Friday, May 2, 2025

Today, thoughts on the intra-Democratic-Party divide that has taken shape over the last few months. It took me some time to write it up, but it's been rolling around in my head and I wanted to get it out. I anticipate future updates will be less my thinking and more just news.

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A Tea Party Movement on the Left?

The right-wing Tea Party Movement rose to prominence around 15 years ago. I recall thinking at the time that much of the Tea Party's dissatisfaction with establishment Republicans seemed to stem from Tea Partiers' belief that establishment Republicans weren't actually committed to implementing the Republican agenda. To a meaningful degree, I suspect the Tea Party was correct. A number of Tea Party challengers defeated establishment Republican candidates in primaries, and the movement drove a "Republican wave" election.

I don't know what the effects will be, but I think we are now seeing something similar play out within the Democratic Party. There are several different dimensions to the divide, so not every Democrat fits neatly into one camp or the other. Those dimensions include disagreements over electoral strategy and over the urgency with which we should oppose rising fascism and Trump's unmaking of the federal government. The rift also relates to temperament or appetite for conflict, which tracks somewhat but not perfectly with a generational divide.

Before I irresponsibly caricature describe the factions, I'll make my own opinion clear up front: I think that a liberal Tea Party movement would be a good development, and I hope establishment Democrats who resist all-out opposition to fascism get wiped out in the next election.

Team Don't-Rock-the-Boat

One group of Democrats believes they can and should maximize their electoral chances by selecting and emphasizing policies that are popular rather than unpopular, typically as shown by public opinion polling. This has intuitive appeal: We expect candidates promoting popular things to do better than candidates promoting unpopular things. While this idea isn't really new, it's recently associated with data scientist and political consultant David Shor, who terms the idea "popularism."

This group of Dems may be concerned about fascism and democratic backsliding, but they tend to think they are not winning electoral issues. They may also think that the harms done by serious opposition to fascism and democratic backsliding--things like a government shutdown--will outweigh any benefits such efforts might produce.

These Democrats tend to be risk and conflict averse, and they may want politics to "return to normal." They talk about bipartisanship. Unsurprisingly, they tend to be older and therefore more likely to have a sense of how politics worked in decades past.

In practice, this tends to mean these Democrats shy away from partisan combat and culture war topics, instead focusing on "kitchen table issues," which usually signifies economic matters like jobs, taxes, and cost of living. They may support doomed-to-fail performative gestures aimed at messaging solidarity with their supporters who want action, things like introducing a bill to show concern on a topic while safe in the knowledge that the bill will never be allowed to get a vote.

At present, this group of Democrats believes that material circumstances will deteriorate enough under Trump to sweep Dems into power if only they don't screw it up, and they can't screw up if they don't do anything, or at least anything big. Accordingly, they want to coast into the 2026 midterm elections, adopting only positions that already poll well, not doing too much, and trying not to alienate centrists and Trump voters.

I expect these Democrats, if they get elected, to continue on this path, not actively doing much of anything in office but constituting an improvement over Trump and Republicans by virtue of not being Trump and Republicans. To me it seems like they seek election to office as an end in itself, rather than to achieve anything with the power they want to hold.

Team Fight

Other Democrats believe that inaction now will allow fascism and democratic backsliding to become increasingly entrenched, making it harder or impossible to ever make our way back. They may also fear that the damage the Trump administration is doing to the economy, public health, and state capacity will only be harder to reverse the longer it goes on.

Rather than adopting poll-driven messaging and a platform based in popularism, this second group of Democrats believes they can win elections by picking morally and substantively sound positions and then, to the extent voters are not with them already, making their case to the public. Notably--and obviously--this requires Democrats to select morally and substantively sound positions and then, if necessary, make their case to the public, which is easier in some contexts than others.

Democrats from this second group skew younger and tend to be quicker to embrace partisan conflict, which is likely due in part to their heightened concerns about fascism and democratic backsliding. They are probably the Democrats you see talking about fascism and authoritarianism and calling for impeachment, Supreme Court reform, and investigations of and accountability for corruption and abuses of power.

My take

I believe there is nothing more urgent and important in American politics (and American life?) right now than resisting fascism and democratic backsliding, whether your top issue is Gaza, the economy, health care, or civil rights. While an all out fight against fascism will entail costs--maybe immense costs--they pale in comparison to the harm and misery that will follow if we slip into a fascist dictatorship in perpetuity.

I also think that poll-driven messaging and a platform based in popularism are not the electoral winners some Democrats think, and that they can instead be actively harmful. To start with, polling is not a perfect measure of public opinion even on the specific questions polled. For example, when asked whether they approve of Trump's tariff policy, people may base their responses on whether they approve of Trump generally rather than his tariff policy specifically. That may be because they think that's what the pollster is really trying to get at, or because they don't know much about the tariff policy, or for some other reason. (I expect this problem is reasonably well-studied and that techniques have been developed to reduce though probably not eliminate its effect.)

Second, the significance of poll results may not be clear and may instead require interpretation. For example, a poll may show that voters favor bipartisan immigration policy, but at the same time they may disapprove of the entire universe of specific bipartisan immigration policies that are actually possible, given political realities. (Like the first problem, I expect this has been studied and that there exist ways to help minimize but not eliminate the problem.)

Third, while polls measure opinion at a moment in time, we're using them to predict what opinion will be at different time*--the time of an election--and opinions can change in the interim. This is particularly true on issues on which voters have little information, or on which they don't already have strong feelings. (I expect it's harder to control for this issue.)

More fundamentally, popularism is premised on a model of voter decision making that just doesn't seem to be true to life. In practice, people don't examine the platforms of the candidates or parties and then choose to vote for the option that most closely matches their preferences. To the contrary, voter preferences are influenced by their peers, their culture, and their personal biases and heuristics. In fact, there's more evidence that people base their policy preferences on their political party affiliation than there is that they select their political party based on their policy preferences.

Public opinion isn't some independent variable. It can be influenced by politicians and other leaders. If leaders look to existing public opinion to choose their policies and messages, they are abdicating their responsibility to lead. And if they are silent about good policies and important topics that are not already popular, they not only miss out on an opportunity to bring the public around, they are effectively telling the public that those policies and topics are not important. We've seen this happen over and over with Trump's misconduct and corruption: When Democrats don't treat it as important, they are teaching the public that it is not important, and now they have materially contributed to normalizing conduct that would have been universally recognized as impeachable just 10 years ago.

Relatedly, in a pure form, popularism is non-substantive: You do what is popular and don't do what is unpopular. If that's really your guide, there is no principle you won't sacrifice. Provided you have principles, that's bad because it will lead you to support bad things and oppose good things. The civil rights movement, for example, was morally necessary but unpopular--popularism practitioners would have been against equal rights for racial minorities in the 1950s just like they won't defend transgender persons today. Moreover, it's bad because it projects weakness, which is a brand with a poor track record of electoral success: People can smell phonies, and no one wants to vote for a candidate or party without a moral foundation or that needs to consult a poll to know what to think.

Lastly, the divide in the Democratic Party is presently less about policy on a center-versus-left spectrum and more about willingness to at least try to exercise power, and the general subject matter--opposition to fascism, preservation of democracy, America's founding ideals--is fairly uncontroversial. That explains why we're seeing AOC aligned with centrists like Chris Murphy and Conor Lamb. Moreover, it suggests there's room to rally all Democrats and others as well around an active, energetic Democratic Party.

Final thoughts

This has been in the news a little because of a speech given by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has sort of been a standard bearer for Team Fight. (Team Don't-Rock-the-Boat is associated with Chuck Schumer and now California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has absolutely destroyed his support by apparently trying to make a lame popularism-informed move to the center with a podcast featuring a series of right-wing figures.) It's not breaking news, but it's a story that I think is extremely important and that I expect will continue to play out in the 18 months before the next election.

And that won't be the end of it either. I'm convinced that, to save American democracy, we're going to need some radical reforms. Things like adding justices to the Supreme Court (or jurisdiction stripping), removing lower court judges from the bench, and reviving Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to expel oath-breaking insurrectionists from Congress. I don’t believe popularism is compatible with enacting those reforms. I don't believe it's compatible with selling the public on them. And I don't believe a candidate who is unwilling to mount an all-out fight against fascism now will be willing to enact such reforms in the future. So keep an eye out for this rift in the Democratic Party and how it evolves.

FN* It's actually worse than that: We're using opinion polling at a moment in time to predict behavior--how someone votes--in the future.

Miscellanea

Who said it?

I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.'' 

* * *

This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

That was Ronald Reagan, in his last speech as President. (H/t Heather Cox Richardson.)