Democrats can embrace reality, or they can lose again

After a tumultuous and dramatic election, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the most boring and important facts about American politics, like how more voters identify as conservative than liberal.

This is a fundamental structural problem for Democrats, who need to win over large majorities of self-identified moderates without alienating their base. A new postelection survey from center-left think tank Third Way that looks at voters in presidential battleground states reveals that voters picked Donald Trump over Kamala Harris for the extremely boring reason that they saw him as closer to their ideological views and not that they saw her as some wild-eyed radical.

Harris’ score of 2.5 on a 0-10 ideological spectrum places her squarely in the middle of the left-of-center coalition. That’s consistent with her history as a Democrat who ran to the left in 2019 when that was the general trend in the party but then returned closer to the center as vice president. Trump, at 7.8, was seen as somewhat further off center. Nonetheless, voters placed themselves considerably closer to Trump because they see themselves as on the whole right-of-center.

Such ideological abstractions only tell you so much. Fifteen years ago, a person who accepted marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples would have been to the left of most Democrats. Today, though it’s still surely something many Republicans oppose, it’s not a topic of active controversy. Medicare privatization was at the heart of Republican politics in the 2012 campaign and has been completely disavowed today. The country has in many ways evolved in a leftward direction since Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009.

But this metric tells us something important about how voters see themselves, because that’s what it asks them about, and voters in the aggregate see themselves as moderate but somewhat to the right of center. This is why successful Democratic Party politicians of the past like Obama and especially Bill Clinton have often provoked deep anger from elements of their base. Clinton’s triangulations are famous but even the more liberal Obama frequently tussled with the left-wing of the party — especially during his first term — on topics such as education reform and trade. These weren’t necessarily the most popular causes, but they showed a politician who was engaged in independent thought about the issues and who was in some respects more moderate than a generic Democrat.

Trump-era Democrats have spent years banging their heads against the wall about why his obvious character defects don’t disqualify him in the eyes of the voters. But if they’re honest they’ll admit that part of the reason is that Democrats took advantage of Trump’s many sins to become a more uniformly liberal party.

The straddle between a base that wants Democrats to be a straightforwardly progressive alternative to the straightforwardly conservative GOP and the electoral reality that if you split moderates 50-50 the Republicans win every time has always been awkward. The idea that Trump could repulse enough moderates on non-policy grounds to run and win as proud progressives was tempting. This failed in 2016, but Hillary Clinton did win many more votes than Trump and there was a view that she was primarily doomed by ticket-splitting. Then in 2020, Joe Biden ran back the same strategy on policy with, if anything, even more emphasis on coalitional unity and it worked. But in 2024, the dam broke as voters acculturated to Trump just voted for the candidate they felt closer to on policy.

None of this means Republicans are guaranteed to march from triumph to triumph. Voters were closer to Trump overall, but his margin of victory came from people who think he’s more conservative than they are. The postelection ritual of GOP chest-thumping, proclamations of a "landslide" victory, mandate-claiming, and vague promises of sweeping policy change are only going to alienate the critical voters he won. There’s a reason that almost every president sees his party lose congressional seats in the midterms: Winners indulge their party’s base and get punished for it.

Still, Democrats should really think harder about this chart and their own feelings on Trump. He’s been repeatedly described as an existential threat to U.S. democracy. Many of us genuinely believe that. But in practice, many Democrats have used his freakshow qualities as a welcome pretext to set ideological discipline aside. Harris lost the election, but it was a very narrow loss and she very plausibly could have won on the exact same platform if she’d been a bit savvier about distancing herself from Biden or hadn’t taken a handful of odd stances years in the past.

But unless something goes badly off the rails with the American constitutional order, Trump won’t be on the ballot in the future. Democrats are going to have to relearn how to run and win against more professional, more organized, less scandal-plagued politicians.

That’s going to mean reckoning with the difficult task of doing progressive politics in a country that’s mostly tilted toward conservatism. Democrats can’t not be the more progressive of the two parties, but to win they need leaders who have significant differentiation from that core ideology. This means lots of unpleasant infighting and the risk of disunity, but it’s also the only realistic path forward.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A cofounder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of "One Billion Americans."