Democrats can accept reality, or they can lose again

(Bloomberg Opinion) — After a tumultuous and dramatic election, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the most boring and important facts about American politics, such as the fact that more voters identify as conservative than liberal. This is a fundamental structural problem for Democrats, who need to win over large majorities of self-identified moderates without alienating their base. A new post-election poll from the center-left think tank Third Way, which tracks voters in battleground states, shows that voters preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris for the extremely boring reason that they saw him as closer to their ideological views and not because they saw her as a wild-eyed radical.

With a score of 2.5 on an ideological spectrum of 0 to 10, Harris falls right in the middle of the left-leaning coalition. That’s consistent with her history as a Democrat, who ran leftward in 2019, when that was the general trend in the party, but then moved closer to the center as vice president. Trump was seen as slightly further off center at 7.8. Nevertheless, voters moved significantly closer to Trump because overall they see themselves as right of center.

Such ideological abstractions only say so much. Fifteen years ago, someone who accepted marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples would have been to the left of most Democrats. Today, while it is certainly still something many Republicans oppose, it is not a topic of active controversy. Medicare privatization was at the heart of Republican policy during the 2012 election campaign and has been completely disavowed today. Since Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009, the country has moved leftward in many ways.

But this metric tells us something important about how voters see themselves, because that’s what they’re asked about, and voters overall see themselves as moderate but slightly right of center. For this reason, successful Democratic Party politicians of the past, such as Obama and especially Bill Clinton, have often provoked deep anger among segments of their base. Clinton’s triangulations are famous, but even the more liberal Obama frequently clashed with the party’s left wing – particularly during his first term – over issues such as education reform and trade. These were not necessarily the most popular causes, but they showed a politician who was engaging in independent thought on the issues and who was in some ways more moderate than your average Democrat.

Trump-era Democrats have fretted for years about why his obvious character flaws don’t disqualify him in the eyes of voters. But if they are honest, they will admit that this is partly because Trump’s Democrats have exploited many sins to become a more unified liberal party.

Balancing a base that wants Democrats to be a straight-up progressive alternative to the straight-up conservative Republicans and the electoral reality that Republicans win every time you split moderates 50-50 has always been difficult. The idea that Trump could fend off enough moderates for political reasons to run and win as a proud progressive was tempting. This failed in 2016, but Hillary Clinton won many more votes than Trump, and there was a perception that she was doomed largely by vote-splitting. Then, in 2020, Joe Biden pursued the same political strategy, placing even more emphasis, if anything, on coalition unity, and it worked. But in 2024, the dam broke when voters who had become accustomed to Trump simply voted for the candidate they were politically closer to.

None of this means that Republicans are guaranteed to march from triumph to triumph. Voters were closer to Trump overall, but his margin of victory came from people who consider him more conservative than they do. The Republicans’ post-election ritual of chest-thumping, declaring a “landslide victory,” demanding a mandate and vague promises of sweeping policy change will only anger the critical voters he won over. There’s a reason almost every president sees their party lose congressional seats in the midterms: winners pamper their party’s base and are punished for it.

Still, Democrats really should think more carefully about this chart and their own feelings about Trump. It has been repeatedly described as an existential threat to US democracy. Many of us really believe this. But in practice, many Democrats have used his freak show qualities as a welcome excuse to override ideological discipline. Harris lost the election, but it was a very narrow defeat, and it’s very plausible that she would have won on exactly the same platform had she distanced herself from Biden a little more cleverly or hadn’t taken a few strange stances in the years past .

But unless something goes wrong with the American constitutional order, Trump will no longer be on the ballot in the future. Democrats must relearn how to compete and win against more professional, better organized and less scandal-plagued politicians. This means facing the difficult task of pursuing progressive policies in a country that overwhelmingly leans toward conservatism. The Democrats can’t help but be the more progressive of the two parties, but to win they need leaders who differ significantly from that core ideology. That means a lot of unpleasant power struggles and the risk of disunity, but it is also the only realistic way forward.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Matthew Yglesias is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. As a co-founder and former columnist at Vox, he writes the blog and newsletter “Slow Boring”. He is the author of “One Billion Americans.”

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