Where are the centrist insurgents?

Democrats need to fight the system, not just be more moderate.

Today is Election Day. Make sure you vote if there’s an election in your area. And it’s also the release day for the paperback edition of Party of the People, “the book that predicted the 2024 election,” complete with a new chapter on the 2024 election and its aftermath. Get your copy here.

If there’s anything that lights up the Substacks, it’s a moderate vs. progressive fight about the future of the Democratic Party. Consuming the discourse in recent days is the Deciding to Win report, which I was happy to blurb (in usual trolly fashion) and covered in my weekly roundup.

Bluesky may think it’s an op, but my endorsement is completely sincere — or maybe it’s not! In all seriousness, I want to both sides to bring their A-game. We lose something when 95% of politics is just a fight for control of your party and a coin flip in the general. Actually competing for the same group of voters in the middle forces both parties to be better. If you’re a baseball fan, you probably like watching the game more when Shohei Ohtani is on the field, whether he plays for your team or the other one. And it’s the same for politics: it’s more rewarding beating a strong opponent than it is a weak one.

While there’s much good advice in the pages of the report, something I think the authors would acknowledge is that the forces blocking change in the party are larger than its current leaders. There are seemingly lots of little things the national party could do to signal a move to the middle, like put the kibosh on land acknowledgements to kick off DNC meetings. But somehow, these never happen.

This kind of symbolic rebuke could generate tons of media coverage and signal that the party has changed. A direct punch in the face to the identity politics wing of the party would strengthen its appeal to the center (while also causing a lot of internal Democratic infighting and drama that I as a Republican would find immensely entertaining).

But a part of me is skeptical that this particular move would work. How the DNC starts its meetings is a very inside-baseball issue that only the terminally online care about. Would this actually register with swing voters? Probably not. Ruffini would be entertained, but it probably wouldn’t improve Democratic odds in the next election.

This is all downstream of a basic structural problem faced by any party looking to reboot its brand after losing an election: there is nothing they can realistically do about it until the next presidential election.

America’s is a presidential system, and the brand of the parties is dictated by Presidents and presidential candidates. A lot of the things people associate with Republicans today are largely personal attributes of Donald Trump. Because the brand of the Democratic Party was frozen in amber in November 2024, losing is now their brand. And that can only be changed by winning in 2028.

While white papers, podcasts, and conferences are all well and good, what really matters is the next presidential nominating contest. Whether the Deciding to Win recommendations actually become reality hinges completely on whether the next Democratic nominee adopts them and wins.

Lots of things certainly need to happen before then. The 2020 litmus tests and issue group questionnaires need to go. Many point to the groundwork laid by the DLC ahead of Bill Clinton’s presidential bid in 1992 as a model. And it was indeed influential. But only because Clinton, an extremely charismatic candidate, adopted it, a bunch of better-known Democrats passed on the ‘92 race, and the incumbent president’s job approval dropped 50 points in the space of a year. Party reform historically has been subject to history’s Great Man theory: it either happens or it doesn’t, based on the talent and luck of singular individuals.

Only a handful of times in recent decades have new leaders been able to change the image of their parties for the better. Each of these — Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump — campaigned as outsiders disrupting the status quo. They changed their parties as a byproduct of changing the country.

More than an ideological shift, it’s important to have a candidate who taps into public disdain for politics-as-usual. Even if they can project a more moderate image, this is the ingredient that continues to elude the current crop of Democrats.

It’s not just that Democrats have gotten too liberal. It’s that by opposing Trump on all fronts, they’ve been tricked into adopting a posture of defending the elite norms and institutions Trump attacks. And they’ve lost a focus on regular people in the process.

Democrats during the first Trump term pined for the return of “normal politics” and rejoiced when Biden was elected to deliver it. But voters also hate “normal” politics, not just the abnormal kind. After an initial focus on affordability, Kamala Harris pivoted to closing out her campaign as a defender of institutions with a speech on the Ellipse. Disdain for Washington politics is a winning theme on every campaign ever, but here were Democrats tying themselves to the mast as democratic defenders while an affordability and immigration crisis raged around them.

Being too “woke” remains a problem, but potentially the bigger problem is the Democrats’ reputation as the party of hall monitors, those upright defenders of rules and procedures. It’s not just the fact that you come across as censorious scolds, or that you end up focused on D.C. issues that most people don’t care about. There’s also the opportunity cost: you end up unable to deliver a real change message, the most effective kind for the party out of power.

Yes, Democrats want change from Trump or MAGA in the White House, but they don’t come across as wanting fundamental change to the system, and that’s a problem.

Who does want this is the left: Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC. But their ideological extremity makes the DSA project a net loser even compared with the lameness of establishment Democrats. Mamdani may be headed to a comfortable win, but he’s losing more than a third of Democrats and his numbers are well underwater statewide in a blue state. The Left will nevertheless demand respect for Mamdani as an S-tier political athlete when he’s just the 40-handicap who golfed a 100 round.

Completely missing in the Democratic Party today is someone able to campaign as an insurgent from the center or as a mainstream liberal. Most of the party’s victories fit the mold of youthful upstarts and outsiders: Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, Obama. Biden is both an exception and cautionary tale.

Today, it’s harder to see this emerging even from Democrats who aren’t nearly as old as Biden. Who can convincingly pull this off? Newsom? Harris? Buttigieg? Shapiro and Beshear are moderates, but also political lifers who exude a Dukakis-like “competence not ideology” vibe.

It’s hard to see an outsider-insurgent candidacy developing anywhere that’s not the far-left, and that’s a complicating factor for the Deciding to Win forces. Yes, the party needs to moderate. But it also needs to not be boring. It needs to be rebellious and exciting, channeling the public’s deep frustration with status quo politics. Just like Trump did. And Obama did. And Clinton did.

If you married an insurgent posture and ideological positioning that wouldn’t instantly turn off a majority of the country, that would be a powerful brand of politics. In my book (coming out in paperback today), I cite the pathos of Bill Clinton in 1992 as the model. Here he was speaking in Albany, Georgia in September 1992:

In the morning I go running on the streets in Little Rock and all sorts of people come up to me. I knew how important the family leave bill was a couple of years ago when I stopped my morning jog at the local McDonald’s about two blocks from a homeless shelter and a young couple came up to me living in a homeless shelter because they both had to give up their jobs when their kid got cancer and they had to bring their child to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and there was no medical and family leave provision in our law to protect people like that. I want you to know that I may not have all the answers and I won’t always tell you what you want to hear, but I will wake up every day thinking about you, and your interests, and your hopes, and your children, and your future.

Sure, this alluded to vaguely pro-government ideas — passing a family and medical leave law. But the main takeaway here is empathy with those down on their luck, identifying with regular people and speaking for them without any overt ideological pitch. When is the last time a Democratic nominee was able to convincingly talk like that?

In 2008, Barack Obama repeated the word “change” so many times it basically became a bit. But there’s been hardly any “change” in who has led the party since his ascent, culminating in a nomination awarded to the next-in-line in 2024 without discussion or debate.

Every Democratic nominee since Obama has basically been a derivative of him: Hillary Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State, Joe Biden his Vice President, Kamala Harris performed the same function in Biden’s administration. Their status as the anointed ones in the Obama line of succession are the main reason they won the nomination. Photocopy the original enough times, and the defects compound, until you end up with someone like Harris, the AI slop of presidential candidates.

At the time, political parties all tell themselves this is fine. Their candidates doesn’t need to be exceptional because it’s their turn to win (which I’m sure will be the Dems’ argument in 2028) or that the opponent is fatally flawed (what they told themselves about Trump). But this eventually catches up to you. Voters start to notice that you’re just phoning it in and offering nothing new.

Fatigue with the current generation of Democrats means that just changing something up, age-wise, personality-wise, or ideologically, should be positive expected value for the party. It’s not necessarily about moving left or center, but about displaying heterodoxy and taking unpredictable positions that will cause people to take interest in you.

My book contains a new epilogue on the ‘24 election and its aftermath, and I argue in it that what has become the Deciding to Win faction actually has a champion: Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman. He probably isn’t cut out for national politics, but his political model is one that can be copied profitably in purple and red states: blue collar aesthetics, someone who started in the Bernie wing then moderated, and an outsider, anti-politics image rooted in the heterodox middle.

Alas, Fetterman looks more likely to be ditched in a Democratic primary than copied. Predictably, Democrats have polarized against anyone who dares suggest working with Trump, even if their positioning is pitch-perfect for the kinds of voters Democrats need to win back. That’s an ominous sign that they’re actually serious about winning.