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.
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