On fighting, flexibility, and getting out of your own way
A couple of lengthy essays last week spoke to chronic problems (blind spots?) plaguing the Democratic Party. Handy advice for a party self-aware enough to recognize it. DNC Chair Ken Martin commissioned a post-2024 review and then buried it. So Mark Leibovich addressed the topic in The Atlantic, as did Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. But before we get to their critiques, indulge me. I’m just a simple country blogger.
I was the state party’s Get Out The Vote Coordinator (GOTV) for NC-11 in 2006. A week ahead of Election Day, candidate Heath Shuler’s field director and I made a tour of western counties to check on their preparations. We asked one group of county leaders what they’d done and/or still needed to do.
“We’re done,” they told us.
Excuse me?
“We called through the phone list and put out the signs.”
They caught us looking sideways at each other.
“You mean, you want us to do … more?“
Um, yes. They weren’t being lazy. They’d done all they knew to do. They’d done all their county had ever done. What they’d learned from the people before them, who’d learned it from the people before them, etc.
My current obsession is with turning out more independent voters (“unaffiliateds” in NC), especially now that they outnumber Democrats. When I point out deficiencies in standard practice for identifying them, deficiencies that I can document with data, I’m assured that our people will address it by doing the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it. Just more of it.
Democrats’ national voter database, for example, was conceived and implemented around the time in North Carolina that Democrats were 48% of state registrants, Republicans were 34%, and UNAffiliated were 18%. Decades later that mix is UNAs 39% (45% in my county), with Ds and Rs tied statewide at 30%. Yes, Democrats have updated their software, but they haven’t updated their strategy for using it. That was conceived a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away. Democrats need a new targeting paradigm and won’t admit it. They’re comfortable with what they’re used to. Just like my friends from 2006. It’s cultural as much as technical. They don’t innovate, don’t experiment, don’t take chances.
Problem 1 is summarized by Navin Nayak: “Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.” Democrats just telling people they are fighting for them is meaningless. They have to be seen doing it:
Americans want to root for a fighter, to cheer for the underdog who punches back. The fictional George McFly who meekly takes it is cringe-worthy. Nobody wants to vote for him. The guy who cold-cocks Biff Tannen elicits cheers.
How many times have I referenced all those Rocky movies American paid to watch over and over and over? They want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. People don’t want to vote for Democrats committed to playing it safe.
Problem 2: Democratic infighting over ideology. Tomasky cites Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”):
“Democrats are fundamentally committed to issues and policies, and they lose sight of the values that underlie those issues and policies,” he said. “It’s a difference with Republicans. They start with values, but they never bother to get around to policy, because they’re not really interested in running anything.”
When you begin from values, Westen said, you inevitably are emphasizing points of commonality with others in your coalition, because you share those values. Whereas when you begin with policy, you inevitably end up emphasizing differences, because policies are particular, and people have different ideas about them.
The meta message voters hear is that Democrats can’t get their shit together. How can voters know what Democrats stand for if Democrats don’t? A checklist of policies may flow from values but the values should come first and prepare the ground.
Problem 3: Centrists “always want to believe on some level that it’s still 1989, and the left either has just led or is about to lead the Democratic Party to ruin.” Except 1989 was in another century. The country is not permanently somewhere in the middle.
It’s true that not many middle Americans would identify themselves as leftists or even liberals. But they don’t want to live in a cruel country. Their moral sentiments are not directed toward the rounding up of millions of decent people or the attempted erasure of a tiny and powerless percentage of the population. Centrists ought to link arms with progressives and play offense on these issues.
The centrists’ second mistake is worse: the presumed yearning for “normalcy.” I hear some centrists say: People don’t want all these big plans; they don’t want Democrats to remake society. They just want things to get back to normal, by which they mean some sort of pre-Trump idea of business as usual.
We’re not going back. Ask someone who understands that it’s a new day:
AOC on why she's at the Munich security conference:
"I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the Transatlantic partnership, ah, rip up every democratic norm, ah, and, you know, really calling into question, as was mentioned by,… pic.twitter.com/Cd3n5V2ZeB
Problem 4: The left is in its own bubble. A lot fewer Americans identify with the left than they think. At the end of the day on Nov. 3, we don’t count ideology. We count votes.
It also feels as if many people on the left forget that the first job of any political party is to win a majority. If the Democrats don’t win 51 Senate seats and 218 House seats, they aren’t doing anybody a lick of good. That means they have to win in states and districts that are purple at best. Candidates in those places are going to have to take some positions that progressives won’t like. The left has to show more tolerance for these candidates.
Say it with me: Duh.
Tomasky has a slew of suggestions for resolving these issues. Too many to mention, but go here.
Leibovich’s critique gets more at the Democrats’ cultural self-owns. In particular, its attempt to mollify each and every sub-interest group in the tent. The subhead puts it bluntly: “They say they want to save democracy. First they’ll need to get out of their own way.”
“It’s reflective of a broader problem within the party,” said Simon Bazelon, lead author on the “Deciding to Win” project. “We are scared of ever making anybody in our coalition upset.” That, along with the party’s reluctance to fight or to make enemies makes them appear weak.
“Weakness is the toxicity of our brand,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom observes.
One recurring resentment among Democratic voters is the disconnect between the party’s red-alert anti-Trump rhetoric and the musty vehicles—Biden and Harris, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the various other dust-gatherers—it keeps deploying to resist him. “People continue to say, ‘Oh my God, Trump is an authoritarian; the world’s going to end,’ all this stuff,” David Hogg, the 25-year-old gun-control activist and advocate for recruiting young progressive leaders, told me over the summer. Hogg, who had a brief and tumultuous stint as a DNC co–vice chair in early 2025, is contemptuous of the party’s lingering cohort of elder leaders.
“It’s like, ‘Okay, look who your members of Congress are: Some of them literally cannot stand for a press conference,’ ” he said. “You cannot credibly tell the American people that democracy is in danger and the world is ending, and the people that you are putting up on the front lines of fighting back against that genuinely belong in a nursing home.”
I complain regularly that party elders fail to recruit and train their replacements, young ones. Locals just asked me again to take shifts troubleshooting electioneering/voting challenges that arise during our primary. I agreed. But I asked for a young mentee. I may not be ready for the nursing home either, but I know when it’s time to step back. Many Democrats in Congress do not. That’s not just about age. Sen. Bernie Sanders is sharp and still hard at the fight. But it’s a lot about age, especially if you want less engaged independents under 45 to vote.
Your state similar.
Former president Barack Obama, 64, recently chalked up his wins to being younger when he ran for president. “There is an element of, at some point, you age out,” he told Brian Tyler Cohen. “You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through,” reports Politico:
“I’m not making a hard and fast rule here, but I do think that Democrats do well when we have candidates who are plugged into the moment, to the zeitgeist, to the times and the particular struggles that folks are thinking about as they look towards the future, rather than look backward toward the past,” Obama told Cohen.
Leibovich speaks with other younger Democrats with fire in their bellies who are trying to get establishment Democrats out of their way. And yet, he sees advantage in, as James Carville advised, staying out of Republicans’ way when the other side is destroying itself. Liebovich concludes, “there are worse things to be than the alternative.”
Except that’s the kind of visionless, election-cycle thinking that’s turned the Democrats into a gerontocracy, one that’s failed to invest in its own future and led by people perceived as in it for themselves. Not unlike a drug maker starving new drug research funding so it can keep quarterly earnings high. Instead, the company lobbies to extend profits from existing patents until the CEO retires. If it feels stagnant, it’s because it is. If it feels like a party holding onto a normal that isn’t coming back, it’s because that’s true too. Its national leadership is coasting into irrelevance.
Obama warns:
“That spirit, that energy, it’s out there, and you can feel it, but it’s bottled up,” he said. “We haven’t given enough outlets for young people to figure out, ‘How do I become a part of that?’ That’s this enormous, untapped power that we have to get back to.”
Party leaders can start by knowing when they’re past their “best by” date. There’ are few places for fresh faces to go when people up the ladder won’t leave.
