The History Lesson Democrats Can’t Afford to Forget

 Forty years ago the party was in the political wilderness. Then a band of centrist insurgents took on the left wing and got Clinton in the White House.

That was a thumping, wasn’t it?  Even optimistic MAGA fans didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote, taking control of the Senate and the House, and sweeping all seven swing states. He came within five points of taking New Jersey! Exit polls showed more than half of Latino men voting for him! 

The results are devastating for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrats: They lost the nation. So what on earth do they do next? 

One approach would be to repeat what they’ve been doing. Resist! It’s what they chose the last time Trump won. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. There had never been a president so immune to normal analysis, and, as such, so unpredictable. Each time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms—and Democrats responded in kind. Being an opposition party was not enough, they believed. Instead, they would fight his very legitimacy. They built this idea of resistance into their very fabric, and it infected every aspect of progressive society—from raging late-night talk show hosts to left-wing prosecutors determined to put Trump in prison.

But while the Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately failed. Democrats spent nearly a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat to the republic. And what happened? Americans from all walks of life voted for him in overwhelming numbers. The Democrats wanted to erase Trump from the political scene; instead he now controls it. 

Perpetual outrage was not the path to power. Let’s be honest, it was a total disaster: The resistance pulled on pink hats, and hollered about fascism—and then gasped with shock when the nation chose Trump again. 

Democrats Have Recovered from Worse Defeats

So the party is in a pickle. If the Democrats want a shot at winning in 2028, then they need a new direction. Losing parties survive by figuring out why they lost and trying something different next time. In the meantime, they take incremental wins when they can. They act like an opposition, not a resistance. 

The good news for Democrats is that they’ve been here before. Forty years ago, a few centrist renegades mapped out a course that eventually saved the party from oblivion. If you are devastated over last week’s electoral blowout, well, Trump’s victory was a squeaker compared to Ronald Reagan’s landslide over Walter Mondale in 1984. The Democrats were not just in disarray, they were on life support. 

It’s hard to overstate the scope of that Reagan victory. Mondale, who was vice president during Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, lost everywhere except his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan swept up everything else. A conservative Republican won Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii, for God’s sake. 

And yet only eight years later, the Democrats found their savior, a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. 

Democrats Were Backed by Special Interest Groups, Not Voters

Mondale’s loyalty to interest groups inside the Democratic party was his Achilles’ heel. Gary Hart, a senator from Colorado and his chief rival in the primary that year, summed up the problem as follows: “You have to reach [those voters] who don’t feel represented by the AFL[AFL-CIO], the NAACP, NOW [National Organization for Women], or the Sierra Club.”

But Mondale could not see beyond the demands of the noisiest factions in his coalition. His campaign attacked one of Reagan’s most innovative initiatives—research into space-based missile defense—claiming “killer weapons” would send the arms race with the Soviets spinning out of control.

And Reagan countered with one of the most effective ads in American political history. 

Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?

Al From, one of the men who would eventually remake the Democratic Party, watched all this with dismay. In one sense, Mondale was an effective candidate. He unified all the special interest groups in the party. 

Except for one thing. 

“The only people who didn’t support him were the voters,” he told The Free Press. “And to me, that was a big problem.”

You can see an echo of that problem today. Here’s Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman from New York, on the 2024 election: “My basic diagnosis is that we have allowed the far left to have outsize power over the messaging and policymaking of the Democratic Party, which is causing us to fall out of touch with the working class,” he told The Free Press. “Particularly working-class voters of color who have been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

A Centrist Insurgency

In 1985, the Democrats were a big government, soft-on-crime party, animated by nostalgia for FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s War on Poverty. The party functioned as a coalition of unions, environmentalists, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, women’s groups, peace activists, and other progressive tribes convinced that rallying under a common banner every four years was the way to win and hold power. 

But they didn’t win. Between 1968 and 1992 the Democrats only won a single presidential election, Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976, following the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon. 

The Reagan landslide of 1984 was the final straw for Al From. He got to work in 1985 with another Democratic staffer, Will Marshall, forming a group that would bring moderate governors, senators, and Congressmen together to steer the party to the middle. It was an insurgency led by people terrified the Democrats would never win the White House again—that the party would vanish into history, like the Whigs. They weren’t afraid to play hardball. 

One of their first tricks was the name. They called themselves the Democratic Leadership Council, even though the leadership of the Democratic party didn’t like them one bit. It was an audacious gambit that catapulted them into the center of the political conversation. 

“We were an entrepreneurial, insurgent operation,” From recalled. Marshall, his partner at the DLC, put it this way, “The Democratic establishment was not happy about the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council. And the premise on which it was based was that in some way the party establishment was failing.”

The first job for the Democratic Leadership Council was to focus on the Republican-controlled Senate for the 1986 midterms. And here, they had some early success. 

They began to germinate deeply un-Democrat-sounding ideas. The DLC critiqued Reagan on his strongest issue, national defense. Instead of slamming the hawkish president for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, the DLC chastised wasteful Pentagon spending. They weren’t saying, “Stop building bombs,” they were saying, “You’re building bombs badly!” They wanted national service for young people who received scholarships. They became deficit hawks, a threat to their party’s big spenders. And on crime, the DLC—unlike the mainstream of the Democratic Party—supported the death penalty and more police on the streets. 

Willie Horton and Sex Changes for Prisoners

In 1986, the DLC had momentum. The Democrats gained eight seats that year, wresting back control of the Senate. Eight of the 11 new Democratic senators had run as DLC Democrats. From and Marshall were ecstatic. After a strong showing in the midterms, the Democrats thought they were in great shape to end the Reagan era with a Democratic victory in 1988. 

It didn’t work out that way.   

The Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, the governor from Massachusetts, did not run on the interest-group coalition campaign of Walter Mondale. He ran on his competence as an executive. 

But his party was still vulnerable to the taint of excessive liberalism. And it caught up with Dukakis in devastating fashion in a single ad. Produced by supporters of the Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, it slammed Dukakis for a program in his state that allowed a convicted murderer named Willie Horton to go free on a weekend pass. He went on to rape a woman and stab her partner. 

And again, we see an echo in 2024, in the commercial attacking Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” that ended with the tagline, “Kamala's for they/them. President Trump is for you.” 

Harris did not campaign on gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. She ran on keeping abortion legal in all 50 states and on Trump’s unfitness for office. But her past position as a senator from California and her ill-fated primary run in 2019 allowed the Trump campaign to paint her as an out-of-touch elitist lacking common sense. 

The same thing happened to Dukakis. Bush thumped him in the 1988 election. Another Republican landslide.  

Bill Clinton Led the Party Out of the Wilderness

The DLC decided the party needed what From called reality therapy. 

“Over the 1980s, the Democrats lost the three elections in landslides that were greater than any party has ever lost in history, in terms of the Electoral College,” From recalled.  (In addition to the Dukakis and Mondale losses, Carter had been crushed by Reagan in 1980.) “If you continue doing that, that's the definition of insanity.”

After three election fiascoes, the Democrats were ready for a change and the DLC was there to offer exactly that, and they had a secret weapon—maybe the greatest political athlete of the last 50 years: Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama and Reagan were outstanding orators, but no one combined the abilities to think like a policy wonk and to sell those policies to everyday people like Clinton. At a time when his party was wary of the police, Clinton would just amble up to cops and ask them about their jobs. He was obsessed with making schools better and could talk for hours about it. And he had a knack for presenting center-right ideas in the language of folksy liberalism. After all, it was Bill Clinton who promised and delivered the end of welfare as we knew it. 

Clinton’s ideas didn’t come out of the vapor; they were honed during his time as the chairman of the DLC. And in that role, Clinton in some ways began his campaign before his announcement. He would travel throughout the country to spread the gospel of the new Democrats. 

From explained that a core value of the DLC was to distinguish between equal opportunity, which these new Democrats favored, and equal outcomes, which they opposed. “We believed the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government,” he said.  

This did not go over well with other members of the party’s core coalition. And at the top of that list was Jesse Jackson, who was—like Clinton—a great talker. In 1990, he sought to kill the DLC with kindness. He asked to speak at the group’s convention that year in New Orleans, where he delivered a speech in which he claimed the DLC and his Rainbow Coalition had similar agendas. “We are delighted to be united,” he said. 

This was a poison pill, because in 1990 the DLC’s mission was to distinguish itself from the kind of identity politics Jackson championed. Jackson believed the Democratic Party was a big tent of different minorities. He wanted equality of outcomes. 

Going into the 1992 election year, the relationship between the New Democrats and Jackson was frayed. It was about to get worse. After Clinton survived the first of many sex scandals in his career, he came in second in the New Hampshire primary and pronounced himself the Comeback Kid. He would go on to vanquish his primary opponents, and as he was preparing for the general election, Clinton decided to deliver a little payback to Reverend Jackson. 

Clinton addressed Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 12, 1992, five weeks after the Los Angeles riots. Racial tensions were at a boil. The Arkansas governor focused on one of the young black leaders at the conference, a rapper named Sister Souljah. He noted that she had called for a day when black people should kill white people. “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them. Where are they?” he quoted the rapper saying. Then he paused and answered her rhetorical question: “Right here in this room.” 

Clinton’s speech would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment,” when a politician rebukes someone ostensibly on their own side to appeal to a broader constituency. Clinton invented the tactic. 

It was a masterstroke. Bush had been trying his best to turn Clinton into Dukakis. Clinton gave him quite a bit of material. For example, he wrote a letter in 1969 reneging on his earlier commitment to join the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Clinton was a draft dodger. He also smoked marijuana, though he incredulously claimed not to have inhaled. His rebuke of Sister Souljah was a kind of political inoculation. Clinton was not an out-of-touch liberal, he was a new Democrat, fighting for hardworking Americans who played by the rules. 

This kind of politics had a darker side as well. Clinton flew back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a lobotomized cop killer named Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of his primary campaign in New Hampshire. Rector had the mind of a child. To execute such a person was cruel, even if the messaging was savvy.  

Clinton would go on to win the election that year, ending the drought for his party and completing the mission of the DLC. One of the ways he was able to pull this off was to pick a fight with a pressure group that advanced a politics out of touch with the majority of voters.  

Resistance Theater Has Been a Voter Turnoff

The value of taking on the left-wing fringe was one of the first lessons the DLC  taught the Democratic Party. Torres wants the party to relearn that lesson. “The far left is pressuring the party to take positions that are deeply unpopular with the American people,” he told The Free Press, citing the ad about illegal immigrant prisoners and transgender healthcare. 

“It was effective because it weaponized the vice president’s words against her. And the question is, why did she feel the need to ever say that in the first place? Because the pressure from the far left on center-left Democrats is overwhelming.”

But there are other lessons as well. It’s not just the substance of resistance politics, it’s the style that’s been repellent to many Americans—the shout-downs, the screaming, and the loaded rhetoric, all of it making the normal give-and-take of democratic politics impossible. Sometimes resistance is necessary. But few political disputes revolve around existential threats. Normal politics demands compromise, and that means acting like a political opposition. 

To Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, compromise with Trump isn’t a dirty word.

“Donald Trump signed five of my bills,” he told The Free Press, referring to Trump’s first term in office. 

“He's the president of the United States or will be. He was elected by over 50 percent of this country. My job in representing my district is to first do what is best for America. They elected me to represent them in what is good for this country. And if there is someone who is president proposing something that is good for America, even if it’s not perfect and I can be part of the solution, that’s my responsibility. That doesn't mean that when he proposes things that are bad for America, that I won’t speak out. And I think the American people want that.”

Clinton’s political strategy and tactics were unimpeachable (pardon the pun), but the substance of his policies has fallen out of favor. The Democrats would be wise to follow the DLC’s lead in tacking to the center. But today the center is a different place than it was in 1992. 

The Backlash Against Neoliberalism

Clinton’s governing agenda planted the seeds of an eventual electoral rebuke. One of his big ideas was that the middle class and working class would rise with the tide of globalization. That worked really well in the 1992 election. But, by 2015, as both Trump and Bernie Sanders were energizing a new wave of populism, public perception had shifted against the neoliberalism of the Clinton era. In office, he celebrated successes like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the repeal of the banking legislation known as Glass-Steagall. These measures were fantastic for the coastal elites. But they ended up leaving too many in middle America behind. Factories went overseas. The knowledge class prospered while the working class suffered.

Trump just won the 2024 election, in part, by promising tariffs, the opposite of free trade. And his appeal to the forgotten men and women is aimed directly at working-class voters whose economic fortunes were punished by the globalization that accelerated in the 1990s. 

From said the embrace of free trade and globalization was a successful formula in the 1990s. Incomes rose across the entire working population. “Our goal was to deal with the problems that we were facing, and one of them was that we had to grow the economy and we had to equip people to take advantage of that growth. And we did.” 

Khanna, though, argues that elements of Trump’s critique ring true.

“Towns were being hollowed out,” he said. “We were giving condescending lectures for people to either train for jobs that they never had or to move miles away. And that was wrong. And I think the first thing a Democratic politician needs to say is ‘We messed up.’ ”

The key to success in the 1990s, selling neoliberal policies to working-class voters, led to eight years of Democratic rule; eight years of peace and prosperity. But it was also a kind of time bomb. The 2024 election in that sense is the bookend of the 1992 election. It’s the year when Clinton’s working class coalition became Trump’s. 

The Path Forward for Democrats

That’s a bitter pill for Democrats old enough to remember the glories of the Clinton years. At the same time, it can offer a ray of optimism for a rising generation in the party. Trump’s coalition looks formidable after last week’s election. But if he imposes all the tariffs he promised, a bout of inflation is likely to follow. If Trump alienates America’s allies, he will make the wars he wishes to end last longer. Sometimes the best an opposition can hope for is to let the party in power make its own mistakes. 

And that brings us back to the emergence of the DLC. They realized the voters weren’t buying what their party was selling. So they offered something else. Power is earned through persuasion in democracies, not through cosplay. So the party is at a crossroads: One path is the make-believe theatrics of the last eight years. The other is for Democrats to roll up their sleeves and offer the voters an agenda worth voting for. 

 

 

https://www.thefp.com/p/can-democrats-come-back-trump-victory?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=151716007&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email