Transcript: What the Democratic Moderation Debate Gets Wrong |
Transcript: What the Democratic Moderation Debate Gets Wrong
Political scientist Jake Grumbach explains why Democrats are doing well in recent elections despite not moving to the center in the way that some pundits want.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. This is Perry Bacon—I’m the host of Right Now, a show from The New Republic. I’m joined today by Jake Grumbach. He’s a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and he’s been a guest once before. Jake, welcome.
Jake Grumbach: Thanks for having me back on, Perry.
Bacon: Good to see you. So I want to talk about something you’ve written a lot about—this Democratic Party debate about so-called moderation. There were two pieces this week that I thought were really telling.
One is from The New York Times: “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?” And the second is from a site called The Liberal Patriot, titled “No Learning Please, We’re Democrats.”
Both pieces are different in some ways, but they share the same basic argument: that after the 2024 election there was a lot of talk about the Democratic Party needing to move—to become more so-called moderate, particularly on so-called social or cultural issues. And both authors are now lamenting that the Democratic Party has not moved to the right as much as they had hoped.
I think they’re correct that the Democratic Party has not necessarily become more anti-immigration or moved on trans rights. I might feel differently about whether that’s the right diagnosis, but I want to unpack a little bit why this has happened.
Let’s start with the Liberal Patriot piece, because it goes through several specific issues. I’m going to ask you two questions about each one: first, do you think this is an actual problem with the Democratic Party? And second, would moderating help—would moderating in a policy sense help? And if not, what would?
The first issue the Liberal Patriot raises is what it calls the culture problem: there’s a yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working-class voter. So: is the culture problem a real problem, and is it solved by ideological moderation?
Grumbach: I think political parties—both the Democratic and Republican parties—represent different groups within society, and therefore always struggle to combine sets of committed activists, party stalwarts, and constituencies they’ve represented for a long time: Black voters in the Democratic Party, rural whites and evangelical whites in the Republican Party.
This is a known challenge for political parties around the world, in democracies and partial democracies like the U.S. But the thing that strategists and pundits have really locked in on over the past couple of years is this very simple answer: the Democratic Party needs to moderate, get more centrist on the left-right dimension—typically with an emphasis on culture-war issues.
Ruy Teixeira is the writer of The Liberal Patriot blog, and he is a fascinating character. Back in the Obama era, he was writing about the permanent Democratic majority on the basis of young people and voters of color as this new multicultural coalition. Then the Trump era comes, and suddenly it’s about the white working class that’s been lost. The point here is that there are a lot of moving parts, and moving in a centrist direction is not something that can just be done easily.
We saw Kamala Harris—a mainstream California liberal, I would say, in the middle of the Democratic Party—really try to run a moderate campaign in the 2024 presidential election. Not speaking to Gaza, tough-on-crime prosecutor, the toughest cop on the beat, very much not defund the police. And that didn’t work. There were other structural reasons—things like inflation and the way voters who don’t pay a ton of attention to the news reacted to it. And it’s actually really hard to make yourself look more moderate; you end up looking like a flip-flopper who doesn’t believe in anything.
There’s this uncanny valley for Democratic candidates, as Chris Hayes recently mentioned in an interview I liked, where you are seen by the base of the Democratic Party as a centrist sellout, and seen by the Republican Party as the ultimate partisan lib—capital-D Democrat. That was the Hillary Clinton problem. Hillary Clinton actually governed as a New York senator as a moderate Democrat—she’s part of the Clinton family, a historically nineties-moderate part of the Democratic coalition—and that still didn’t work.
What my coauthor Adam and I have been advocating is breaking out of this left-right dimension—particularly in this age of authoritarianism. We actually don’t know what works; elections are hugely uncertain. There are some things we know, but most things we don’t, and polls are very volatile right now. So anybody selling you the idea that just moderating will save democracy is selling you something. That’s the short answer, but I’d love to rant more on this.
Bacon: So let me ask: are Democratic Party leaders culturally out of step with voters? You seem to be saying that on some level, all politicians are.
Grumbach: Yes. Politicians themselves have incredibly huge egos—which is part of why the U.S. federal political class is among the oldest in the world. These are people who don’t want to retire, people who really believe in their own importance. And politicians, by definition, are not like the rest of society.
At the same time, it’s really crucial for parties to recruit candidates who are authentic and relatable, because voters don’t think all that much about policy and politics all the time—at least those swing voters who often determine elections. That’s why you sometimes see candidates with credible messaging.
I think James Talarico is a new example of trying to sidestep the trans rights issue through an authentically liberal Christian ethos. You can’t design this in a lab—you need to allow candidates to be themselves, because otherwise they come off as pandering lab rats attempting to craft messaging directly for the audience, and voters can really see through that.
Trump and the Republican Party are out of step on many issues. The Democratic Party has sometimes been out of step too, although its policy platform at the national level is much more popular than the Republican platform—especially economically. But here’s another example. The Biden administration from 2021 through 2023 did have a more liberal asylum policy on immigration—for people showing up and claiming asylum fleeing violence, especially from Central America, a large number were basically granted stays. That did provoke some backlash, but the Biden administration and Kamala Harris shifted much more conservative on this in 2023 and locked it down.
They became more centrist on the issue—but the damage was done in some ways, and when they shifted, nobody really believed it was credible. People thought the old policy was still in place. That’s an example where everybody at the Democratic elite level knows that story, and nobody is doing that asylum policy anymore. It’s done.
So these pieces that keep coming out saying “get more moderate on these issue areas”—it’s already baked in. And when you hear “moderate on immigration” now, what that really means is what the Trump administration is doing: internal mass deportation, secret police, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, it’s killed American citizens.
For the Democratic Party to take its foot off the gas on immigration right now would be very foolish. The point is there is no simple moderate recipe to capture ostensibly white working-class median voters. You have to be authentic. There are times the Democratic Party has taken policy stances that are out of touch, but it’s not a one-to-one—not something you can pander your way out of. This debate has just totally jumped the shark at this point.
Bacon: So I think what the Liberal Patriot piece is saying—and I think this part is well taken—is that if you do a poll, what you’d find is that college-educated Democrats are probably to the left on these issues: more pro-choice, more pro-trans rights—more willing to say there’s racism in America than non-college Democrats. And so it’s worth asking what we’re capturing here.
My guess is that the people who marched in Selma were to the so-called left of the people who stayed home in Selma. So I’m not sure what these poll gaps actually tell us. But what do you think?
Grumbach: It’s a great point. So sometimes over time, mass opinion on cultural, racial, gender, and sexuality issues has gotten more liberal—that’s a fact. Interracial marriage: my own parents’ marriage was very unpopular back in the day, and now it has over 90 percent support.
The legalization of interracial marriage, pro-choice attitudes especially, gay rights and LGBT rights in general—when we think about the early nineties Will & Grace era versus nationally legal gay marriage and the cultural impact of LGBT individuals. The point here, though, is that there’s a trade-off in the positions you take on these social issues.
On the one hand, leadership through activism—political leaders and so forth—can move public opinion and help bring it into the future. At the same time, in the present snapshot in time, you may be a step ahead of where people are right now. That’s a trade-off that needs to be acknowledged. You get maybe a short-term loss for a long-term gain. There are various trade-offs that parties and activist groups face on these issues.
When you listen to the moderation punditry, there is no trade-off. There is a snapshot in time where voters are frozen with fixed opinions, and it’s treated as permanent. That’s why G. Elliott Morris, the pollster, writes about opinion trajectories. For example, leaders basically knew that internal ICE........