OpinionGuest Essay

Credit...Kyle Ellingson

Supported by

By Timothy Shenk

Mr. Shenk is a historian and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming “Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.”

Something in the Democratic Party’s subconscious knows that in times of change it should go to Chicago.

It’s the city where, in 1896, a 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan sent convention delegates into raptures by railing against Gilded Age plutocrats and urging Democrats to reconnect with their populist roots. It’s where Franklin Roosevelt announced the coming of a New Deal in 1932, starting a political revolution that pushed the Republican Party to the verge of extinction. It’s where the Roosevelt coalition ripped itself apart in 1968, with protesters and students brawling in the streets and delegates at one another’s throats. It’s where Bill Clinton went in 1996 to put the ghost of the ’60s to rest and build a bridge to the 21st century. And it’s where, next week, the party of Bryan, Roosevelt and Clinton will become the party of Kamala Harris.

But what is she going to do with it? Although Ms. Harris isn’t the kind of politician who dreams about sweeping transformations — “fancy speeches,” she says, aren’t her thing — she has a unique opportunity to set the course for Democrats as they stumble out of the Biden years, to outline the steps for beating Donald Trump this fall and renew the party over the next generation.

The easiest option will be to keep heading down the road Democrats have followed since Mr. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. eight years ago. This means piecing together an anti-MAGA coalition in a campaign defined by opposition to Mr. Trump while tacitly giving up on blue-collar voters who have moved toward the Republican Party. Although the track record of this program has been spotty — just ask Hillary Clinton — it has by no means been a disaster for Democrats. The Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, summarized the logic in a memo detailing a path to victory shortly after President Biden left the race, arguing that Ms. Harris is poised to match his 2020 levels of support with nonwhite voters, young people and women, while improving on the party’s already strong performance with college-educated whites.

There’s another choice, a campaign dedicated to restoring the party’s frayed connection with the working class. This path is tougher to follow and could well be riskier in the short term because it requires providing a compelling reason to vote for Ms. Harris rather than against Mr. Trump. It’s also the plan with the best chance of building a lasting Democratic majority that could deal a hammer blow against Trumpism and pull American democracy back from the brink.

The key figures in this strategy are voters deeply skeptical of elites and alienated from both parties, usually because they lean to the left on economics but have cultural views closer to the center or the right. A political scientist might call them anti-system and ideologically cross-pressured, but you could also think of them as burn-it-down moderates. Politics doesn’t occupy much of their attention, in part because they probably didn’t graduate from college, which also means they’re more likely to come from the working or lower-middle class.

These voters have been moving away from Democrats since the 1960s. For most of this period, the group has been overwhelmingly white, but it has recently become more diverse, with Hispanic voters and younger Black men drifting away from their traditional partisan moorings under Mr. Biden, a phenomenon polls suggest Ms. Harris has not fully reversed.

It’s easy to assume that in a ferociously polarized electorate Democrats have no chance at winning back these voters in significant numbers. But polarization isn’t a force of nature, and party coalitions aren’t dictated by factors outside human control.

To understand how to break out of our current political stalemate, you have to look back at the last time Democrats came to Chicago with a nominee looking for a reset with the public and willing to wage an all-out war against polarization to get it. Bill Clinton was rewarded a few months later with a distinctly Rooseveltian coalition anchored in the bottom half of the income distribution — and with a victory on Election Day.

Ms. Harris still has a chance to assemble that kind of coalition. That makes it the perfect time to take a look at the strategy that made it possible almost 30 years ago.

Mr. Clinton’s campaign could have fallen apart on the day he accepted the presidential nomination in 1996. As he was huddled with staffers putting the final touches on his convention speech, news leaked that Dick Morris, his chief strategist, had kept up a long-running relationship with a prostitute. Clinton staffers were accustomed to what they called “bimbo eruptions,” but only when they came from the candidate. Mr. Morris was off the campaign within hours.

His departure left a vacuum that was quickly filled by Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, two longtime consultants who have become familiar characters in histories about the making of the modern Democratic Party. And by “characters” I mean “villains” — the pollsters behind the New Democratic push to abandon the working class, which spurred a populist revolt that gave the world President Donald Trump. Today, they are both frequent guests on conservative media who can be counted on to chastise Democrats for moving........

© The New York Times