Democrats Should Embrace Ideological Pluralism
Litmus tests offer a bridge to nowhere.
Part of the difficulty any political party faces in forming a winning coalition is keeping all its various factions satisfied while simultaneously leaving room to win voters who don’t naturally identify with it. This tug-of-war can be difficult: cater too much to your base voters and you risk alienating non-members; try to appeal to people outside the party and you risk growing angst within your own ranks.
Normally, the parties’ mission of winning elections incentivizes them to build as big a coalition as possible. However, in America today, neither party seems capable of—or possibly even interested in—claiming a broad enough coalition to routinely give it the upper hand. As my colleague Ruy Teixeira has pithily observed, we have a “politics without winners.”
This has been especially difficult for Democrats over the past roughly decade-and-a-half. Since their dominant 2008 performance, they have been decimated down the ballot and lost many of the voters who were long the backbone of the party. Their most recent indignity was losing to Donald Trump for a second time as he won historic levels of support from racial minorities. It’s clear that their coalition is less competitive than it was 17 years ago, and the electoral map has become far less friendly as well. This is not a sustainable formula for long-term success.
To find their way out of the wilderness, Democrats would be wise to first acknowledge a longstanding truth about American politics: the U.S. is a center-right country. This obviously doesn’t mean that Democrats can’t win or that the public doesn’t side with them on important policy or moral questions. But it does mean that they, more so than Republicans, can’t afford to constrict the size of their tent. Their coalition must be ideologically diverse if they hope to win swing states more consistently or begin competing again in places like Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio.1
Expanding the electoral map will require finding and running candidates who can win in places where voters have left the Democrats behind in recent years, and that means accepting that such candidates may necessarily reflect the priorities—and values—of these places. In other words: to rebuild a coalition that is capable of winning in more areas, Democrats should embrace ideological pluralism. Not only is it good electoral strategy to be a more heterodox party, but it has the added bonus of being true to a core tenet of liberalism: an openness to people who think differently.
Of course, a commitment to ideological pluralism isn’t always easy. Moderate-to- conservative candidates who can win in Macomb County, Miami-Dade, or rural Iowa may not always agree with the party’s base on sensitive subjects like abortion, guns, or immigration. Sometimes, they might even stymie the party’s agenda. But without them, it will be hard to consistently win control of the House or Senate, and it could keep state-level offices in key states out of reach for a long time.
One model of this type of candidate is Joe Manchin, who represented West Virginia, a state Trump carried by a 42 points, in the Senate for 14 years. Manchin was often a headache for the Democrats during his tenure, blocking parts of Biden’s agenda and occasionally even crossing party lines to vote with Republicans. But his ability to hold down this seat in a deep-red state gave Democrats a governing trifecta during Biden’s first two years in office, which helped him secure major policy wins and add a justice to the Supreme Court.2
There are others who fit this mold as well. In the House, this includes Jared Golden (ME-02) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03), who chair the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus; Henry Cuellar (TX-28), a fellow Blue Dog and the last remaining pro-life Democrat in Congress; and Laura Gillen, a Democrat who aired a tough ad about the southern border and narrowly defeated a GOP incumbent in NY-04. All four members may pose headaches for party leadership from time to time, but they could also be crucial to passing major legislative priorities down the line.3
But in contrast to 2008, this type of Democrat is a rare breed these days. The party’s base is no longer centered on a moderate, multiracial working class but instead a much more liberal and wealthy professional class. This has shifted its center of gravity correspondingly leftward, evidenced by the growing number of elected progressives and the adoption of more left-leaning cultural attitudes by rank-and-file members.
One consequence of this is that Democrats have not just become more focused on hot-button social matters like abortion, LGBT issues, and democracy, but some of these issues have become litmus tests for deciding who can or even should be welcomed in the party. This has left little room in the tent for those with views that deviate from the prevailing party orthodoxy.
For example, there’s a reason why the concept of a “pro-life Democrat” is thought to be an oxymoron today, and why, despite numerous polls showing Democrats are out of step with the public on “gender identity” issues, they continue to vote in lock-step on them—including even some of their more moderate members. Anyone who deviates from the party’s current positions on these issues and others risks facing intraparty backlash.
Democrats often like to say they “look like” America, and insofar as this relates to the racial diversity of the party’s members, it’s a fair sentiment. But there is far more to America than racial distinctions, and any honest definition of diversity will include an array of other factors, like socioeconomic class, religion, education level, and ideology. On those metrics, the party can’t quite claim to represent the full nation.
So, if the Democrats desire to live up to this ideal, they must come to see America for what it is: a “vast transcontinental empire encompassing dozens/hundreds of cultures, with people living in vastly different lifestyles,” according to RealClearPolitics writer Sean Trende, who added, “There is probably no combination of total viewpoints that commands a majority. To win, your coalition has to be heterodox.”
On this, he is surely correct. The alternative to embracing pluralism is the continuation of a culture that makes it next to impossible for people who hold differing views from the party on one or two issues to find a home in it. So long as purity tests prevail over an embrace of difference, Democrats may find themselves rotating between narrow wins and irrelevance for the foreseeable future.
These four states and the seven 2024 swing states all went for (or nearly went for) Barack Obama at least once—and all of them have voted to the right of the national median across the last three presidential elections.
His presence in the Senate also prevented Republicans from overturning the Affordable Care Act in 2017—they failed by just one vote.
For another interesting example, see state Representative Frank Burns of Pennsylvania.
In 2022, I had a fairly long one on one conversation with a woman running for congress as a democrat in NY state- she lost by a small margin. She told me that she agreed with me about the excesses of covid restrictions, such as keeping schools closed for over a year and masking children- including toddlers. Her children attended public school and she agreed that there was too much transgender ideology in the readings and the lessons, and she understood why parents didn't like it. She said that as a democrat candidate you are not allowed to question any of the big blue issues- or you wont get DNC money.
Definitely you can't criticize long school closures during covid. Definitely you can't push back on transgender ideology in schools. She said they gave her a list of 10 issues to talk about and that was it, and if you went off script, especially in the primary, you would be cut off from money.
Good points, and Democrats would be wise to consider them. But there is a major underlying elephant in the room that undergirds all "positions" or issues that might involve more pluralism, and that is the post-New Deal/post-Great Society bedrock of Democrat thought that government is essentially a good and positive thing to be celebrated. The mood of the country after the Mortgage Crisis, two wars, out-of-control hideous abuse of the legal and judicial system under Biden, and overreach by virtually every single agency---combined with the utter incompetence of FEMA---has people much, much closer to Reagan's line that the eight most dangerous words: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Aside from a congressman securing a DoD form for my mother-in-law, I cannot recall a single thing government specifically has done for me. Yeah, roads, utilities, etc. And some states are better than others, and some towns better than others. But looking at NY, CA, and IL, no one can say the government is "there to help."
I think this is a major, major hurdle that will not demand Democrats just rebuke the Obama-Biden years, but reject the previous sixty years, just as Republicans did under Trump (which is why they are winning).