The Democratic Party has spent most of the past decade deciding to lose.

Or so argues a new report from Welcome PAC, an organization that backs center-left candidates, so as to build “a big-tent Democratic Party.”

It is no secret that the Democrats are in a sorry state. They’ve lost to an exceptionally unpopular Republican presidential nominee twice in the last nine years. They have long odds of regaining control of the Senate next year and aren’t even certain to retake the House of Representatives. They’re historically unpopular, having lost ground with much of the party’s traditional base — including voters who are working class, people of color, young, or all of the above.

To determine how this happened, Welcome’s Simon Bazelon conducted six months of polling with nearly half a million voters, examined the results of hundreds of recent elections, analyzed shifts in the Democratic Party’s legislative priorities, and crunched various other data points. In so doing, Bazelon produced a rigorous and thorough accounting of what the centrist organization already knew: The Democratic Party has veered too far left, effectively choosing to prioritize progressive orthodoxy over electoral success.

Welcome’s report has already resonated with many of the Democratic Party’s leadership. And if Bazelon’s analysis proves persuasive to Democratic insiders, it could shape the trajectory of the party’s 2028 presidential primary — and thus, the future of American democracy.

To see how well that analysis stands up to scrutiny, I spoke with Bazelon about various progressive objections to his arguments. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Key takeaways

• The Democratic Party has become more left wing since 2012, as measured by the types of bills it supports in Congress. Over that same period, the share of Americans who say the party is too liberal has risen in polls.
• Democrats have also shifted the focus of their messaging away from the electorate’s core economic concerns, with words related to the environment and identity appearing more frequently in its platforms.
• Among Democratic candidates, there is no correlation between being influential on social media and successful in elections.
• Nonvoters and swing voters have similar issue priorities and policy views.

Give me the short version of your story: How did Democrats end up in their present state?

Since Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, the Democratic Party has undergone two really major shifts. First, we have shifted our priorities, focusing less on kitchen table economic issues and more on issues that are less concrete and more abstract to voters: climate change, democracy, abortion, and other identity and cultural issues.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party became a lot more left wing than it used to be across the board. In 2013, 24 percent of Democrats in Congress co-sponsored Medicare-for-all. In 2023, that was 47 percent. In 2013, 41 percent of Democrats in Congress co-sponsored an assault weapons ban. Now, it’s 88 percent. Only 1 percent co-sponsored a reparations study bill in 2013. Now, that’s a majority. And I think these two shifts are primarily responsible for the situation that Democrats are in today.

At the same time, polls also show that voters believe Democrats have been focusing too much on social issues and not enough on concrete economic issues.

Elections are complicated and multi-causal. In 2024, there was obviously a big anti-incumbent surge around the world. Inflation played a big role, but immigration also became incredibly salient to voters. They really disapproved of the way that the Biden administration handled immigration. And I think you can draw a direct line from the party’s leftward shift to the Biden administration’s handling of immigration to voter disapproval of Biden to Trump gaining votes.

And there’s another indication that the ideological shift mattered: Democratic candidates who have resisted these shifts, who are more in line with where the party was 10 or 15 years ago, do better electorally.

Some political scientists have disputed that and suggested the benefits of moderation have all but disappeared in recent elections. In their view, when we look at results from 2024 or 2022, we simply don’t see moderate candidates significantly outperforming extreme ones. What do you think they get wrong?

It’s going to be hard to answer this question without really getting into technical specifics. But I’ll say that Grumbach and Bonica’s papers are one data point. They have a view. I think looking at the full sweep of the literature over the last decade, the primary thrust is that there still is a penalty for more ideologically extreme candidates and a benefit for more ideologically moderate candidates. I think it is true that that benefit is smaller than it was 20 years ago. But also, elections are a lot closer than they used to be.

Adam Bonica’s own paper from last spring found that running a more moderate candidate would be worth a 1 percentage point increase in Democrats’ share of the vote in a presidential election.

Well, if Democrats did one point better in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections, they would have won........

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