The shock of losing to President Donald Trump a second time has inspired the biggest bout of Democratic introspection since the 1980s.
Since Trump’s reelection, new groups and initiatives to reconsider the Democratic message and agenda have proliferated. Though these efforts have emerged across the party’s ideological spectrum, many of them argue that Democrats must move toward the center, particularly on cultural issues, to recapture working-class voters who have shifted toward the GOP since Trump’s emergence as its national leader.
Those calls echo the warnings during the 1980s from the party centrists who created a group called the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC spent the late 1980s banging heads with more liberal constituencies before ultimately capturing control of the party’s direction behind Bill Clinton’s election as president in 1992.
“Similar to that period, we’ve been confronted with the fact that we are not a majority and 2024 drove that home,” said Adam Jentleson, a former Senate Democratic aide who recently launched the Searchlight Institute to incubate new policy and political strategies for the party. “What’s happened in the last 10 years is there’s [emerged] a group for every issue, and on each issue … you have this wall of sound screaming at Democrats to move left. Not only does it push them to take positions outside the mainstream, it doesn’t provide any space to think outside the box.”
Just as in the 1980s, these calls for the party to moderate are facing resistance from more progressive elements, who say it misdiagnoses the reasons for Trump’s success. “I just don’t feel that cultural moderation is the simple fix,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on supporting candidates of color. “It’s been a rush to this theory of ‘move to the center’ without having a real debate in the party.”
Today’s internal Democratic debate sounds as heated as its predecessor a generation ago, but it may be less intractable. Beneath the sharp words, all Democratic factions share some common beliefs about how badly the party’s image has deteriorated in the Trump years — and how urgently it needs to reverse that trend.
The doldrums of the 1980s
Like today, the 1980s period of Democratic soul-searching was triggered by voter backlash against a disappointing presidency. The first demands for new approaches emerged after Democrat Jimmy Carter’s troubled four years in the White House culminated in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
After Carter’s loss, two principal theories emerged for how Democrats could recover, as Washington Post reporter Dan Balz and I wrote in our 1996 book Storming the Gates. One camp argued that Carter lost because he strayed too much from the party’s liberal New Deal traditions with centrist economic policies, and that the way back was to mobilize more non-voters by reviving themes of economic redistribution and “fairness.” The second camp, which came to be known as neo-liberals or “Atari Democrats,” revolved around younger officials such as Gary Hart who insisted the party had to streamline government, and distance itself from liberal interest groups, while championing economic growth and free trade.
Those approaches sequentially failed when Walter Mondale, who embodied the New Deal strategy, lost the 1984 presidential election, and Michael Dukakis, an especially technocratic neo-liberal, lost in 1988. Those defeats opened the door for a more radical alternative centered on the DLC, which was launched in 1985 by Al From, a Democratic congressional aide, mostly as an organization of centrist elected Democrats from the Midwest and South.
The DLC shared with the neo-liberals support for government reform, fiscal discipline and free trade. But, while the Hart generation maintained generally liberal positions on national security and social issues, the DLC insisted the party needed to move right on both fronts.
After Vice President George H.W. Bush trounced Dukakis in the 1988 general election, more Democrats became receptive to the bracing DLC message. For Democrats, losing to Reagan — a historic political talent known as “the great communicator” — was one thing; losing to the tongue-tied Bush was another. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, a generational political talent himself, used his chairmanship of the DLC to raise his national profile and then decisively won the nomination and general election in 1992 behind a centrist “New Democrat” agenda that rejected liberal shibboleths on issues including welfare, crime, trade and balancing the federal budget.
The shocks of the Trump era
Many Democratic reformers see the 2024 election as the modern equivalent of 1988. It was easy for the party to consider Trump’s win in 2016 a fluke because he lost the popular vote and Hillary Rodham Clinton carried so many unique vulnerabilities. In 2020, despite ominous gains for Trump among working-class non-white voters, he was, ultimately, defeated by Joe Biden.
But Trump’s victory in 2024 — even after voters had lived through the tumult of his first term — has shocked today’s Democrats as profoundly as did losing to Bush a generation ago. And just as then, the 2024 defeat has widened the possibilities Democrats are willing to consider now.
“We have now lived with Donald Trump for 10 years, I think we have to wrestle with the fact that Trump is a force, and we need an alternative,” said Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, the leading left of center Democratic think tank. “MAGA is a big idea, and the real question is: What is your bold offer that competes with MAGA?”
Stanley B. Greenberg, a Democratic strategist who served as Clinton’s 1992 pollster, agrees the 2024 election should shock Democrats as 1988 did. But he says that formulating a response is more difficult now. Clinton’s winning formula, Greenberg noted, emerged only after the party had cycled through a procession of less successful approaches — from George McGovern to Carter to Mondale and Dukakis — over a period of decades after the social upheavals of the 1960s initially shattered the party’s electoral coalition. “The battle took place through a whole series of elections,” he said. Today, he says, the Democrats’ dilemma “seems equally dire” as in the late 1980s, but compared to the long gestation that yielded Bill Clinton, the party must synthesize a new approach “in an incredibly compressed timetable.”
A surge of new Democratic groups
No shortage of policy entrepreneurs is scrambling to meet that test. Introspection has become a booming business among Democrats. Even a partial list of the projects includes:
•Jentleson, a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has launched the Searchlight Institute, to encourage unconventional policy thinking and, in a manner reminiscent of From at the DLC, explicitly counter the influence of liberal interest groups.
•Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor and Biden White House aide, is leading The Working Class Project to study the blue-collar voters across racial lines who have drifted toward the GOP at an accelerating pace under Trump.
•About three dozen centrist Democratic officeholders, including Sens. Elissa Slotkin, Ruben Gallego and Michael Bennet, have formed a group called Majority Democrats “committed to reshaping and growing the Democratic Party so that it can compete everywhere.” In a similar vein, the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist think tank originally launched by the DLC in the 1980s, has convened elected Democrats for sessions in Denver and Las Vegas to explore “new directions” for the party and is planning more gatherings.
•CAP has launched a “Path Forward” that has produced policy papers on campaign finance and immigration and is planning further releases on major cultural and economic issues. Likewise, the thinktank associated with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which champions the economic populism linked to Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, is launching the “big ideas project” this fall to generate a left-leaning agenda.
•Open Philanthropy, a grant-making group with Silicon Valley roots, announced this spring it is establishing a fund that will spend at least $120 million to promote the kind of pro-growth agenda championed in Abundance, a best-selling book from liberal journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that touched off widespread discussion in the party.
•Andrei Cherny, editor of the quarterly journal Democracy, is organizing Project 2029, a book slated for publication in 2027 modeled on the governing agenda that conservatives drafted for the second Trump administration with Project 2025. Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, is organizing a network of economists to develop what he calls a “PTA”: post-Trump agenda.
Will Marshall, who has served as the Progressive Policy Institute’s president since its founding, says so many efforts are competing that none is likely to exert as much concentrated influence as the DLC did in its heyday. (The DLC itself officially closed its doors in 2011 but faded as a force in the party after Clinton left office 10 years earlier.) “If you wanted to show that you were a reform-minded Democrat, a modernizing Democrat, you joined up with the DLC and it was really the only enterprise dedicated to changing the party’s governing agenda,” Marshall said. “Now you have a slew of so-called centrist groups that are out there operating independently, and it’s all very disjointed.”
Marshall, like others I spoke with, sees another big obstacle for today’s efforts — these projects are primarily led by consultants and strategists. The DLC, he notes, was defined mostly by elected officials representing politically swing constituencies. That contrast, Marshall says, will make it harder to move these ideas into the party mainstream.
“We had a large cadre of credible Democratic figures-governors, senators, House members, state leaders-who embraced the mission of the new Democrats because they could feel the ground shaking under their feet,” Marshall said. Winning buy-in from large numbers of elected Democrats will be harder today, he says, “because the party is so shrunken, and the number of competitive seats is so shrunken, that the Democrats left standing are mostly safe.”
Bringing back the working class
Still, the urgency among Democrats about developing new approaches is palpable. And the groups mounting these efforts agree on some foundational principles for change.
One concerns the balance between economic and social issues. While most of these groups want the party to move right on issues of crime, immigration and transgender rights and some do not, both camps agree the party should concentrate its public messaging more on the economic struggles of working families.
Working-class voters “think that Democrats spend way too much time on social issues and not enough time on pocketbook issues,” said Landrieu. “[In our focus groups], they didn’t say, ‘I hate trans people [or] I hate immigrants and I think they are criminals.’ They were just saying, ‘I need you to focus on my stuff first because I can’t breathe.’”
A second important agreement across these efforts is that Democrats must take bigger risks and propose more fundamental changes than they have in recent years.
Tanden, who served as Biden’s chief domestic policy adviser, says that for center-left parties around the world “the trap of the Trump moment is … to defend the status quo” while “the populist right is offering a disruption of institutions” that many voters believe have failed them. “Our most successful politicians have had hope as a core theme — Bill Clinton was the man from Hope, Barack Obama was hope and change,” she added. “The only way we are going to get out of this is hope and a plan.”
Jentleson is critical of CAP, which he sees as defending an untenable liberalism, but echoes Tanden when describing the Searchlight Institute’s mission. “Our watch word is heterodoxy,” he said. “We want to break up this culture of rigidity, and we want people to have the freedom to move in different directions, whether it is to the left or to the right.”
Bernstein describes the ethos for his “PTA” in similar terms. “The stakes are incredibly high, and we need to be much more of a bull in a china shop,” he said. “The idea that you can sit back on your economic laurels and say ‘sorry we can’t help working people because that violates principle 16 in econ 101,’ those days are over.”
Cherny, who’s leading the Project 2029 effort, says that the disruption Trump is imposing will require Democrats to offer bolder ideas. “The infrastructure of government as we’ve known it for the past century is being decimated before our eyes,” he said. “So, if Democrats come into power in 2029 the agenda isn’t just about rehiring everybody at the Department of Education and doing what they did before. We are being forced to completely rethink how we are operating for this century.”
A showdown in 2028 primaries
These agreements notwithstanding, these competing projects still present Democrats with a clear crossroads between more liberal and centrist approaches. Some liberal leaders, for instance, believe that even while stressing economic concerns, the party must find principled ways to defend inclusion for transgender people, since Republicans will use that issue to define Democrats no matter how rarely they discuss it.
The party will also face choices on whether to center its economic agenda on soak-the-rich populism and new government programs or more business-friendly measures designed to catalyze private sector growth. “The lack of consensus is, do we need billionaires and corporate villains in our storytelling? Or do we sing Kumbaya and pretend we are fighting for everyone, when there are good actors and bad actors in society?” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
Ultimately, this tug-of-war will be decided by Democratic voters, particularly in the 2028 presidential primaries. “It isn’t going to be solved before then because it is going to be about which individual [candidates] embody these theories and take them up and win,” said Fernandez Ancona. Greenberg points out that without Bill Clinton putting his own stamp on it, the DLC critique might never have captured the party. Looking forward, Greenberg said, “it’s more a question of which leader jumps to the head to the queue, rather than which organization moves.”
Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, last week released an early poll of likely 2028 primary voters that found most were focused less on ideological purity than finding a nominee who could win. “Being the most exciting choice for these primary voters does not necessitate taking the most leftist position,” said Democratic pollster Angela Kuefler, who conducted the survey. Instead, she said, the dominant impulse among potential primary voters is that “the stakes are so high we have to win this next election.”
That inclination might benefit candidates drawing from the centrist end of the Democratic reassessment. But as Zohran Mamdani showed by winning the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City this year, compelling candidates can emerge from anywhere on the ideological spectrum. The intellectual battles now unfolding between the Democrats’ left and center are best understood as only the lower card fight before the main event between actual candidates in the presidential primaries a little over two years from now.