‘Democrats Don’t Need to Become G.O.P. Lite’

Now is an agonizing time for Democrats. Some days are dominated by feelings of despair, others by recriminations. But in fact the Democratic Party is on the cusp of a renaissance if it plays its cards right.

The claim that a revival may be near at hand might seem bizarre, given that the party is at its weakest point in at least half a century. It is all but shut out of power in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Its popularity is at a record low, according to a report by Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization. Since 2022, according to Gallup, more Americans identify and lean Republican than Democratic, the first time that has been true since 1991. Leading figures in the Democratic Party, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, call the Democratic brand “toxic.” Democratic support has collapsed among non-college-educated voters, who make up some 64 percent of electorate. Voters are leaving blue states for red ones. And if that were not enough, based on current demographic trends, blue states will lose up to a dozen electoral votes after the 2030 census.

Despite this, Democrats have an opening. The Trump administration’s wall-to-wall incompetence, and the human suffering that is resulting from it, will become more and more obvious. Disenchantment with President Trump and his party is already spreading. But can Democrats exploit the opportunity?

To help figure out an answer, we conducted written interviews with 19 Democrats, from progressives to centrists. They included officeholders, analysts, strategists and state party chairs chosen because they represent a range of views and experiences and have given careful thought to how the Democratic Party needs to change. We also plowed through a stack of white papers, articles and published interviews.

These Democrats agree that attacking Mr. Trump is not sufficient; the party must make a new offer to Americans. They also agree on a main theme of that new offer: making the American dream affordable for the middle class and especially the working class. But Democrats across the ideological spectrum, not just on the party’s right flank, also recognize that their economic message will fall on deaf ears if they cannot re-enter the cultural mainstream and stop talking down to ordinary people.

Rahm Emanuel, a former Democratic representative in Congress and mayor of Chicago who served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, was blunt: “If you’re outside the mainstream on culture, the public will never trust you enough to listen to your ideas on economic ‘kitchen table’ issues.”

Hearing from all these people, we emerged with an observation of our own. Although the party is not yet where it needs to be, especially on cultural issues, it is moving toward a consensus that makes good strategic and economic sense. It can become something it has not been for years: the party of prosperity. Mr. Trump and his beggar-thy-neighbor policies, exacerbated by his politics of vengeance, are abandoning the high ground of prosperity. Both wings of the Democratic Party — its center and its left — have a good inkling of how to capture it.

Those we spoke to harbor no illusions about their party’s plight. Many voters doubt that the party cares about them or fights for them; they can’t name tangible ways Democrats have helped them. Democrats are viewed as the party of big government and the status quo, both of which are deeply out of favor. “Historically, Democratic successes under leaders like former Presidents Clinton and Obama were driven by their roles as disrupters of the status quo,” Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former presidential campaign manager, told us. Today’s Democrats are seen as being in thrall to progressive, elite special-interest groups. “We will never be a majority party if we are dependent on college-educated voters to win elections,” according to Doug Sosnik, a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.

To solve this problem, our interviewees agreed, the Democrats need more than a brand refurbishment; they need to make a different kind of appeal to the public. “We cannot just be an opposition party,” Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said. “We also have to be a proposition party. We can’t just fight back; we have to fight forward.”

We encountered more emphasis from the left than the center on countering corporate power. Centrists, by contrast, emphasized reforming the government itself. Democrats need to show that “a dollar’s worth of government gets a dollar’s worth of results,” Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization, told us. Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate think tank, put it this way: Democrats “need to get serious about reinventing government again. One big reason Bidenomics didn’t land with working families is that they don’t think the federal government works for their benefit or can deliver on its promises. By reflexively defending underperforming public institutions — from public schools to ossified federal agencies — Democrats only cement their identification with a broken status quo.”

Still, we found considerable agreement on the economic direction the Democratic Party needs to take: stress affordability, show respect for the dignity of work and reorient around working Americans’ economic aspirations. Affordability was virtually a mantra. “On policy,” Mr. Emanuel told us, “the American dream needs to be the Democratic Party’s North Star. The American dream has become unaffordable and inaccessible. For Democrats, that should be unacceptable.” Xavier Becerra, who served in the House of Representatives before serving as secretary of health and human services under President Joe Biden, echoed that theme: “You shouldn’t have to worry if you can afford to take your child to the hospital. And you’ll be able to replace the aging washer and dryer when their time has come. Just give a working family the tools to stay ahead of the bill collector, and they’ll figure out the rest.”

While some of our interviewees made this point in general terms, others provided lists of policy specifics — including some that are notably ambitious. Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, for example, recommends chartering new cities (with at least five million apartments and five Hoover Dams’ worth of nuclear power); building 1,000 vocational-technical high schools and “surging” high-dose tutoring to public-school students; taxing junk food like sugary beverages to fund community health centers; and more. Mr. Marshall calls for a suite of reforms to help working people and small businesses get ahead — for example, by reducing regressive taxes on work, fighting exclusionary zoning, cutting regulations that make it hard to start small businesses, supporting apprenticeships and “learn and earn” instead of student debt relief and “college for all,” and transferring more regulatory authority to local governments. Neither of those agendas sounds like today’s timid Democratic Party.

But there is also broad agreement that Democrats cannot advance any agenda, however creative, if they sound like space aliens when talking about American culture. When we asked our interviewees which is more important, getting policy right or getting cultural issues right, the most common answer was that the choice is false because the two are not really separable.

“The policy must flow from the culture,” Michael Wear, who served in Mr. Obama’s first term, told us, “and the two have to be close enough that the culture affirms the policy more than undermines it.” As Ms. Jayapal put it, policy and culture “are both incredibly important and must be used together as a strategy to bring back our base.”

How should Democrats earn back lost cultural credibility? Here we found less consensus — and a fair number of generalities: “Be the party of the working people.” “Win the battle of reasonableness.” “Listen to what the public is saying.” “Use normal language.” “Be both visionary and relatable.” “Start believing in America.”

Those who did offer specific ideas for reconnecting culturally tended to hail from the centrist wing of the party. Mr. Marshall calls on Democrats to rebuild credibility on immigration and crime, distance themselves from identity politics and the “hectoring” left and champion an American, not group, identity. Mr. Bennett calls on them to reject canceling, language policing and purity tests; emphasize family, marriage and parents’ rights; demand orderly borders; and acknowledge the public’s legitimate concerns about new pronouns and fairness in sports when it comes to trans athletes.

“To break through,” Mr. Bennett said, “Democrats will have to break some eggs. They will need to speak in ways that may draw jeers from the very online left or the ‘groups’ and see that as a crucial part of signaling to swing voters that the party has learned and changed.”

Some Democrats have taken up that challenge. Two years into his tenure, Wes Moore, the talented Democratic governor of Maryland and the nation’s only sitting Black governor, vetoed a measure that would have studied and made recommendations related to reparations.

Still, our admittedly unscientific survey suggests that Democrats are readier to adjust their policy prescriptions than their cultural messaging. We believe they need to be pro-police while also anti-police abuse. They need to be pro-parent and pro-child by, for example, embracing charter schools and sensible parental notification rules, supporting bans on smartphones in school, raising the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 and supporting childhood vaccines. Democrats need to acknowledge that biological sex isn’t chosen or changeable while insisting on compassionate treatment of trans people. And they need to take a strong stand against illegal immigration while continuing to push for rational and generous legal immigration reform.

Democrats should also be welcoming to people of faith and willing to accommodate their reasonable needs, even if that sometimes means compromising on things like L.G.B.T. rights (a topic on which we’ve written in the past). They need to be on the side of teaching America’s civic inheritance, encouraging a reverence for American ideals and advocating assimilation — respecting but not elevating group identities. If leading Democrats can own up to mistakes their party made in the past on these and other issues, all the better. But the party still seems a long way from being comfortable with many of those propositions.

On another point, however, we did find an unexpected degree of consensus. We expected to hear complaints that Democrats fail to embrace social media, podcasts and other new media channels. But our interviewees had little to say about new media as such. They emphasized what they called showing up: interacting with the public in civic forums and social settings where Democrats have too rarely been seen. Perhaps not surprisingly, this was an especially strong theme among state party chairs, who spend their days working at the grass roots.

“Too often, politics feels like a conversation about people rather than with them,” said Christale Spain, the chairman of the South Carolina party. “Reconnecting with the public,” she said, “means showing up — and demonstrating that we are a part of these communities.” Shasti Conrad, the chairman of the Washington State party, amplified Ms. Spain’s point: “Get off cable news and into City Council chambers, P.T.A. meetings, school boards and neighborhood councils. That’s where trust is built.”

In particular, our interviewees emphasized that Democrats need to show up on unfriendly turf. “There are still too many Democrats in the D.C. elite circles who have an iron grip on Democratic messaging, and they are not connecting to folks outside of the Beltway,” said Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire party. Nikki Fried, Mr. Buckley’s Florida counterpart, said, “If we’re going to compete at the national level anytime soon, we have to stop being allergic to appearing on platforms that might make us uncomfortable.” And in those forums, Democrats should make their case more vigorously.

“Democrats don’t need to become G.O.P. lite,” Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns, said. “They need a communications revolution, good old-fashioned party building and to fight unapologetically for what they value.”

But state party chairs agreed that affordability is still the key when it comes to Democrats’ returning to power. As Ms. Fried told us, “If we’re going to mount a national comeback, it has to start with the cost of living.” She described what the party has done in Florida: “We’ve been focused on affordability, affordability, affordability for the last few years. The cost of living is too damn high in this state and our government hasn’t done enough to make it better.”

These affordability Democrats are on the right track. The high cost of living and inflation were top issues for swing voters in 2024, and Democrats lost in large part because of them. Mr. Trump’s tariffs and immigration crackdown — which will raise prices, not reduce them — make him vulnerable on the affordability issue. And a larger opportunity lurks here, too, one that could not merely help the party tactically in 2026 and 2028 but could also help Democrats steal a march on the Republican Party strategically.

One of the most reliable indicators of parties’ standing is the “party of prosperity” polling question, which Gallup has asked almost every year since 1951. (In September of 2024, the poll asked, “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous — the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?”) In the post-World War II period, Democrats — still remembered for ending the Great Depression — held a seemingly impregnable prosperity advantage, forcing Republicans to fight every national election uphill.

The stagflation of the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s supply-side message broke the Democrats’ grip, bringing Republicans to parity or better. Since then, prosperity has largely been a horse race between the two parties. But in 2024, Republicans enjoyed a six-point lead on the question — enough to pull their relatively unpopular presidential candidate across the finish line. No coincidence there; the party of prosperity has won every presidential race since at least 2008. (Gallup didn’t report data in 2004.)

Mr. Reagan’s supply-side argument wrongly claimed that giant tax cuts pay for themselves, but it had a larger core of truth: burdensome regulations, onerous taxes, bloated government and other supply bottlenecks constrain output, raising inflation and slowing growth. Relieving those pressures could end the stagflation of the Jimmy Carter years, Mr. Reagan argued — and, in so doing, transform the Republican Party’s standing with voters.

Today a similar opportunity is on offer, but this time it favors the Democrats. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and policies are remarkably unconcerned with economic growth. Instead, they emphasize a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog worldview holding that more for me (or America) means less for you (or the rest of the world).

Derek Thompson, a co-author (with the Opinion columnist Ezra Klein) of the recent book “Abundance,” said in an interview with the online magazine Zeteo that Mr. Trump exemplifies a scarcity mind-set. “So, for example, he sees the U.S. doesn’t have enough manufacturing and he says what we need is less trade,” according to Mr. Thompson. “Or he says the U.S. doesn’t have enough housing, so what we need are fewer immigrants. Or what the U.S. has is an issue with our debt, so what we need isn’t growth but we need to catastrophically cut everything that government does, especially for the neediest and most marginalized. This is a situation where every time he’s identifying something Americans don’t have enough of, he’s taking away something that we need.”

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Klein are among a growing chorus of Democratic support for a classic supply-side argument: Fix the red tape, special-interest vetoes and public-investment shortfalls that make life’s essentials — housing, postsecondary education, health care — more expensive to provide. Goods will become more plentiful and, yes, affordable.

While the Democrats we interviewed do not generally embrace the term “abundance,” much less the term “supply side,” they do perceive an opening to seize the prosperity banner by promoting supply-side policies. By doing so, Democrats can shed their reputation — often well deserved — for being unable to get anything done or built. As Representative Ritchie Torres of New York told the podcaster Sam Harris recently, “Progress is measured not only by more spending but by more supply.” He added, “it’s often the case that in blue cities and blue states we’re pursuing policies that actually contract the supply of fundamental public goods that we need and want.”

Skeptics, such as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait, worry that the abundance theme divides the Democratic coalition by pitting the party’s centrist faction against its populist left, which wants to target greedy corporations, not restrictive zoning laws. But in fact, the left also has an abundance story to tell, about corporate monopolies and manipulations that boost profits by creating scarcity.

“We need to make the case that we don’t suffer from scarcity as a country; we suffer from greed,” Ms. Jayapal told us. “We have to be willing to call out the villains: the giant corporations that have such concentrated power that they have driven out small businesses, raised prices on the things we need and lowered wages for workers so they need three jobs instead of one.” This is not so different from the centrist Mr. Marshall’s calls for “breaking up concentrated markets — like food processing, ticketing and hospitals and health care providers — to expand consumer choice and drive prices down.”

Democrats seem to be getting the memo. Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and self-described democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary for mayor last month in New York by campaigning “relentlessly against New York’s spiraling affordability crisis,” as Nicholas Fandos reported in The Times. Mr. Mamdani’s justly famous video about “halalflation” made a classic — and in this case, accurate — progressive supply-side case: Crony capitalism rigs the system to raise the prices you pay.

In other words, the supply-side concept encompasses complementary narratives that can appeal to the party’s left and center alike. In principle, it is a unifying idea, not a divisive one — bringing the party together much as the Reagan agenda did for Republicans in 1980.

Of course, whether Democrats can exploit the prosperity opening that Mr. Trump has given them depends in large part on the presidential candidates who emerge. Even an appealing message needs politically talented leaders like Mr. Reagan or Mr. Clinton who can challenge stale ideas and confront entrenched coalitions. The culture war remains a tar pit for the party, and the economy itself will have a vote.

Still, the consensus that affordability is priority one and the emergence of a plausible pro-growth agenda suggest, at least to us, that the Democrats have more material to work with than is commonly recognized — and that they are moving in a wise direction. Emphasizing economic growth gives them a plausible and positive economic case, one that accommodates multiple factions and policies and that frees them from being mere naysayers.

“Fundamentally, our platform should be about empowering Americans to build a better life, not just opposing any one individual,” Christale Spain told us.

On that point, Ms. Spain speaks for her party. And she is not wrong.