About a week ago, both Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Last at The Bulwark had piees up arguing different electoral strategies for the Democratic party. Yglesias argued that while the current Democratic party is at least competitive in national majority votes (good enough for bragging rights and probably the House) they are at a decisive disadvantage when it comes to winning the Senate in 2026 and in a challenging position when it comes to electoral college. What’s necessary, he argues, is a major repositioning on issues like guns and fossil fuels (among other issues) to make Democrats competitive in Senate contests in states like Iowa or Texas, states that often seem like they might elect a Democrat but then don’t. For the purposes of this conversation we might slot in immigration and trans rights for Yglesias fossil fuels and guns. In a way, the arguments were captured by a series of speeches freshman Senator Elisa Slotkin started giving around the same time which she captured as a prescription that Democrats needed to shed their reputation for being “weak and woke” in order to battle and defeat Trump.
Meanwhile Last made a totally different argument nicely captured in the headline “Dear Democrats: STFU About ‘Woke’“. The argument was that Democrats are the opposition and that the role of the opposition, especially in such a binary, manichaean moment, is to systematically disqualify the party in power. Any naval-gazing or attempted rebrands are somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive.
As with all big framing questions, answers to questions like these don’t come in absolutes but more matters of degree. But I’m definitely more on Last’s side of this argument. Beyond this, parties grow and transform much less by thinking and hypothesizing than by acting. Commentators and idea-people will always obsess about an opposition party needing a fully fleshed out vision for government, for their party, for their preferred set of policies. But this is a ‘think more than do’ bias held by people who think and write more than do. That’s almost never how anything plays out. Opposition parties win when they manage in whole or in part to discredit the party in power – almost always with a ton of help from the party in power itself.
With this in mind if I were in charge of any Democratic electoral operations my goal right now would be to be investing a lot of money in doing everything possible in Iowa to discredit the Trump White House with a view toward defeating Joni Ernst next year. (Not solely in Iowa but it’s a place where the logic and opportunities are among the clearest.) Right now the Trump White House is playing havoc with the farm sector from countless different directions – gutting the FDA and the USDA and various loan programs that facilitate family farming. They’re also gutting the Veterans Administration as well as various health care programs that support older Americans and rural voters. The White House is giving Democrats quite a lot to work with.
Democrats have mostly written Iowa off as a red state. And in presidential elections that may be right. But the actual details of the state are much less monochromatic than that suggests. Joni Ernst won her Senate seat in 2014 with just a fraction over 52% of the vote and then actually got fractionally less than 52% when she won reelection in 2020. She’s a formidable candidate. But that’s far from unbeatable. A politician wants to expand on their original election margin, especially in a state perceived as trending in her party’s direction. At least in 2020 she didn’t manage that kind of consolidation that is usually the sign of a politician who is going to be around for a long time.
You beat a candidate like Ernst in this kind of climate by disqualifying her or at least the President she so loyally serves. It’s an example that parties grow and evolve and improve by doing far more than doing, acting more than grandplanning. The DC discourse tells us that the Democrats lost in 2024 because their party became too “woke” and identified with purported elite concerns about trans rights, DEI, “open borders” and the like. The truth I think is a bit different. The reality of the 2024 election is that there was concentrated public unhappiness with inflation, the high cost of living and other dislocations tied to the aftermath of the pandemic. Republicans were able to make the case with a key slice of voters that Democrats were indifferent to the cost of living because they were so focused on pronouns and DEI. That notorious Trump ad (“Kamala is for they/them. I am for you”) I think captures this.
A great deal of politics is about: who are you for? Who do you care about? Obviously, anti-trans voters ate this ad up. But I think it’s real power comes in that message about, who are you for? Who do you care about? Trans right supporters make a very good point when they point to polls which show most voters are not anti-trans. Where things break down is on the question of salience. If Republicans can successfully make the argument that Democrats don’t care about cost of living challenges facing the majority of Americans because they’re hyper-focused on trans issues or making sure trans-women can compete in women’s supports that’s a big problem. You change that misunderstanding or perhaps you get the party to change less by holding performative intra-party battles than simply by driving up the salience of different issues through the act of being an opposition.
If the issue is that voters think Democrats are all about trans rights and barely notice non-trans families who are struggling with inflation or the high cost of living how do you address that? One plan is to hold an open-ended “reckoning” and sackcloth wearing about wokeness. Another is to spend the next year and a half making the case against and organizing against how the Trump White House is hurting basically every family in Iowa with its policies. It’s probably no surprise that I think the second option is more promising. At a basic level, Democrats who are currently focused on repositioning the party away from being ‘woke’ sound like they’re in a time warp. People are scared about losing their jobs. They’re upset about authoritarian attacks on the rule of law. There’s deepening pessimism about a looming recession. A big focus on ‘wokism’ seems mostly like someone is in a timewarp. It’s just not what people are thinking about right now. They’re worried about Trump and the climate of chaos and uncertainty.
The additional issue here is that politics is all about salience. That’s why people so frequently get themselves mixed up with polls. Maybe your issue has 80-20 support. But if it’s not what voters are voting on it’s irrelevant. Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump White House cuts to medical research. But it’s not getting a lot of traction at the moment. Because most people don’t know about it. It’s not a driving focus of the news. It’s salience is low. So it makes sense for Democrats to do everything they can to focus more attention on it.
Democrats aren’t going to become an anti-trans party. Even if some consultant thinks that’s a great idea that’s simply not going to happen. Belief in bodily autonomy, personal identity vs traditionalism and personal freedom are simply too ingrained in the great majority of Democratic voters. If there’s an issue it’s one of emphasis, whether the political emphasis is on the unicorn-level rarity of access to Olympic level sports vs the gratuitous cruelty the right wants to aim at trans kids. More than anything else it’s about getting out of under the argument made by the right that Democrats are only about trans rights and don’t care about people losing access to health care coverage or struggling with a rising cost of living.
On all this you make progress by doing far more than by grand strategizing. Right now the issue is Trump and the damage he is doing on so many fronts. That’s not just Democrats saying that. It’s the majority view. You lean into that. You lead by opposing. Pundits constantly harp on the claim that there’s something cheap about opposing. What’s important is a positive vision. They’re wrong. The positive vision emerges from the outlines of what you oppose. But fundamentally the job of an opposition is to oppose. Don’t overcomplicate it. It’s not simply than you gain more ground from opposing than from grand-strategizing. You learn more from it too.
