The DNC and The Democrats

What is to be done to repair the party’s national identity?

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Democrats will elect a new party chair on February 1st. The choice matters greatly in terms of rebuilding a strong and popular national party. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

When the Democrats have held the presidency, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been a rubber stamp for the White House, but when the party is out of power, the DNC has sometimes played a useful role in readying the party for the next general election. It has done so by defining what the party stands for and what kind of majority it should aspire to build.

Three examples spring to mind: In the late 1950’s, DNC chair Paul Butler facilitated the party's transition away from its dependence on Southern segregationists. After George McGovern's landslide loss in 1972, DNC chair Robert Strauss helped to reconcile the party's center and left, laying the basis for Jimmy Carter's successful candidacy in 1976. After Michael Dukakis's defeat in 1988, DNC chair Ron Brown helped bring Jesse Jackson's supporters around to New Democrat Bill Clinton's candidacy.

As the 2026 and 2028 elections approach, the Democrats are in desperate need of redefinition. They've now relied for five elections in a row on Donald Trump's unpopularity but have only succeeded—and partially and barely—in 2018 and 2020. Trump may come through for the Democrats again, but it would be folly to depend on his failure.

The Democrats face an electoral map that continues to give disproportionate representation to those voters outside of, and those states that don't contain, the big post-industrial metro areas where the Democrats are strongest. The Democrats also face the further erosion of support among working-class voters, including now black, Hispanic, and Asian non-college voters, that have proven essential for winning majorities.

In the past, individual politicians could overcome the weaknesses of the national party and ticket by carving out their own constituencies. Even after Democratic support for the civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, Democrats retained support in the South in local and state elections. That ended for Southern Democrats, finally, in 1994, and it may have finally ended in 2024 for politicians in states like Montana, Iowa, and Ohio that have small town majorities or that depend on resource extraction. The Democrats' future depends very much on how voters perceive the national party, and the Democrats' first chance to do something about that will be the election of a new chair for the DNC.

On February first, the DNC will choose a new chair. I don't have a favorite among the candidates, but I have three kinds of initiatives a new chair and the committee members should be prepared to undertake. The first is to take a leadership role in the party. The DNC's role should not be to ride the existing currents of the Democratic base and to echo the pronouncements of the think tanks, foundations, media outlets and activist groups that are identified with the party, but to direct, or even redirect those currents. That's particularly necessary today.

In redirecting the party, the DNC will have to contend with two powerful groups—activists and donors—whose goals don't necessarily align with the party's goal of winning elections. Many of the activist groups take positions that they hope will energize their donor base and immediate supporters, but that if adopted by Democratic politicians would doom them to defeat. Others take ideological or moralistic positions that are oblivious to political reality. That has led the party to be identified with extreme positions on racial justice, crime, sexuality and gender, immigration, climate change, and gender that are out of touch with a majority of voters, including many erstwhile Democrats.

Equally, the party must contend with wealthy donors from Wall Street or Silicon Valley whose interest may be in pressing policies on trade, taxes, finance, and immigration that, while unpopular, would benefit their businesses. If you look at the donors for the DNC, it's dominated by high-tech, real estate, and financial firms. In 2024, Kamala Harris's timid approach to economic reform appears to have been dictated by her reliance on large donors. Both these activist groups and donors will resist aggressive leadership from a new party chair.

The second imperative is geographic and demographic: to focus the party on winning back working-class voters and bridging the great geographical divide in American politics. That would seem obvious—the Democrats cannot hope to win enduring majorities based on their support in Oakland and Brooklyn—but some influential Democrats continue to contend that the party's focus should be "to appeal to its base, not to swing voters." Fortunately, several of the DNC candidates recognize that this is nonsense and have advocated reviving former DNC chair Howard Dean's 50-state strategy and paying attention to down ballot races. But it's not enough to knock on doors in Millersburg or Sioux Falls. It must be on behalf of a Democratic Party that can appeal to these voters.

The third initiative will be, perhaps, the most difficult for a DNC chair to embrace, but is essential for winning majorities. And that has to do with the stances with which the party is identified. Fifty years ago, the Democratic Party could get away with meaning different things to different people, but in the era of social media and unlimited independent expenditures, that is no longer possible. The parties have a national identity—sometimes referred to vulgarly as their "brand"—from which they cannot escape. In the absence of clear direction from above, that identity is set not only by politicians, but by the various activist groups and outlets that try to shape the party. As such, the Democrats' identity has proven to be an obstacle to its winning major elections.

There is now some recognition that the party must reclaim its identity as the party of the common man and woman, but the question is how to do so. In the wake of Harris's loss, some Democrats, including, notably, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, have argued for the party to revive that reputation by embracing economic populism. That's all to the good with one proviso: the embrace must not entail the dramatic enlargement of government requiring higher taxes. Many Americans retain an allergy, dating way back to the revolutionary era, to "big government." Raising the minimum wage is fine; massive government-funded full employment is not.

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But as Ruy Teixeira and I have argued repeatedly, espousing fair trade, a stronger safety net, and taxes on the rich will not solve the Democrats' problem with middle America and with many working-class voters. They remain turned off by the Democrats' identification with positions on social and cultural issues that reflect the mores of Park Slope and Mountain View. They also suspect that Democratic economic initiatives are designed to benefit some segments of society at the expense of others. That was the reason for the initial distrust of Obamacare and for the unpopularity of college student loan forgiveness.

Recently, the Democrats have become indelibly identified with highly unpopular and wrong-headed stands on cutting police budgets, reducing penalties for crimes, affirmative action (often at the expense of Asians), permitting men who identify as women to compete in women's sports, and decriminalizing border crossings. They've also become identified with draconian measures on climate change that while attempting to address the genuine threat posed by climate change, threaten the livelihood of workers and farmers whose support is prerequisite to making any meaningful changes in climate policy.

Incredibly, some commentators continue to deny that social and cultural stands had any bearing on the Democrats' defeats over the last decade. "Whether to put he/she pronouns in emails wasn’t a factor in Harris’s race against Donald Trump," Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. has asserted. But an extensive post-election survey of swing voters by Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, showed that concerns over Democratic stands on crime, immigration, and gender were even more important than concerns over the economy in winning these voters to Trump.

And these issues didn't just affect the presidential race. In this year's Ohio Senate race, incumbent Sherrod Brown sported a decades long record of taking economic populist stands. He was the poster child for Murphy's economic populism. But Brown was defeated by a Republican car dealer, financed by the crypto industry, who in his party's ads spotlighted Brown's stance on transgender issues. Of all the races, Brown's showed most clearly that Democrats cannot simply use attacks against the "billionaire class" to overcome their weaknesses among working-class and small-town voters.

If a new Democratic chair isn't willing to lead the party away from extreme stands on social and cultural issues, it won't matter how much money it spends in Florida or Nebraska. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has made a strong case for electing Wisconsin State Chair Ben Wikler. "If anyone can save the Democrats, it's Ben Wikler,” she writes. Wikler is justly praised for his attention to Wisconsin's down ballot races. But the DNC delegates should ask him about what happened in the 2022 Wisconsin Senate race between incumbent Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Mandela Barnes, the state's lieutenant governor.

That year, Johnson was rated the most vulnerable Republican incumbent. His approval ratings were under water. Johnson was opposed to abortion rights, he had described January 6th as a "peaceful protest," and he had claimed that vaccines were making people ill. He had the kind of wackadoodle views that would repel the suburban voters who had backed Biden in 2020 and would back Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2022.

But the Democrats nominated a candidate who had supported cutting police budgets and abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Barnes began the general election contest with a five-point lead over Johnson, but as soon as the Republicans began publicizing Barnes' stands on crime and immigration, his lead disappeared. While Evers easily won re-election, Barnes lost to the unpopular Johnson.

Afterwards, Wikler attributed Barnes' defeat to being outspent by outside groups, but it had far more to do with his extreme stands on social and cultural issues. I suspect, too, that the Democrats' national identity contributed to Trump winning Wisconsin in 2024 and to Tammy Baldwin, who routed her opponent in 2018, barely squeaking by.

If the Democrats don't aggressively change their cultural identity as a national party, Wisconsin, which is the least metropolitan of the swing states, could go the way of Ohio and Missouri. Is Wikler—or any of the other candidates for DNC chair—ready to do that?

It will be difficult. One can already see the pushback that Congressman Seth Moulton received for arguing that Democrats should restrict participation of boys who identify as girls in girls’ sports at the high-school level and above. The DNC may also be too weak an organization to effect significant change. The last chairs who had influence on the party's direction—Ron Brown and Howard Dean—operated before the era of social media and before the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United.

But as one surveys the political landscape, there is no other organization even capable of exerting leadership. The labor movement is deeply divided. The National Organization for Women and the NAACP are shadows of themselves. There is no equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council today.

The DNC is it, and Democrats must hope that the new chair can act decisively to turn the party around.

John B. Judis is author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?