Do Democrats need to moderate to win — or would that be a terrible mistake?

Recently, I argued that progressives were wrong to see Kamala Harris’s defeat as proof that Democrats have little to gain from moderation. Osita Nwanevu, a contributor to the New Republic and author of the forthcoming book The Right of the People, has made one of the most interesting cases against my perspective. So, to hash out our disagreement — and discuss the Democratic Party’s challenges and opportunities more broadly — I spoke with Nwanevu last week. We discussed the challenge that the nationalization of politics poses to Democrats in red states, how the party became the face of establishment institutions, and what it means to be pro-worker in an age when very few Americans belong to labor unions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In your columns since the election, you’ve criticized the notion that Democrats can mitigate their present political challenges by moderating on policy. But you’ve also expressed some skepticism about whether Sen. Bernie Sanders’s brand of left populism constitutes a sound formula for Democrats’ political renewal. So, I’m wondering what you see as the alternative to moderation; how should Democrats go about rebuilding a national majority?

I certainly don’t have a definitive answer in my mind. But I don’t think we have very strong evidence on either side of this question. I think people on the left are making pretty sound criticisms of the efficacy of moderation as a strategy. But at the same time, if the left had its own kind of reliably effective approach — if it had a way of building a majority for itself — Bernie Sanders would’ve been president already. And I don’t think that we can say that the lack of success there is clearly a function of Democratic Party machinations, as real as the machinations might be.

So I think that we’re in a place where basically all sides left-of-center need to go back to the drawing board. There’s something structural happening to the electorate that I think makes Democratic moderation less and less effective. That’s not to say that I think that if you ran a DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] candidate in a congressional district in Nebraska — on economic populism — that that candidate would do better than moderate candidates. It’s not what I’m saying at all. But I do think that the electoral record of the past, let’s say, 20 or so years of running disciplined moderates in places that are tough for Democrats seems to be less and less effective.

And I think overall, when we look at this presidential campaign, I mean, there was this extraordinarily disciplined tack to the center by Harris. She did, I think, all of the right things that you would expect or want a candidate to do running for a general election if you are a kind of mainstream political consultant. She took the anxieties that people had about social progressivism after 2020 seriously, and shaped her campaign in a way that they thought would circumvent some of the impact of those positions. And it didn’t really work.

How do we know that she wouldn’t have done even worse, had she not followed the advice of mainstream consultants or taken those anxieties seriously? After all, this was a bad national environment for Democrats: Across the globe, virtually every party that presided over inflation suffered at the ballot box in recent elections. And Harris also came into the race with personal liabilities: In the 2020 primary, she took several left-wing stances that are highly unpopular, and which Trump’s campaign highlighted in campaign ads.

So, a defender of Harris’s messaging choices might argue that these background factors are what doomed her, and that her gestures of moderation prevented her from losing by a larger margin (but messaging can only do so much). And the fact that Harris came closer to matching Biden’s 2020 performance in swing states — which were the places most exposed to her moderate messaging — than in non-battlegrounds is arguably consistent with that view.

I think this was a tough election to win. There’s no doubt about it. I think the point about the incumbent parties getting shellacked across the world is true. If anything, I think I was reading the other day that Democrats performed a little bit better than some parties have in elections this year. 

I don’t know that you can necessarily say that it was her kind of background identity here that freighted her the most heavily of all the issues and all the factors that might’ve played into how she performed. It is absolutely true that the campaign performed better in swing states than it seems to have elsewhere. But you’re hearing from operatives, people who were working on the campaign, that it was in the swing states where you really had a focus from the Harris team on their economic message. 

So yeah, I think that’s actually a point in favor of the idea that she would have done better with a more economically focused message. 

There was a lot of scolding of the campaign when they came out with their price-gouging plan. You can debate the economic merits and the substance of her proposals, but all of the data that I’ve seen suggests that it actually resonated really strongly with a lot of voters, and they were kind of browbeaten by moderate columnists and economists. 

But I think the one thing you can indict Democrats for in general in this election more than anything else, even more than the particular messaging decisions they made over the course of this campaign, was how long it took for them to realize that Joe Biden was not going to be a viable candidate. That’s the original sin of this election. 

Zooming out from this particular election cycle, how do you understand the structural shifts in the electorate, such as the realignment of non-college-educated voters away from the Democratic Party? 

I’m still piecing together what I think about this. But some of my first thoughts are about media. I don’t know that it’s the case that the American public on social issues is more reactionary today, in 2024, than it was in 2014 or 2004 or 1994. I don’t think that’s the driving reason why Trump came into power and people took interest in the campaign. I do think that you have a more consolidated conservative media infrastructure though, one that is very efficient at packaging political messages. Segments of the electorate that would’ve considered voting for Democrats 20 years ago — kind of moderate to conservative folks in swing areas of the country — I think they’ve bought into this media in a way that makes them more reluctant to even consider voting for the Democrats. 

On educational polarization, there’s the case that a lot of the people who run Democratic Party messaging and Democratic political operations and Democratic Party campaigns are college-educated professionals that aren’t necessarily sure what kind of messaging resonates best with working-class Americans. And I think there’s some truth to that. But I don’t think there’s one easy answer. 

Educational polarization goes way, way back. For several decades now, people have been pointing to this trend. White working-class erosion amongst the Democratic Party is a trend that goes back decades as well. 

There’s this paper by a professor at Vanderbilt that pointed out that [then-Republican presidential nominee] Mitt Romney actually did more to pull working-class voters to the right in 2012 than Trump did in 2016.

If you buy the kind of standard left argument — that white working-class voters are looking for anti-establishment politicians who don’t seem conventional and who are going to take on corporate power — well, hey, Mitt Romney did well amongst this constituency of people. 

So I think that none of the extant explanations seem to really take seriously how long these trends have kind of been baked in for the Democratic Party.

In one of your recent pieces, you suggest that moderation has been tried repeatedly by the party in recent decades and found wanting. You write that the Democratic Party has been dominated by centrists for longer than you’ve been alive. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were moderates. As you noted before, Kamala — maybe she had a reputation as a liberal before this campaign, but she ran pretty tightly on the recommendations of the so-called “popularists” in the party.

And I think one objection to that would be that while Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won primaries against more progressive candidates and weren’t identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party for most of their careers, Hillary Clinton’s substantive positions on public policy were pretty much all to the left of Obama’s in 2012. And Obama’s in 2012 were to the left of his positions in 2008. First-term Obama is the “deporter in chief,” second term he does Deferred Action for Parents of Americans. And Clinton comes out against the Hyde Amendment, decries systemic racism, etc. And then as you note, Biden’s positions in 2020 also seemed to the left of Clinton’s in 2016. I think Harris is arguably the first step back in the other direction, but it’s not a huge step back either. And so, over the broad sweep of 2008 to 2024, you’re seeing a party that is becoming more and more progressive, while simultaneously having a harder and harder time competing in culturally conservative parts of the country. Is it not plausible that those two developments have something to do with each other? 

To an extent, the Democratic Party has moved left on certain cultural issues because the public has moved left on certain cultural issues. I think that the public is in a different place on LGBT rights, on race, and so you would expect the Democratic Party to shift in response to that. Are there places where Democrats have moved ahead of public opinion? Sure. There are always places where each of the parties are a bit further afield than public opinion. I don’t think that’s a novel problem or a novel situation.

The person who did this right — by the lights of Democratic moderates — was Bill Clinton. He himself was a Southern Democrat. We think that he was disciplined on social issues, obviously on domestic policy, on things like criminal justice reform. He made deals and made policy with the right. I think the point to recognize, though, is that even Clinton did not master the task that Democratic moderates say the party has lined up for itself now. I mean, Clinton loses Congress in 1994 in this historic rout because the perception at the time is that he had moved too far to the left by pursuing health care and on some cultural issues.

I am not a huge fan substantively of where the Clinton presidency went after 1994. But it’s always a little striking to me that the peak of class-based voting in the modern period is 1996 with Bill Clinton (that year, Democrats’ share of the non-college-educated vote was much larger than his share of the college-educated one — in fact, this was the largest such gap since 1968). That year, he both wins reelection comfortably and the actual class composition of his coalition is unusually working-class for a Democrat in the modern period, which is interesting. It seems like there’s a case that it at least worked in the moment. Obviously it didn’t solve the Democratic Party’s brand issues for a long period of time.

I think that’s important. I think Clinton ran two very successful presidential campaigns. I think it is important for the left especially to recognize that if you believe exit polls, the last Democratic candidate to win the white working class outright was Bill Clinton. So I think that that is an important thing to appreciate. If you’re somebody who wants to believe that there is a kind of natural working-class constituency out there that is primed against neoliberalism, I don’t know that we have evidence that that is necessarily the case. 

All of that said, I do think it’s true that whatever Clinton’s strengths were at the top of the ticket, there was this kind of structural erosion underneath.

That’s actually very similar to the dynamic that we had under Barack Obama, where Republicans are able to make all of these sub-national and sub-presidential gains that seem kind of durable. And they did that partially by capitalizing on the idea that Clinton was not as moderate as he claimed to be. So I think the question that I’d pose to people at the center of Democratic politics is, well, what is the right amount of centrism? We have seen a lot of disciplined moderate and conservative Democrats lose elections in the last 15, 20 years, for a lot of reasons that I think, again, are worth thinking about and taking seriously.

I think proponents of moderation have an account of the Democrats’ down-ballot difficulties that overlaps with your own understanding. So, one, I think that they would posit that the Democratic Party’s movement leftward on some issues has outpaced the public’s own leftward drift. But then second, they would point to this development where local media institutions progressively die off while more Americans gain access to high-speed broadband internet, and the internet goes from being a text-based medium that attracts a narrower population to being a really effective vehicle for dispensing video content. And then because of this, people get less of their information from local outlets, more of their information from ideologically oriented national outlets. And this leads voters in Indiana and North Dakota to evaluate Democratic Senate candidates less on the basis of their own discrete moderate positions, and more on the positions and image of the Democratic Party nationally. And so, since candidates in red and purple areas are now more tied to the national brand, this creates an imperative to make that brand more broadly appealing and more moderate.

That feels right to me. I mean, as local newspapers, local outlets die, your consumption of political news is less about who’s doing what about highway funding in your state than about the national policy-making cultural narratives. I think that’s true. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there’s an easy solution to the media problem. I think it’d be fantastic if we had a hundred different progressive publications brought up in the next hundred years that are backed by, I don’t know, the Ford Foundation. I don’t really see that happening. And so to the extent that there is a kind of path forward, I think you’re right that Democrats are going to have to craft some kind of national narrative about themselves that is more broadly compelling to more people.

I think one of the other key things I want to mention here though is that moderation and the perception of moderation are not always connected tightly. The fact that Donald Trump is perceived as more “moderate” in certain respects than Kamala Harris was out of whack with the positions he actually took. You can talk about, “Well, he doesn’t talk as much about entitlement reform as conventional Republicans do. He’s dialed back on abortion in the last year or so.” I think he makes a lot of contradictory statements on these points. But I think that the balance of his policy platform is actually quite extreme. He succeeds at being perceived as moderate on the basis of his affect, his way of talking about political problems, whatever it is. 

And so to the extent that maybe being perceived as moderate is a task for the Democratic Party ahead, I think we should be careful about believing automatically that that means they need to tack substantively much further right than they are on the issues.

It seems to me that the Obama approach, the Obama message, which I think has shaped Democratic rhetoric as long as I’ve kind of been engaged in politics — “We are one country, all have the same common values, whether in red states or blue states, there’s this fundamental commonality and there’s more that unites us than divides us, and business owners and workers and everybody, all the constituencies in American politics have kind of common interests that we would realize if it weren’t for the peddlers of division and those who seek to capitalize on division for their own personal gain” — worked for a good while, certainly for his presidential campaigns. But I think that this election, and frankly Donald Trump’s election in 2016, should be understood as a repudiation of that from most of the American electorate. I think there are a lot of people who really matter in the electorate for whom that message is not really resonating reliably.

There’s something about Donald Trump’s political style and personality — the fact that he stands against our institutions and norms — that is very compelling to a lot of people you need to win the Electoral College. And so maybe that’s one area where Democrats can think about tweaking their messaging. 

That last point’s really interesting. I think Donald Trump’s elevation and then the dangerous ways that he attacked established institutions during his first term — trying to compromise the independence of federal law enforcement, obviously attacking the basic administrative offices of vote counting — seemed to polarize Democrats into becoming the party of established institutions. And this does seem to have potentially hurt the party with voters who are more anti-system in their general orientations.

So, it seems plausible to me that the Democrats should move in the general direction of being a bit more anti-system and populist in their orientation or affect. But then, I also see a risk that such messaging could promote more cynicism about government. Basically, I see a tension between affirming the idea that there’s perennial corruption in Washington and building a consensus for giving the federal government more power over some domains of American life.  

I think government can do a lot of things for us, and does a lot of vital things for us. As a matter of fact, I think it is the ground under all of our feet, and for marginalized Americans especially. Social programs are a lifeline that allows them to live productively. All of that being said, I think that there is a kind of ambient distrust of government that conservatives have been able to capitalize on. I think some of this is because it’s frustrating to deal with bureaucracy. Sometimes people don’t like paying taxes — all kinds of background frustrations people have when they interact with government that are easy for conservatives to capitalize upon. I think that’s how they built out a durable constituency in American politics, seizing upon these kinds of nagging indignities.

So maybe what being anti-institutional could mean for Democrats isn’t to tear down these institutions, but to say, “God dammit, these things aren’t working as well as they could be, and I’m going to go in and I’m going to take out a monkey wrench and really get into the gears and then fix stuff and make it work right, make it into something that doesn’t burden you, doesn’t burden the American worker.”

I really think, to the extent that I have a direction I feel very confident in about messaging, it’s really about focusing even more deeply on labor. And I know that we’ve had these takes in the last couple weeks about how Biden did all these things for labor and he didn’t really seem to be getting an electoral payoff for it. Still, I do think there’s a lot of evidence that in the long run, there are things about labor organization that do redound to the benefit of progressive parties, beyond just being materially beneficial and good in their own right.

I think there’s something about these institutions that sustains liberal-left politics. You see that in the history of this country. I think that’s something to invest in. But I also think the thing that’s useful about labor on a rhetorical basis is that you have a kind of message and a kind of outsider politics that doesn’t require you to invest quite as much in defending and shoring up — or being seen as defending and shoring up — government. The message could be, “Look, I am for you, the worker, and you and your collective power.” And that’s power that can and should exist outside the halls of Washington and outside the halls of your state capital. 

So I think that that’s a kind of way to dive into populism. You’re promoting solidarity, you’re promoting collective action, promoting people becoming democratically involved in new ways. I think all of that actually helps us knit people together in certain respects. It’s not just about tearing down these other institutions. But it is also not dependent on being seen as the steward or protector of our policymaking institutions. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think so. I’d also note that, in opinion polling, Democrats are often on their firmest ground when advocating for policies that seek to redistribute power within companies, as opposed to redistributing through the government via taxes and transfers. Some of the latter stuff is popular and higher-impact. But it does require some trust in the government, whereas the sentiment that workers should have a higher share of the profits of an enterprise and a bit more authority in how things are done within the business seems like it asks for less in terms of trust while still being a fundamentally progressive sentiment and project.

Right.

So, I’m in broad sympathy with what you were saying there. I do wonder, though: At a time when the private sector unionization rate is so low, how much does talk of helping unions resonate with voters? I worry about the vast majority of voters responding to such messages by thinking, “This sounds fine, but you’re not actually talking about the thing that I’m concerned about because I don’t belong to a union.”

I don’t think that we should rely exclusively upon the traditional labor movements here, either rhetorically or substantively. I think, should we get a trifecta again, the PRO Act has to be at the top of the agenda. But I think we also are at a place where we need to be thinking more creatively and ambitiously about ways to organize workers beyond the kind of standard National Labor Relations Board framework. 

So Sharon Block at Harvard has this “Clean Slate For Worker Power” that contains a whole lot of ideas for how to pull people into democratic work organizations of various kinds, even if they’re not in a union. I’m doing some reporting right now on wage and workers’ boards and how they might be a step towards sectoral bargaining.

But my interest in all of this is driven by a faith that, if we talk about labor policy in the terms of democracy, that that’s a kind of message that could resonate with the people that Democrats have been struggling to reach. And it grounds the kind of rhetoric we saw in this campaign about the importance of democracy in the actual material interests of working-class people.