James' World 2

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Inside the Democratic Party — in its backrooms and its group chats, its conferences and its online flame wars — an increasingly bitter debate has taken hold over what the party needs to become to beat back Trumpism. Does it need to be more populist? More moderate? More socialist? Embrace the abundance agenda? Produce more vertical video?

The answer is yes, yes to all of it — but to none of it in particular. The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things.

In two days, there will be elections for governor of New Jersey, for mayor of New York City, and for governor of Virginia. Democrats are leading in all of these races. As of now, the RealClearPolitics polling averages show the Democrat up by about seven points in Virginia and about three points in New Jersey. These are not unusual leads in what have become reliably Democratic states. You can imagine a world where the violence and corruption of President Trump’s first nine months in office had led to a collapse in support for him and his party. We’ll see what Election Day brings. But we do not look to be in that world.

That’s all the more true if you look a year out, to the midterms. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, Democrats are leading by about 2.5 points when you ask Americans which party they want to see control Congress. At about this time in 2017, Democrats were up just over 10 points in the same average.

The news gets worse. To win the House back next year, Democrats will need to overcome the chain of redistricting Republicans are setting off across the country: Republicans have already redrawn the maps in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; they are seeking to do the same in Florida and Indiana, and they have others in their sights.

The Senate is even harder for Democrats: They will need to flip four seats in the 2026 midterms to win back control. That would mean defending seats in Georgia and Michigan, winning in Maine and North Carolina — no easy task — and then winning at least two seats in states that Trump won by 10 points or more, such as Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Ohio or Texas. That’s not some quirk of the 2026 Senate map. There are 24 states that Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024.

Any enduring majority — any real power — will require Democrats to solve a problem they do not yet know how to solve: The number of places in which the Democratic Party is competitive has shrunk. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats held Senate seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and West Virginia. How many of those states remain in reach for Democrats today?

n American politics, power is not decided by a popular vote. In the Electoral College, in the House of Representatives, and particularly in the Senate, it is apportioned by place. Democrats don’t just need to win more people. They also need to win more places. That will require a more pluralistic approach to politics. It will require the Democratic Party to see internal difference as a strength that requires cultivation rather than a flaw that demands purification.

Think of it this way: If Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayor’s race running as a democratic socialist in New York City and Rob Sand wins the Iowa governor’s race next year running as a moderate who hates political parties, did the Democratic Party move left or right? Neither: It got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people in more kinds of places.

That is the spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation. Not progressivism. But, in the older political sense of the term, representation.

In 1962, Bernard Crick, a political theorist and a democratic socialist, published a strange little book called “In Defense of Politics.” Politics, for Crick, was something precious and specific: It “arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.”

The fact of difference is not always accepted. There are other forms of social order, like tyranny or oligarchy, that actively suppress it. But to practice politics as Crick defines it is to accept the reality of difference — that is to say, it is to accept the reality of other people whose values and views differ deeply from yours.

In my favorite line from the book, Crick writes, “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”

I love that. I think the path to a better politics — perhaps even a political majority — lives within it.

The endless fantasy in politics is persuasion without representation: You elect us to represent you, and where we disagree, we will explain to you why you are wrong. The result of that politics tends to be neither persuasion nor representation: People know when you are not listening to them. And they know how to respond: They stop listening to you. They vote for people who they feel do listen to them.

I am not a pessimist on the possibility of persuasion. But I believe it is rare outside a context of mutual respect. And if I were to say where the Democratic Party went wrong over the last decade, it’s there. In too many places, Democrats sought persuasion without representation, and so they got neither.

A Democratic strategist who has conducted countless focus groups told me that when he asks people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as “crazy” and Democrats as “preachy.” One woman said to him, “I’ll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn’t look down on me.”

That echoes what I have heard from the kinds of voters Democrats lament losing. I feel as if I have the same conversation over and over again: Sometimes people tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation: The Democratic Party, they came to believe, does not like them.

Many of these people voted for Democrats until a few years ago. They didn’t feel their fundamental beliefs had changed. But they began to feel like “deplorables.” They began to feel unwanted.

When I’d push on the experiences they had — when I would ask which Democrats, who were they talking about — I often found they were reacting to a cultural vibe or an online skirmish as much or more than a flesh-and-blood party. But they had felt something change, and I knew they were right.

Something had changed. It had changed on the left. It had changed on the right. The structure of American life changed in a way that has made the genuine relationships of politics much harder. Instead of representing many different kinds of people in many different kinds of places, the parties now tilt toward the place in which the elite of both sides spend most of their time and get most of their information. The first party that finds its way out of this trap will be the one able to build a majority in this era.

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Tim Enthoven

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