Perry Bacon Jr. : Democrats should try to be more interesting -- not more centrist

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/23/democrats-strategy-election-voters/

https://archive.ph/4Ju1s



There was a huge public backlash, including opposition from Trump-friendly podcast host Joe Rogan, after the administration deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García to El Salvador. New York state Rep. Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist, has surged in the polls and could win this week’s Democratic primary in the New York mayor’s race. The “resistance” against President Donald Trump is perhaps even stronger than it was eight years ago, with recent massive protests across the country. All of this liberal energy has emerged despite national Democratic Party leaders.

Early in Trump’s second term, many party officials were discouraging another resistance and instead looking to move rightward, particularly on immigration. So what happened? The Democratic establishment’s plans were doomed to fail because they didn’t reflect today’s political realities, say Stanford University’s Adam Bonica and Jacob Grumbach of the University of California at Berkeley. They are part of a growing group of left-leaning political experts imploring Democratic officials to stop fixating on finding policies or phrases that perfectly appeal to centrist voters and instead try to harness the forces actually driving politics today: attention-grabbing politicians, social and partisan media, an antiestablishment mood, passionate activists, and voters who hate both parties.

Bonica and Grumbach aren’t radical philosopher-professors calling for the end of capitalism; they are mainstream political scientists who rely heavily on data and research. “The old playbook will not yield the gains that we need to fight off this very, very serious threat to our democracy,” Bonica told me in a recent interview. Bonica and Grumbach, who have co-authored several articles together, say the Democratic Party’s leaders and strategists operate based on an outdated model of American politics.

The establishment’s general view (party officials rarely discuss their strategies candidly) is that voters prefer parties and candidates closest to them ideologically on conventional left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative scales. So Democratic officials closely monitor polls and try to move toward positions held by the most voters — the political center. When Democrats lose an election, party officials conclude that their stances were not sufficiently popular and centrist. Because Democrats overwhelmingly win liberal voters but not necessarily moderates or conservatives, approaching politics this way means the party nearly always thinks that moving to the right will help.

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