity politics, and a tendency to prioritize material prosperity over emissions reductions.

A truism in academic political science is that the electoral benefits of moderation have declined in recent decades. I’m a little bit unsure about that, because I think the extent of the moderation on these questions has really diminished.

When the Republicans moved a bill to ban trans girls from school sports teams, only Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez voted with them. And even Golden, the most moderate House Democrat, came out in favor of an assault weapons ban after a mass shooting in his district.

In 2006, though, when House Republicans brought up a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, 34 Democrats out of 201 voted for it. In 2010, there were Democrats who were so hawkish on immigration that they opposed the Dream Act. There used to be at least a few pro-life Democrats, several of whom favored bans on late-term abortions and plenty of whom used rhetoric about being personally pro-life or wanting abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Public opinion on abortion rights has genuinely become a lot more progressive over the past 15 years, but that doesn’t explain the full extent of the shift on that issue, let alone on the broader panoply of cultural questions.

I think Golden is wrong about tariffs, and I think Perez is wrong about cities. I thought the people who voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 were wrong and that the people who voted against the Dream Act in 2010 were wrong. I would not personally object to a much stricter gun regime, and I don’t feel any particular desire to ban late-term abortions. But part of a creating a big tent is that I don’t want to run people out of town for saying things that I disagree with. Golden’s take on Trump and democracy, in particular, is really wrong and yet clearly in line with his constituents’ views.

Stef Feldman, who was policy director for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, wrote something wise about this recently:

[C]andidates should run if and only if they believe they can effectively represent the views of their future constituents while remaining consistent with their personal values. On the margins, an elected official can shape public opinion. But generally, elected officials should represent the views of their constituents instead of trying to convince their constituents to change their minds.

That doesn’t mean Democrats should only nominate people with solid progressive values who lose tons of races. It means that Democrats should try to find nominees with decidedly conservative views on at least some cultural issues and run them in culturally conservative parts of the country. There is no scenario in which Louisiana sends an abortion rights champion to the Senate or Oklahoma elects a champion of asylum-seekers’ interests. We might as well try to elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit.