Today at 6pm Eastern, I am giving a webinar on the impact that artificial intelligence will have on democracy and public life at Johns Hopkins University. It is mostly meant for alumni of the university, but I was able to secure an invitation for readers of Persuasion. If you want to tune in, please follow this link: https://events.jhu.edu/form/snfagora-ai-impact.
Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot. His latest book, with John B. Judis, is Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ruy Teixeira discuss why The Liberal Patriot is shutting down after five years, how the Great Awokening is still driving the Democratic Party, and whether the Democrats have learned the right lessons from Trump’s 2024 victory.
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This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I have to say that I would like to talk to you under more pleasant circumstances. You are one of the co-founders of The Liberal Patriot, which I have been reading religiously for the last five years. I am sure that many of my listeners are well-acquainted with The Liberal Patriot. I, like many of your readers, was shocked to learn a few days ago that you are closing down the shop. Tell listeners a little bit about the publication and why you saddened our weekends with this news.
Ruy Teixeira: Well, it started about five years ago. It was started by a group of people who either left or were in the process of leaving the Center for American Progress. They were worried about the state of the Democratic Party and that they did not seem to be absorbing the lessons they should from the rise of Trump and right-wing populism, and some of the other ways politics had evolved in the country. It was weakening the support sustained among working-class voters and moving to the left, quite severely, on cultural issues and a lot of other things.
We were just disquieted about that. We thought we would start a Substack where we put forward a different philosophy and a different approach, and had a no-holds-barred attitude toward the problems of the Democratic Party. Sometimes we summed it up as “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America.” Sometimes we looked at it as a combination of social-democratic economics and cultural moderation. But it was certainly different from the mainstream of the Democratic Party and where it was going.
Given that we started this five years ago, as you can figure out from the math, this was right as Biden was coming into office and right on the heels of the “Great Awokening.” Well, the crest of the “Great Awokening” in 2020—the George Floyd summer and all that. As a longtime observer of Democratic politics and someone who was actually hanging out at the Center for American Progress at the time, it was like, “What the hell is going on?” I could not believe the things people were saying, the causes they were taking up, and the intolerance and “cancel culture” type attitude toward anyone with a different point of view.
Mounk: Take us back to that moment. We do not need to go through all of the summer of 2020, but the Center for American Progress was founded by the center left, right? It was founded, I believe, by the Clintonite faction within the Democratic Party. It was a very center-left establishment think tank and was dominant in the 2010s. How did CAP evolve in the years before your departure?
Teixeira: Well, when it started out it really was a more conventional center-left think tank. They were pretty focused on—just because it started in 2003—getting rid of the Bushies and managing to move the Democratic Party back into power and not really pushing the envelope on cultural issues necessarily. But that really changed over time. The two things the center did that were most well-known to begin with were that they laid some of the basis for Obamacare and they basically did a lot of stuff around the Iraq War and how we needed to get out of it. It was pretty unradical kind of stuff, really.
As time went on, and as the Obama administration came into office and went through its second term, you could see that the nature of the party was starting to change, and CAP fully reflected that. People really were moving to the left on a lot of cultural and other issues. They really were becoming more intolerant of the other side. Black Lives Matter started in 2013. It may have crested in 2020, but those kinds of ideas were already out there, and they really were infecting the minds of people in the Democratic Party infrastructure—the think tanks, foundations, the arts world, legacy media, you name it. You could already see the hints of it evolving.
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As people who have a more small-c conservative attitude toward cultural issues in the sense of being for equality, anti-discrimination, and tolerance, we are not really on board with a lot of this more radical stuff. That is just going to scare off a lot of voters. Besides, what is progressive about racial preferences, for example? But that became a harder and harder thing to sustain at a place like CAP, and indeed within the center left in general. I think things really had a phase change after 2016 because Trump won, as we all remember.
People could not process it on the center left, in my opinion. That was very true at CAP. All they could think of was that this was a result of racism, xenophobia, and all the other things that “deplorables” of our nation believe in and that Trump managed to mobilize. That was really all there was to it, and we must resist, resist, resist. As someone who followed American electoral politics for a long time, I just did not think that was an adequate understanding of why the Democrats did lose, and why working-class voters deserted them so severely, particularly in the Midwest.
It was, in a sense, at least partly a revolt against neoliberal economics in trade, in manufacturing, and a lot of other things in many left-behind communities. People were not too happy with the way the country was going. All the Democrats could think of was how awful these people were—just beyond the pale. Of course, things just got worse over the course of the first Trump administration.
Like I say, it’s a phase change. By the time you get to the lead-up to the 2020 election and the George Floyd summer, that’s when things really got out of control. You saw this incredible group-think on a lot of these cultural issues.
Mounk: For those four years, you are trying to stay a loyal soldier of the center left. You stay within CAP. You are trying to push the Democratic Party to address some of these issues, both because you disagree with some of the policy positions they are embracing, but more broadly because you think that this kind of stuff is going to lose them elections, that it is not what is needed in order to defeat people like Donald Trump.
What finally pushed you and some of your co-conspirators to say, in order to actually push the Democratic Party to reform in these kinds of ways, we have to leave CAP, we have to start this new publication? What were your hopes for what this publication would accomplish in 2020?
Teixeira: Well, it is true what you say, Yascha, that for years I was more in the loyal soldier position. I was always tugging at people’s sleeves at CAP. Well, don’t forget about the white working class. Don’t forget that we are really doing pretty badly among this demographic. They are still pretty big. They do not really think the Democrats are their party, and this could really hurt us.
Mounk: For people who do not know the backstory and who have not listened to the excellent earlier episodes with you on The Good Fight or read the work you published in, I believe, 2002, you had some authority on this. You are one of the people who coined the concept of the “emerging Democratic majority,” which emphasized that Democrats could build on the diversification of the United States. They were doing very well among knowledge workers and people who have gone to college, but also among racial minorities that are growing as a share of the population.
When you say, Democrats can build on all of that, but if they fall below a minimum level of support among the white working class, the electoral math is not going to work out, that carries weight. It comes from somebody whose strategy all along was not just that Democrats need to build in the white working class. You were saying Democrats can win thanks to these new voters, assuming that they retain significant support among their historic constituency, which was the white working class.
When you go to people saying, our policies are so alienating us from rural voters and the white working class that we are not going to be able to win, that carries more authority than it would coming from some random policy analyst.
Teixeira: In my book with John Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, we framed things in terms of a progressive centrism that would be consistent with the way the country was changing, but would not be obviously too far to the left. They would have to retain a core of white working-class support that could not afford to shrink much.
The reason 2016 is a phase change in all this, Yascha, is because I had been reminding people of this over and over in my role as a loyal soldier. Nobody was paying any attention. Then, after 2016, they are taking this event that I more or less predicted and, instead of trying to remedy the weakness, they are making it worse. They are paying no attention. They are consigning all these voters to the eighth circle of hell. How are you going to win people over on that basis?
When you fast-forward to 2020 and the peak of the “Great Awokening,” obviously this stuff was not going to go well with many of these voters. This was not the way they were going to win any of them back, even if Biden did manage to win the election. In the process, I noticed a very important thing, which a lot of other people did as well: non-white working-class voters were starting to weaken their support for the Democrats. That was what really led us to think this is ridiculous. If they do not realize they have a problem when they are losing support not only from white working-class voters, but from non-white working-class voters as well, what can we do?
As you know, Yascha, from the way the Biden administration went down, he ran as a moderate, but he did not govern in a particularly moderate way. It was symptomatic of the way the center of gravity of the Democratic Party had changed dramatically, both in cultural and other ways. The kind of people who are staffing his administration, and their supporters outside of the administration—what John Judis and I called in our other book the “Shadow Party”—were pushing the party very strongly to the left. The Biden administration was responsive, and it did not seem like that would go very well, either.
That is the kind of stuff we started to write in 2021 and onward to warn that the way the Democratic Party is going at this point is like being on a train bound to hell and not realizing it. This is not going to end well; bad things will happen. We wrote a lot and made some cogent arguments, but people did not really want to believe that the problem was as deep as we said.
Then, in the 2022 election, the Democrats did better than they thought they would. They now clean up in special elections where their turnout advantage among higher-education, more engaged voters is typically operationalized. You have a formula for the “Great Forgetting”—the great refusal to engage. I think we are seeing it again. That is really what my latest piece is about.
All Democrats should consider it a cataclysmic defeat. This guy who they anathematized and thought would never come back won the popular vote. He won all the swing states. What is it you do not understand about the danger you are running? How quickly they forget. For a few months, there was some moderately serious effort to engage in it, but now people have completely forgotten about it. They just want to oppose Trump. They are doing great in the special elections and did well in 2025. Unless something drastically changes, they will do quite well in 2026, I think. It is just like: why change? Why bother? We have them on the run. Trump is so terrible that the masses of honest workers and peasants have finally woken up and rejected right-populism forever. I think that is not true.
Mounk: The steel-man argument on the other side is that some of the most toxic practices of the period around 2020 have subsided—that not just the Democratic Party, but more broadly progressive institutions, have walked back some of the most absurd outrages of that time. People are no longer getting fired for referencing a Chinese filler word that has a passing resemblance to an American swear word. Electricians in San Diego are not getting fired because they have a hand dangling out of the truck and somebody thinks they made the “OK” symbol, which they somehow associate with white supremacy.
I was at a dinner with people who have broadly heterodox views yesterday and someone said, “I just don’t feel afraid that somebody is going to try and cancel me in the way that I did five or six years ago.” It does not feel like when I voice my perfectly tolerant and reasonable opinion out loud in a cafe or restaurant, I have to take my voice down a notch.
Of course, the unpopularity of Donald Trump is real. Trump has come in and governed in such an extreme and irresponsible way that perhaps the Democrats do not need to change all that much in order to win the midterm elections. They are likely to win the House; they may even win the Senate, which would be a remarkable feat given the map. Why shouldn’t Democrats just keep going the way they are? As you know, I do not fully agree with the steel-man version, but I am trying to give you that version here.
Teixeira: I do not think Democrats need to change anything to do well in 2026. You could argue that if they change a few things they might do even better than they are likely to do, but given the nature of this upcoming election—the way the out-party tends to do well in these midterm elections anyway—and how unpopular Trump is, I do not see how they do not take back the House. I do think they have an outside shot of taking back the Senate. Broadly speaking, it will be a very good election for them.
The longer-range issue is how the Democrats change their pretty toxic image among tons of working-class and rural voters around the country, where they are still viewed as being pretty out of the mainstream in terms of these other culturally freighted issues. As I pointed out at the end of my piece, Democrats’ economic program is nothing to write home about, either. They will do well in 2026, but I think their brand is still pretty terrible, particularly among working-class voters. You need to change that if you are going to succeed on the presidential level, and more generally in terms of forming a more stable majority coalition.
Mounk: There was an amazing poll recently, which mostly was paid attention to because of what it found about artificial intelligence. But it revealed something interesting about the Democratic Party: artificial intelligence is now very unpopular in the United States. The two things that are less popular than artificial intelligence are the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic Party.
Teixeira: Nothing has been unsolved in terms of those underlying problems. The problem is that Democrats do not want to solve their underlying problem and feel they can get away without doing much about it at the current time. In terms of the specific stuff you were mentioning about race and cancel culture, I do think that at the elite level, it is harder to cancel people and they are less interested in doing it than they once were. You are a bit safer in terms of saying particular things in particular contexts.
The fact remains that people who are very culturally liberal—the radicals—still have control of the commanding heights of cultural production. They are still ensconced in universities, newspapers, foundations, the infrastructure of the Democratic Party, and NGOs. I think they are all still there; they have just sanded off a few of the rough edges. The question becomes: if you really want to change people’s perception of the party, its image, and its fundamental commitments, do you not actually have to change some of your positions instead of just not talking about them?
As I pointed out in that article, and as Lauren Egan mentioned in an article in The Bulwark, the typical approach of the Democrats now is to “shut up and pivot.” Do not talk about what your positions are on unpopular issues. Just immediately attack the billionaire class and say this is a diversion from the rich fat cats picking your pockets. I think that is the party line now, and it is not a very promising way to change your image in a fundamental way. It is a way to win the next election by deflecting.
Where are the Democrats who are willing to say forthrightly, actually, I think DEI programs are a terrible idea. I think race-based affirmative action is a bad idea and I do not support it? With a lot of these issues—trans rights is another one—you find that they are either not talking about it, or they might mutter something about how some of this stuff may have gone a bit too far, but it is basically noble stuff.
Mounk: I want to go into some of those positions in detail and really think through what the reasonable positions would be. I guess my position on this is that we are in a two-party system. That means that if one party is really unpopular, it allows the other party to be pretty damn screwed up and do relatively better. That always goes to the benefit of the opposition party.
The Biden administration was sufficiently dysfunctional and Joe Biden, of course, was sufficiently mentally unsound. People looked at that and said, I don’t want that. They went back to Donald Trump despite everything we knew from his first term about how irresponsible he was. Now that Trump has come in, he had a great opportunity to actually turn the Republican Party into a multiracial party of the working class. He has completely squandered that opportunity.
He has been culturally extreme in ways that go well beyond the American mainstream and has made significant blunders, like the current war in Iran. I think he is going to be so unpopular that, in the midterm elections, Democrats are going to do very well. Probably even in 2028—if you asked me for a point estimate right now, if I had to place a bet on one of these betting markets—I would say the Democrats probably retake the White House in 2028. I do not want to be certain about that because Trump is term-limited.
Teixeira: What would your probability estimate be?
Mounk: 60/40. The reason for that is I think Republicans have an ability to rebrand; they have an opportunity to rebrand. Primaries are unpredictable once the person who has been dominating the party for a very long time is out of the way. I do not think it is unimaginable that Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and perhaps Donald Trump Jr. compete for the mantle of the MAGA movement and they split the vote. Perhaps someone like Spencer Cox somehow manages to win the nomination, and suddenly the Republicans go into 2028 with a much more palatable face, which would be great.
Teixeira: I think Marco Rubio would be actually a fairly forbiddable candidate. We could argue about that, but that’s what I think.
Mounk: Yeah, I agree. He would have real strengths. Anyway, I do not think the shadow of Trump will remain that strong. I think that if the administration keeps going the way it has for the first year and six weeks of being in office for the next nearly three years, people are going to be so sick of them. The Democrats have a good chance of winning.
But there are two fears that I have. Number one is the Keir Starmer scenario. The Tories were in power in Britain for ten-plus years, and people got deeply sick of them. That was enough for Keir Starmer—who was never charismatic and never had a substantive political vision of his own—to come into office. Because he did not have a coherent governing program and because he did not solve some of the underlying problems of the Labour Party, within a few months he was deeply unpopular. Now it looks like Reform is likely to win at the next election.
A broader way of putting this is that it depends on what you are solving for. If you are solving for getting Donald Trump and his chosen successor out of the White House in 2028, perhaps Democrats do not have to do that much. It is a risky strategy. It would be much more likely to succeed in that crucial undertaking if they changed more, but perhaps it is not necessary.
But that is not the problem for me. The actual challenge for me is that we are at a moment when people who are very dangerous to basic democratic norms and institutions have the commanding heights of the Republican Party. We need to lastingly and convincingly beat them to force the Republican Party back to the negotiating table—to make sure that they have to expel those extremists from the commanding heights of the Republican Party in order to win elections. That has to happen not just in 2026 and 2028, but for long enough for the Republican Party to make those reforms to themselves because of the wilderness they are in. That, I think, would take much, much more than being, in the eyes of many voters, the lesser evil in 2028.
Teixeira: Well, just to clarify what I was going to say about “necessary”: are you satisfied with a 51–49 or 52–48 chance of winning, or do you want to maximize your probability of victory? If the situation is as dire as you say it is, then Democrats should view it as a necessity to maximize their ability to win that election. You do not just want 60–40; you want something like 75–25.
May I recommend the report I wrote with Yuval Levin, Politics Without Winners? It is all about the idea that we are now in a very peculiar political space where we basically toggle between the two parties. They do not get to hang around very long before they are tossed out because people get sick of what they are doing, and there is no stable, dominant majority coalition.
What you want to do is get to that point. You do not want to just alternate with right-populists for another 20 years; you want to have a stable coalition that can govern effectively, make the country prosper, and gain the default allegiance of the American voter. Conversely, if you were the Republicans, you should want the same thing.
As you are pointing out, there was a brief moment where, if Trump had played his cards right and the Republicans had governed in a different way, they really could have grown their coalition. They could have been much more moderate on cultural issues and avoided a weird, tariff-heavy economic regime.
Mounk: Well, if they had secured the border with Mexico and even done some deportations, but not gone after people who’ve been here for a long time…
Teixeira: They did not need to do that. It was a way of manufacturing bad publicity for the party and not doing anything very effective. Everything they did, they overdid. If they had played their cards right, they had a chance to sustain a fairly high level of popularity, consistent with Politics Without Winners.
As you say, let us say the Democrats do get back in in 2028. What is the guarantee that they are not going to have a light version of what Biden tried to do that would wind up being very unpopular? It is very unclear what they would do on the border, on the economy, on DEI, or on trans issues. I think the fundamental radicalism of some of the left agenda that the Democrats have adopted in the last 15 years would actually come out because they have not changed. Their underlying positions are roughly the same.
If they want to maximize the probability of not only winning in 2028, but sticking around for a while, they would be well advised to change some of these underlying positions.
Mounk: The only smart way to think about the future is in terms of scenarios, and I am going to defy that and give you a point estimate. I think it is less than 50% that this exact scenario will play out—it is probably less than 5%—but I think the Democrats are going to win the midterms: definitely the House and possibly the Senate. I think they will eke out a victory in 2028 unless they really self-sabotage.
Then you are going to have the Keir Starmer problem. Very quickly, they will become unpopular because they will overreach and because they have not actually developed a substantive vision for how they want to govern. In 2032, we will see the Republicans romp back into power. Whether the leader at that point is J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, or Donald Trump Jr., it will be potentially even worse than the current Trump term.
I am conscious of the fact that in this conversation we have presumed both a substantive case that Democrats are in the wrong place on a bunch of these issues, and that people are going to agree with that. I want you to lay out really clearly, in a few of those areas, how concretely Democrats are actually in the wrong place. We can go through the valedictory piece you published with the lovely title, No Learning, Please, We’re Democrats. You say they have a cultural problem. What concretely is that problem? What are some cultural positions the Democrats have that they need to move away from, and what should the position on those issues be?
Teixeira: There is a long list of issues with cultural content where Democrats are much farther to the left than they used to be. We recently discussed DEI and racial issues; clearly, the Democrats are too far to the left on these. People do not really believe in DEI, except in the sense that everyone should have an opportunity. Equal opportunity is popular; equal outcomes are not.
The fact that there is not a completely proportional representation of different racial or other groups in a professional setting or for a given set of rewards is not prima facie evidence of racism. However, that became a widely-accepted position within the Democratic Party and remains so today. The solution should not be racial preferences. People should be judged on the basis of merit—how good they are at a task, how well they did on a test, and how competent they are. This is a fundamental principle of fairness that Americans deeply believe in.
By soft-pedaling or outright opposing the idea of merit-based rewards, Democrats have gone far out of the mainstream. Where are the Democrats today who are willing to say that DEI is not written into the Constitution, as Hakeem Jeffries suggested? Where are those for merit-based rewards and jobs who do not believe in racial preferences, but want everyone to compete on an equal playing field while remaining against discrimination? I do not see them.
The immigration situation is also extraordinary. In the late 20th century, Democrats had a very different attitude toward immigration. They were unafraid to say the border should be enforced or that people here illegally should be deported. They were willing to entertain the notion that there might be negative aspects to open immigration, such as pressure on the low-wage labor market and unions. This changed drastically in the 21st century, culminating in the spectacle of quasi-open borders under President Biden, where every lever was pulled to make it easy to enter the United States and stay indefinitely. This resulted in the biggest wave of immigration since the early 1900s. This was not what people in the United States wanted; quasi-open borders were not popular.
Tied to that was the culturally radical position that anyone objecting to this surge or the gaming of the asylum system must be a racist or a xenophobe who dislikes immigrants. This was the hegemonic point of view in huge sectors of the Democratic Party, and it was divorced from how most people look at the world. People believe borders count and that if you come here, you should do so the right way. They did not hate immigrants, but they did not like a wave of illegal immigration.
Another example is the trans issue, which hurtled to the top of the Democrats’ litmus tests within about ten years. It became de rigueur to say trans rights are the preeminent civil rights issue, despite the fact that it was not historically controversial to say there should be no discrimination in housing, employment, or marriage. Instead, there was a push for everything from personal pronouns to gender-affirming care for minors and biological boys in girls’ sports. Underneath it all is the concept of gender identity—the idea that everyone has an innate identity that should frequently trump biological sex.
The idea that biological sex is real and that there are two sexes became a marker of transphobia. Anyone who believed that was labeled a transphobe. Look at what happened to Representative Seth Moulton, who said he was unsure about having biological boys on girls’ sports teams. He was hammered; his staff quit, and he was denounced as a Nazi.
That is an example of something far to the left culturally that became the dominant tendency in the party. It remains hard to dissent from the trans rights agenda, including gender-affirming care for minors, even as much of the world moves against the idea of medicalizing children with gender-nonconforming behavior. In the 2024 election, Trump’s most successful ad was “Harris is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” This is a loser in public opinion and does not make sense as policy or science, yet the party tenaciously holds onto it. To the extent anyone raises a question, the approach is to “shut up and pivot.” If someone mentions trans issues, the consultant-approved reply is that the billionaire class is trying to divert you.
Mounk: That is the line taken by the moderates in the party. The progressives are very loud on these issues and double down on them, while the moderates—like Abigail Spanberger in her race for governor in Virginia—might say that an issue like people who have gone through male puberty playing on women’s sports teams is something local school districts should regulate on their own. It is a way of bowing out of the discussion and having a talking point you can repeat over and over—I think she repeated it three times in a single minute of a debate—to avoid taking a substantive stance.
People like her feel completely boxed in. On one side is the realization that this is an 80-20 issue where a huge majority of independents, and actually most Democrats, are on the other side of the official party line. On the other hand, if you take a position that deviates from what highly engaged activists want, you make yourself so toxic that you are attacked aggressively. It takes a lot of courage to go against that.
When I speak to Democratic electeds, this is the issue on which I most often hear, I would love to vote for a particular bill that a more moderate Republican has introduced, but if I do, I will be primaried tomorrow. I just can’t. I have heard that from many electeds, as I am sure you have. Is there any way of changing those incentives, or are they so baked in that there is no moving them? What would it take for someone like Abigail Spanberger or the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee to speak in a more forthright manner on these issues?
Teixeira: Someone has to break the mold on this. I have used the term myself to describe what is really needed: a “Sister Souljah moment” where the hegemony of the Democratic Party’s professional-class activists is challenged on some of these key issues in an unapologetic way. Rahm Emanuel probably comes closest to that at this point.
Underneath what you have to contend with in the Democratic Party is the unavoidable fact that the professional class, which now votes heavily Democratic, holds a very radical point of view on many of the cultural issues we have discussed—and on climate issues as well. That makes it very difficult for someone to break the mold. It is not clear to me that it is impossible, however. If it happens, it will likely occur around the 2028 presidential cycle.
Mounk: Is this the sort of thing where, actually, if you are any candidate below the presidential level, the heat you take for taking a position like that is so big that you cannot afford it? You have to be the presidential candidate in order to make that break?
Teixeira: I think it is pretty common for parties to change their image in and around a presidential election cycle, where the person is going to define the image of the party. The presidential candidate takes a different position. Everything from “compassionate conservatism” back to Clinton and his approach. I think it is not out of the question that someone could do that in and around the 2028 cycle.
My fear, actually, is that everyone will be herded toward the same positions—maximum resistance to Trump and defending all the basic Democratic positions on these cultural issues. Otherwise, they will get hammered in the primary context because people to their left will attack them. Maybe there is an opening there for someone who is willing to do and say something different and see if there is a lane within the Democratic primary electorate for that.
The problem is that doing what you and I might recommend—if I may take the liberty of assuming we are similar in some of this stuff—would be great in the general election. The problem is getting through the primary electorate, the kinds of voters who show up in primary elections, and the political dynamics that are peculiar to them. To navigate that would be difficult. Right now, you are going to have Gavin Newsom and people like him.
Mounk: That might be easier for a presidential candidate than a lower-level candidate because, if you run for state representative, such a huge share of your electorate consists of people mobilized by local teachers’ unions and other Democratic interest groups. If they give the directive that you are “bad,” there is really no way of winning against it. If you are running at the presidential level, there is so much public attention on you and you have so much free media to put forward your ideas that, if they are compelling to a lot of people in the country, you can build your own kind of coalition.
In some of those issues where Democratic voters are split 50/50, or even less, you might be able to move. Even if a majority of the people who vote for a local state representative in the midterm elections agree, for example, with the recent ruling by the International Olympic Committee that transgender women are excluded from the female category in the Olympics, it is going to be really hard to get the nomination in a primary if you take that position very proactively. Because the share of people who participate in that election is so low, it is difficult to make your argument, since people are not paying a lot of attention. At a presidential level, that might be easier.
Teixeira: I think you’re right. There are two big factors there. One is just that it’s a wider primary electorate, even though it is still a primary electorate. The other is what you said: an enormous amount of free publicity is available for an aggressive candidate for the presidential nomination, which could be leveraged to try to move the conversation in their direction. There is a possibility there.
But where is the profile in courage? Where is the Democrat who is willing to do that and who is also a viable candidate? I like Rahm Emanuel; he has come closest to really raising serious questions about the Democratic approach. Can he get the traction necessary to do that? Maybe. One thing he may do is force the other candidates to reckon with some of these things. There will be debates, and if he is aggressive about raising these issues, maybe someone more viable will move toward his position. Perhaps it will create a lane for “normie” Democrats.
Mounk: Why is he not viable?
Teixeira: Well, I think he is viewed as too much of an operative. There is not a lot of money behind him. He is actually not close to the center of gravity of the Democratic Party today, particularly its more activist segment, but maybe he will be by the time things really develop in terms of the cycle. I do not want to completely disparage his chances; I would love it if he had better chances than he does. I am just trying to be realistic about who he is now and where the debate currently is. I do not know what his betting market rate is at this point, but I bet it is pretty low. I know where it is good—it was a very cheap buy. Gavin Newsom is probably too expensive now. Maybe everyone out there should buy Rahm Emanuel in the betting markets; that is my advice.
Mounk: I want to ask you a strategic question. One of the most striking stats I saw about the 2024 election—and I therefore talked about it repeatedly, including on this podcast—is that when you look at the socioeconomic coalition put together by Kamala Harris and compare it to the socioeconomic coalitions put together by Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and also by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton, the one it most resembles is not her Democratic predecessors. It is the coalition put together by Bob Dole in 1996, the Republican candidate, which is to say that the Democrats are now the party of the highly-educated and the relatively affluent.
There is a way of thinking about two demographic problems the Democratic Party has. The first is that they have become hopeless among rural voters. They have gone from getting a majority of the white working-class vote in the past, to getting a significant minority of it for many years, to just bleeding votes in that demographic in an extremely rapid way. That is one of the demographic problems.
The other demographic problem is that, as you predicted back in the 2000s, the diversification of America was meant to buoy the prospects of the Democratic Party. States like Florida, which was the decisive state in 2000 with the hanging chads and all of that, were meant to become solidly Democratic as they became more diverse and majority-minority. What has happened is that Florida is now solidly Republican, and even Texas has not moved strongly toward the Democratic Party. There is a Hispanic, to some extent Asian American, and even black working-class problem that the Democratic Party has—bleeding rather than building its electoral base among those voting groups.
To what extent does the Democratic Party need a distinct strategy for each of these demographic groups? To what extent is this downstream from the same problem? Is there one set of fixes that would actually buoy the prospects of the Democratic Party among both of those demographic groups, or does it take different approaches to strengthen its positioning with each?
Teixeira: The good news for the Democrats is that they have the votes of these influential professional-class voters; the bad news is that this very fact makes it hard for the party to strike a different tone. The solution is to recognize how toxic your image has become in many areas of the country. You need to break from priorities that people see as out of whack with their worldview and culture. That will be tough and will invite blowback, but it is the only way through. If you want to stop the ongoing bleeding among working-class voters, including non-white working-class voters, that is what you have to do. It will take time and you will get flack, but otherwise, you are stuck with a professional-class-driven coalition.
Occasionally, you will pick up working-class voters when they are dissatisfied with the incumbent party, but they will not stick around. We see this in the polls as Trump’s popularity has declined. As I mentioned in my article, voters who are disaffected with Trump and are not necessarily voting Republican in 2028 do not like the Democrats either. The fact that they are no longer down with Trump does not mean they see the Democrats as their party.
You must make a conscious effort to reach voters outside the professional-class mainstream; if you do not, they will never come back. You have to be willing to take some flack and have “Sister Souljah moments” that accept the reality of contemporary class divisions. I wish I could be more optimistic that they will do this soon, but there is evidence they think they can manage the problem just by talking about affordability and kitchen-table issues. They think that by saying the billionaire class is picking your pocket, they can fix problems that have developed over twenty years. I think that is delusional, but it is what people believe.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ruy discuss whether a third party presidential bid could be viable, what happened to The Liberal Patriot, and what this means for the Democrats. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
