The Hard Calls Dems Must Make to Regain Power

Democrats want to win over more moderate voters. But are they willing to adopt moderate positions?

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) speaks at a campaign rally in Cobb County, Georgia on November 3, 2024. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The ‘code talk’ for white guys party

There is a grim reality facing Democrats amid the hoopla about eye-popping victories in special elections and Donald Trump’s falling approval rating.

The Senate map is an absolute disaster for them. Don’t take my word for it: During an hour-long conversation at Harvard University last month, Tim Walz said he was “pessimistic” about the party’s chances to win back the chamber.

You don’t usually hear that type of open pessimism from top officials. But Walz got even more candid from there. He said that the national party had become so toxic that it dragged down Sen. Jon Tester’s re-election bid in 2024—to the point that Tester, a close friend, asked him not even to call during election season.

But what stood out for me beyond Walz’s dark assessment was how little he had to say about what “change” for Democrats should look like. In fact, he seemed relatively content with the status quo. Walz said the Democratic party’s policies “are good” and defended DEI initiatives. He summed up the party’s problems as mostly a matter of messaging. He encapsulated his view of national politics as a contest of superficial branding when he explained why Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate.

“I was on the ticket, quite honestly, ’cause I could code-talk to white guys watching football fixing their truck,” he said. “I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”

Such a remark certainly says a lot about Walz himself. But it also underscored something bigger: The party faces a dilemma around its future, but Democrats and their allied groups and policy apparatus remain deeply uncomfortable confronting it. If they don’t soon, it might not be just the Senate that’s at risk.

There is near-universal agreement among Democrats that the party needs to expand its tent and appeal to more moderate and independent voters. What’s far less clear is what exactly they are willing to do to make the Democratic label more palatable to those types of voters.

Under the Walz vision, the party doesn’t need to stake out more moderate cultural or policy positions. Rather, Democrats can get the job done if they put a candidate in a Carhartt jacket and get them to speak somewhat fluently about college football on a podcast with Theo Von.

It’s hard not to see the shortcomings of this approach. Walz embodied them, but his inclusion on the Harris ticket did little to stop the bleeding with white male voters. Yes, he may have been boxed in by an overcautious campaign structure. But when he was sent out there as the meat-eating, football-loving neighborhood dad, he had his flubs (pick-six, anyone?).

And that’s to be expected. After all, running candidates who look the part of purple and red America isn’t a panacea. Voters know when they’re being pandered to, and they don’t always like it.

Another option is to simply bank on voters being so turned off by Trump that they turn to you. This may have worked in certain contexts. But the record is fairly mixed. Ask Mitt Romney if Trump’s toxic politics eventually ruined him. Ask Barack Obama if the Republican “fever” ever broke.

And yet, if you survey Democrats now, these appear to be the predominant tactics the party is relying on to win back control of Congress. Thermostatic politics may work in the short term. But the fear in some quarters is that the thermostat won’t help if the house is on fire.

“This is hilariously stupid. If you’re trying to pick up moderate voters, the way to do it is to *be* more moderate. Drinking beer and driving trucks aren’t substitutes,” Lakshya Jain, cofounder and CEO of the election data analysis firm Split Ticket, wrote in response to Walz’s comments.

“Voters don’t care about candidate identity as much as Democrats insist they do.”

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THE GOOD NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS is that now they’re at least engaging in this debate. Substacker Matt Yglesias has been, perhaps, the most vocal combatant in it. He has dubbed the phenomenon going on in the Democratic party “dog-whistle moderation”—talking a lot about moderating without actually changing any policy preferences. He noted that leaders like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) have no problem going on cable news or late-night shows and arguing that the party should be “laser focused on winning elections instead of political purity.” But they aren’t practicing what they preach.

At the end of April, Murphy, along with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), reintroduced the assault-weapons ban. “You know and I know, and Chris Murphy knows and Adam Schiff knows, that talking about an assault weapons ban does not help Democratic candidates win steep uphill Senate battles in Texas and Iowa and Ohio,” Yglesias argued. Gun-safety groups will argue that politics today is very different from politics in 1994, when many commentators blamed the assault-weapons ban for Democrats getting crushed that cycle (in what itself may have been an apocryphal reading of the results). But, then again, no ban is going to pass in the current GOP-run Congress, let alone be enacted while Trump is president. What will happen is Democrats running in red states and districts will be put on the spot.

All of this raises a larger question: What policies, if any, is the party prepared to sacrifice, or at least put off to the side? That’s been an uncomfortable exercise for Democrats, in part because Democratic-aligned interest groups genuinely believe (and can produce their own data to argue) that their pet projects do poll well and can energize voters.

Some party operatives have tried to warn candidates that “the groups” are self-serving; that as the midterms inch closer, the party will inevitably have to make hard tradeoffs if it wishes to deliver meaningful wins. The question is whether the candidates themselves have the stomach for it.

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ONE OF THOSE OPERATIVES ISSUING WARNINGS is Stef Feldman, a senior aide in the Biden White House and the policy director on his 2020 campaign. In a Substack post last week, Feldman encouraged candidates to “not be afraid to tell interests groups, voters, or your political advisors ‘no.’” She said that sometimes the best thing to do is to not say anything at all. During the 2020 primary, for example, Joe Biden declined to fill out the now-infamous ACLU questionnaire that led to the “they/them” attack ad against Kamala Harris.

Feldman is one of the party’s more reserved power brokers, only irregularly putting herself out in the press. So the decision to pen that post suggests that she is worried about the Democrats’ inability to make the hard choices that, in her estimation, they need to make.

A slightly more outgoing Democrat is making similar points. Rahm Emanuel, who is reportedly considering running for president in 2028, has spent weeks warning Democrats that it’s risky to focus just on an economic agenda while ignoring thornier subjects such as crime and immigration. In an op-ed for the Washington Post in February, Emanuel argued that voters were open to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama because they “took stances that were in the mainstream of political sentiment, and both were willing to confront allied interest groups demanding fidelity and orthodoxy to out-of-touch positions.”

Of course, it’s one thing to make these arguments in a Substack post or from the safety of an op-ed page. When actual Democratic lawmakers have tried doing so, it’s proven . . . dicey.

After California Gov. Gavin Newsom said earlier this year that Democrats were wrong for supporting transgender athletes’ participation in women’s college and youth sports, I heard from a number of Democratic strategists and operatives who were appalled. Their criticism went something like this: We don’t win by throwing vulnerable people under the bus! Why punch down on the very people we’re trying to protect?

It’s hard to argue with that moral sentiment. But ultimately, the debate before Democrats is about not just ethics but politics. And it’s worth asking what it means to “protect” trans kids (or asylum seekers, or abortion access, or the environment, or affordable health care, etc.) if you’re losing elections.

Making sure that the national party brand is palatable enough that such Democrats as Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill can hold their Senate seats is probably a crucial element to achieving those stated goals. Can those types of lawmakers win those types of races if the party is going on offense about trans issues? Perhaps. But it’s a risky proposition. The problem is that the party doesn’t seem to be fully grappling with that risk.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— In an appearance on ABC’s The View this week, Joe Biden said he takes “responsibility” for Donald Trump’s return to power—an important admission as the Democratic party tries to heal from 2024. But in the same interview, Biden said that he still thinks he would have beaten Trump if he had stayed in the race. Jill Biden, who was also on set for the interview, took a swipe at their “so called friends” in the party who were instrumental in forcing him to step down.

As Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote this week, the Biden team is anxiously awaiting the release on May 20 of Original Sin, the much-hyped book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson about Biden’s cognitive decline and how the White House tried to keep it from the public. The appearance on The View was partially an attempt to do some preemptive damage control.

Some former Biden aides told me they were happy to see the president getting back out there. But the predominant response from Democrats has been: please stop.

“It’s time for Joe Biden to go away with all due respect and let the next generation of Democrats take the mantle,” Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told Politico’s Brakkton Booker. “Every time he appears on a show or says something, it’s just another week or a month that we have to defend him and remind everybody that we got beat by Donald Trump, again.”

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My open tabs:

— The Partisan Mind Virus.

— Florida Democrats are falling apart.

— The secret tennis court of Vatican City and the Pope who loves to play.