Why Democrats Need Their Own Trump

We are more than 1,200 days away from the 2028 presidential election, but the Democratic presidential primary is already well underway. The likely candidates are fund-raising, hosting campaign rallies, starting podcasts and staking out ideological lanes.

Candidates will try to carve out distinct political identities, but one challenge unites them all: Their party is historically unpopular. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is 22 percentage points underwater — 60 percent of respondents view it unfavorably, 38 favorably. Apart from the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency, that is by far the lowest it’s been during the more than 30 years Pew Research has collected data.

The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps, moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition — one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause — the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.

It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump.

To be clear, the blueprint I refer to is not the one Mr. Trump has used to violate democratic norms and destabilize American institutions, but rather the one for resetting how Americans view a party and its leaders.

In January 2013, at the time of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were deeply unpopular. Conservative thought leaders like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove advocated comprehensive immigration reform as a pathway back to a majority. By the summer, the base’s backlash to the idea was itself so comprehensive that many of them were forced to retreat.