Shor, David (1991- )

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    The Vanishing Moderate Democrat

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    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Early last year, as Democrats were preparing to control the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade, Josh Gottheimer met with Nancy Pelosi to discuss their party’s message. Sitting in the House speaker’s office in the U.S. Capitol, he opened up the YouTube app on his iPhone. There was something he wanted to show her.Gottheimer, who represents a wealthy suburban and exurban House district in northern New Jersey, was first elected to Congress in 2016; his victory over a seven-term Republican incumbent, in a district in which Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton, was one of the Democrats’ few bright spots that year. Since his arrival in Washington, however, Gottheimer has been the cause of more headaches than celebrations for Pelosi and her leadership team.As co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus — a group of 29 Democrats and 29 Republicans that quixotically aspires to the goal of bipartisan compromise — he has frequently found himself at odds with his fellow Democrats on everything from foreign policy to President Biden’s domestic agenda to Pelosi’s leadership. In 2018, Gottheimer and eight other Problem Solver Democrats threatened to reject Pelosi’s bid for speaker if she didn’t concede to their demands for rules changes that would make it easier for bipartisan ideas to be considered, angering colleagues who viewed it as yet another instance of Gottheimer and his group’s engaging in pointless grandstanding rather than constructive behind-the-scenes work. “Tell me a problem they’ve solved,” Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, says.Pelosi, however, had agreed to their demands and secured their support. Now she was willing to hear Gottheimer out about how the new Democratic majority should position itself. He pressed play and his iPhone screen filled with waving American flags as an old but familiar voice emerged, proclaiming, “I am honored to have been given the opportunity to stand up for the values and the interests of ordinary Americans.” The video was a television advertisement from Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Over images of construction workers and children and police officers, a series of bold captions touted Clinton’s first-term accomplishments: “WELFARE REFORM, WOREK REQUIREMENTS”; “TAXES CUT FOR 15,000,000 FAMILIES”; “DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG KINGPINS.” His promises for a second term followed: “BAN ‘COP-KILLER’ BULLETS”; “CAPITAL GAINS TAX CUT FOR HOME OWNERS”; “BALANCE THE BUDGET FOR A GROWING ECONOMY” “We are safer, we are more secure, we are more prosperous,” Clinton said. When the ad was over, Gottheimer says, he looked at Pelosi. “This is how we won,” he told her, “and this is how we win again.”Representative Josh Gottheimer of northern New Jersey, a co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus.Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty ImagesIn April, almost a year and a half later, Gottheimer screened the ad again, this time for me. He provided his own color commentary as it played. “Fiscal responsibility … jobs … tax cuts … he put cops in the ad!” Gottheimer, who served as a White House speechwriter during Clinton’s second term, exclaimed. When it was over, he sighed. “Think about how different that message is,” he said. I asked him what Pelosi’s reaction was when he played it for her. Gottheimer demurred. But the answer seemed obvious. The message that Pelosi and the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership had chosen for their party, the message that Democrats would be carrying into the 2022 midterm elections, was not the one that Gottheimer, and the disembodied voice of Bill Clinton, had counseled.Gottheimer and I were eating breakfast at a diner on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J. In a month, he told me, the busy state highway outside would be lined with campaign signs that read “Josh Gottheimer for Congress: Lower Taxes, Jersey Values.” “I’m the only Democrat in the country who puts ‘lower taxes’ on his signs,” he said. “ ‘Jersey values’ are about cops, firefighters, vets — I’ll get your back.” Although the old Clinton ad wasn’t his party’s current message, it was certainly his. “These are the issues that I continue to stress back home in my district,” he said. It would not be hyperbole to say that Gottheimer runs his political life there according to Clinton’s tenets.The most immediate question for Gottheimer and other moderate Democrats is whether that will be enough come November. Midterm elections have been historically brutal for the party that controls the White House. In 2006, Republicans took a “thumping,” as George W. Bush described it at the time, losing 30 seats in the House, six seats in the Senate and control of both chambers. Four years later, it was the Democrats’ turn to suffer a “shellacking,” as Barack Obama put it, with Republicans gaining 63 seats and a new majority in the House. In 2018, Democrats capitalized on resistance to Donald Trump and gained 41 seats on their way to taking back the House.This year, with Democrats clinging to a 10-seat majority in the House (almost guaranteed to drop to nine with a special election in Nebraska on June 28), most political handicappers expect Republicans to reclaim control of the chamber easily; the only real uncertainty is just how big the Red Wave will be, with predictions about the number of seats Republicans will gain ranging from less than 20 to more than 60. (Despite the public hearings of the House committee investigating Jan. 6, most Democrats running for election are not attempting to make the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election a referendum on Republicans.)The bigger, more consequential question — not just for the moderates but for all Democrats — is whether this projected midterm wipeout is merely a cyclical occurrence or the manifestation of a much deeper and more intractable problem. Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left on almost every salient political issue. Some of these shifts in a more ambitiously progressive direction, especially as they pertain to economic issues, have largely tracked with public opinion: While socialism might not poll well with voters, Democratic proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and lower the age of Medicare eligibility do.But on social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party’s base cheer but the rest of the electorate does not. “The Democratic Party moved left,” says Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, “but the country as a whole hasn’t.”Republicans have sought to exploit this gap by waging an aggressive culture war against Democrats. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and frequent Fox News guest who has turned critical race theory into a right-wing cudgel, wrote on Twitter last year that he intended to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” More recently, he has attacked Democrats for, he charged, attempting to indoctrinate school children with “trans ideology.” Rick Scott, the Florida senator who heads the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, told reporters in June, “The election is going to be about inflation, critical race theory, funding the police — that’s what it’s going to be about.” The result, fair or not, is that the Democratic Party is now perceived by a growing segment of American voters as espousing the furthest left position possible on many of the country’s most fraught and most divisive issues.“There’s a sense among voters that Democrats are too focused on social issues,” says Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, “and those are more left-wing social issues that people think they’re too focused on.” In May, CNN asked 1,007 American voters for their opinions on the country’s two major political parties. After four years of Trump in the White House, an insurrection and unsuccessful attempt to overturn a presidential election and now a Republican Party that can be fairly described as a cult of personality and is moving further right on many of the same social issues, 46 percent of those surveyed considered the G.O.P. to be “too extreme.” But 48 percent of them viewed the Democratic Party the same way.All of which has occasioned not just the normal midterm agita but something closer to an existential crisis among moderate Democrats. While some of them remain reluctant to publicly concede the reality that the Democratic Party has indeed shifted left — either out of fear of angering their fellow Democrats or validating Republican attacks — they will readily acknowledge that voters perceive the party as having drifted out of the mainstream. And they are convinced that this is threatening their political survival. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party has a problem as a toxic brand,” says Max Rose, a moderate New York Democrat who lost re-election to his House seat in Staten Island in 2020 — his Republican opponent characterized Rose’s attendance at a George Floyd protest march as anti-police — and is running to reclaim the seat this year. “There’s a perception that the party is not on the side of working people, that it’s not on the side of the middle class.”That perception has penetrated even the immediate families of Democratic politicians. “My own mother-in-law, a Republican, believes I’m some sort of unicorn because I can put sentences together and I’m not rabid and left-leaning,” says Chrissy Houlahan, a moderate Democratic congresswoman who represents a swing district in the swing state of Pennsylvania. “I believe the national Democratic Party is where I am. I don’t believe that the way people perceive the national Democratic Party is where I am.”But the Democrats’ leftward trend, whether real or perceived, is resoundingly popular with, and often reinforced by, the party’s staff members and activists and especially its donors, who fund a slew of nonprofits and super PACs that relentlessly push the progressive line. In America’s very blue and very online precincts, performative positioning is often accepted as a substitute for the compromises that can be necessary to secure legislation — whether it’s Schumer and Pelosi donning kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol to demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in lieu of actual police reform or Biden traveling to Atlanta to attack Republicans as supporters of “Jim Crow 2.0” in a speech on behalf of voting rights legislation that had no chance of passage.The problem, says Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist who most recently worked for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, is that “in today’s world, what happens on Twitter or in a D-plus-40 district doesn’t stay there. It travels to every race across the country.” And it inherently limits the appeal of Democrats in those races. “If we become a party of the elite-elites, there death awaits,” says Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.), the House Democrats’ campaign arm, pointing to the influence of college activists. “We’ll all agree with each other right into extinction.”The Democrats most at risk of extinction this November are Gottheimer and his fellow House moderates, who typically represent the sorts of swing districts where being painted as an identitarian socialist is the political kiss of death. “We are, almost by definition, the low-hanging fruit in every election,” says Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and member of the Problem Solvers. Although Biden won Gottheimer’s district by more than five points in 2020, and the district got even bluer under New Jersey’s newly drawn congressional maps so that Democrats now have a seven-point edge there, the D.C.C.C. has put him on its “Frontline” list of vulnerable incumbents. Of the 37 Frontliners, the overwhelming majority belong to the Problem Solvers or one of the other two groups for moderate House Democrats: the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition. And then there are the two dozen or so moderate House Democrats who have decided not to run at all in 2022, quitting before they could be fired.It’s enough to drive Gottheimer, 47, to frustration — and to send him searching nearly three decades back in time for answers. In Congress, he has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from his more liberal Democratic colleagues, whom he has privately derided as “the herbal tea party.” The enmity has been mutual. After The Intercept reported the “herbal tea party” insult in 2019, the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a link to the article and wrote, “What’s funny is that there *are* Dems that do act like the Tea Party — but they’re conservative.” It was not the first or last time Gottheimer found himself at the bottom of an online pile-on. Two years ago, his clashes with liberals earned him a left-wing primary challenger who branded him “Trump’s favorite Democrat.” Gottheimer won by 33 points. “The social media Democrats are not the Democrats back home,” he told me during another conversation in his congressional office. “Those aren’t my constituents.”But now, he complained, “the far right is trying to do everything they can to equate many of us to the socialist left,” and he’s worried his constituents will start to believe it. The challenge for Gottheimer and his fellow moderates, however, is not just to define what they are not, but what they actually are. While there is a growing group of Democrats who believe that their party needs to become more moderate, it’s not clear that any of them agree on — or, in some cases, even know — what it means to be a moderate Democrat anymore.In January 1989, Al From invited Bill Galston to breakfast at La Colline, a French restaurant on Capitol Hill. From was a former congressional staff member who, four years earlier, co-founded the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.), a group of mostly Southern and Western Democrats who were trying to remake the party in their moderate image. They called themselves the New Democrats.Galston was a University of Maryland public-policy professor who moonlighted as an adviser to Democratic presidential campaigns — in 1988, working for Al Gore’s ill-fated campaign. The previous November, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 percentage points and 315 electoral votes, the Democrats’ third straight landslide presidential defeat. At La Colline, From asked Galston what was wrong with their party. Democrats, Galston answered, were in denial — focusing on the chimeras of higher turnout and better fund-raising when, in fact, it was their “unacceptably liberal” positions that was the problem. By not grappling with that fact, Galston told From, Democrats were engaging in “the politics of evasion.”From commissioned Galston and the political scientist Elaine Kamarck to write up the argument for the D.L.C.’s new think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, which published “The Politics of Evasion” that September. Galston and Kamarck did not mince words. “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote. The Democratic Party was “increasingly dominated by minority groups and white elites — a coalition viewed by the middle class as unsympathetic to its interests and its values.” Unless Democrats convinced those middle-class voters (who at that time were predominantly white) that they were tough on crime, trustworthy on foreign policy and disciplined about government spending, they would continue to wander the political wilderness.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.).Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty ImagesIn the past, the New Democrats shied away from outright conflict with the party’s liberal wing — refusing to return fire, for instance, when Jesse Jackson dubbed the D.L.C. “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” But “The Politics of Evasion” counseled that internecine fighting was good: “Only conflict and controversy over basic economic, social and defense issues are likely to attract the attention needed to convince the public that the party still has something to offer the great middle of the American electorate.” Bill Clinton, who as Arkansas governor became the D.L.C. chairman in 1990, took that message to heart in his 1992 presidential campaign.That summer, shortly after he cinched the Democratic nomination, Clinton gave a speech to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition group — in which he attacked the group for also hosting a relatively obscure rapper named Sister Souljah, who in the wake of that year’s Los Angeles riots said in an interview, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton told the Rainbow Coalition that “if you took the words ‘white’ and ‘Black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Jackson was furious and called on Clinton to apologize — exactly the response Clinton was hoping for. The Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page later wrote that by picking the fight, Clinton “impressed swing voters, particularly white suburbanites, with a confident independence from Jackson that other Democratic presidential candidates had not shown.” A loudly performed repudiation of a putative far-left extremist would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment.”Clinton ran for president as a factional candidate, against the Republicans but also against his party’s liberal wing, so that when he won, he remade the Democratic Party in his own — and the D.L.C.’s — image. In 1995, midway through Clinton’s first term, 23 moderate House Democrats formed the Blue Dog Caucus to, in their words, “represent the middle of the partisan spectrum.” By 2010, halfway through Barack Obama’s first term, the Blue Dogs had grown to 54 members. “To my surprise, ‘The Politics of Evasion’ had some impact,” Galston recently told me. “With the election of Bill Clinton, this little insurgency within the Democratic Party succeeded.” He paused. “Temporarily.”This February, more than three decades after their original salvo, Galston and Kamarck, now both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, published “The New Politics of Evasion.” Once again, they argued Democrats have swerved too far to the left: “A substantial portion of the Democratic Party has convinced itself that Americans are ready for a political revolution that transforms every aspect of their lives. This assumption has crashed into a stubborn reality: Most Americans want evolutionary, not revolutionary, change.” Once again, they argued that Democrats have ignored the political salience of cultural issues to their detriment: “For Americans across the political spectrum, social, cultural and religious issues are real and — in many cases — more important to them than economic considerations. These issues reflect their deepest convictions and shape their identity.”But unlike three decades ago, Galston and Kamarck were actually a little late to the fight. In the past few years, a growing and increasingly vocal cohort of strategists, policy wonks and intellectuals has been arguing that Democrats have overreached on social and cultural issues and that, as a result, the party has become unable to appeal to voters without college degrees — and, increasingly, not just white voters in that group but Hispanic, Asian American and Black voters too. From 2012 to 2020, the support of nonwhite voters without college degrees for the Democratic presidential candidate decreased by 10 percentage points. Much as in the early 1990s, the most vibrant and urgent discussion in Democratic circles currently revolves around why and how the party needs to steer itself back to the center.“For Democrats to win, we have to cater a lot more to moderates,” Sean McElwee told me recently at an Australian coffee shop in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood. Just 29 years old, with a baby face that makes him appear even younger, McElwee runs Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling firm and think tank that in only four years has come to occupy a central place in the Democratic Party firmament. Its ascent is especially remarkable considering where the firm — and McElwee — started.He burst onto the political scene early in Donald Trump’s presidency as a Resistance Twitter personality who popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” and hosted a weekly East Village happy hour for New York’s left-wing activists and writers. He started Data for Progress in 2018 with the express intent of driving the Democratic Party to the left. As a self-proclaimed socialist, McElwee’s early activism revolved around helping far-left candidates win Democratic primaries in safe blue districts. He was an adviser to the left-wing political group Justice Democrats, which fueled the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a.k.a. the Squad. He liked to call himself an “Overton window mover.” (The term refers to a reframing of what is politically possible.)But during the 2020 presidential primaries, just when practically every Democratic candidate except Joe Biden was jumping through that window by promising to abolish ICE and provide Medicare for all and eliminate student debt, McElwee himself started favoring what he calls “a more pragmatic approach.” The reason? While he personally still supported many of these left-wing policy proposals, Data for Progress’s polling showed that they weren’t actually popular with voters — or at least not with the working-class, non-college-educated voters Democrats need to win outside those safe blue districts.McElwee concluded that if Democrats ever want to accomplish their progressive goals, they need to get elected first — and the way to do that is to do a lot of polling to determine the popularity of various policy proposals. Then, when talking to voters, Democratic candidates should emphasize the popular ideas and de-emphasize the unpopular ones, even if that means emphasizing smaller, more incremental, more moderate policies. “I’m now just interested in a fundamentally different set of tactics and tools than I was six or seven years ago,” McElwee told me.The electoral theory to which McElwee now subscribes has come to be known as “popularism.” Its most prominent proponent is David Shor, one of McElwee’s best friends. A 30-year-old data analyst, Shor crunched numbers for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and later went to work for the progressive data firm Civis Analytics. In 2020, during the widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon,” citing a study by the Black political scientist Omar Wasow, and noted that nonviolence was more politically effective. Online activists were furious, with some branding his tweet racist, and after a pressure campaign from outside and inside the firm, Civis fired him — making Shor a political martyr for those who believed the Democratic Party and progressive institutions had become too beholden to far-left activists and liberal political staff members.Now free to speak his mind, Shor co-founded the data-analytics firm Blue Rose Research and began tweeting more and giving lengthy interviews that expanded on his theory. “I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that,” he told The Times’s Ezra Klein last October. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.”Joining Shor and McElwee in the effort to propagate popularism are a host of other liberal-but-tacking-to-the-center writers and thinkers. Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the influential 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” writes for a Substack newsletter called “The Liberal Patriot,” publishing missives on “The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem,” “The Democrats’ Working Class Voter Problem” and “The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party Left.” Matthew Yglesias, a prodigious pundit who co-founded Vox in 2014 before leaving in 2020 because he felt hemmed in by the “young-college-graduate bubble” at the website, now writes his own Substack newsletter, “Slow Boring.” “Part of what we’re doing here is rediscovering old ideas,” Yglesias told me. “I sometimes use the phrase ‘the wisdom of the ancients.’ None of these popularism ideas are particularly original or say anything that people haven’t said for a long time. They just became unfashionable briefly.”Writing in The Nation last October, Elie Mystal accused Shor and his comrades of counseling Democrats to “figure out what the racists want and give it to them.” The popularists, Mystal continued, “would have us believe that by not addressing Black concerns, by refusing to deliver on promises to fix the election system, the immigration system and the police system, Democrats are actually helping themselves attract white voters and counterintuitively, shoring up support from non-college-educated Black people.”Other popularism critics question the wisdom of relying on polls to develop a “popular” agenda at a time when political polling has never been more unreliable. They also point out that popularism’s most prominent preachers are New York- and Washington-based college-educated white guys themselves, whose evidence for what working-class voters want is, the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Daniel Schlozman says, “either survey data or the limited interactions that fancy people have with not-fancy people.” Instead of trying to win over voters who most likely aren’t winnable, the liberal critique of popularism holds, Democrats should instead redouble their efforts to bring Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college-educated white voters, to the polls. “Overpowering Republicans with enthusiasm and turnout is the only way to beat them,” Mystal wrote, “because trying to appease them is both morally intolerable and strategically foolish.”Popularists argue that Democrats have already tried and failed to win elections with the enthusiasm-and-turnout model. “The other side gets to vote too,” Teixeira wrote in January, “and the very stark choices favored by those on the left may mobilize the other side just as much — maybe more! — than the left’s side.” (A recent review of 400 million voting records by the political scientist Michael Barber and the public-policy scholar John B. Holbein found that “minority citizens, young people and those who support the Democratic Party are much less likely to vote than whites, older citizens and Republican Party supporters.”) Over a recent lunch at a Chinese-Korean restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, Teixeira held out hope that after November, the wisdom of the popularists’ case will be even more apparent. “We’re probably going to have a very rough midterms, and the appetite for change among Democrats will grow,” he said. “Defeat tends to concentrate a party’s mind.”No matter how likely the prospect of humiliating defeat, it’s a job requirement of the D.C.C.C. chairman to exude pugnacious confidence. As even his harshest critics would concede, Sean Patrick Maloney, the first openly gay person to hold the post, has a knack for that part of the job. “Sean makes me think of the old adage about Irishmen,” says Representative Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, the only Democrat to win in a Trump district in 2016, 2018 and 2020 and one of three Frontliners from the Keystone State. “They see two people fighting, and they ask, ‘Is this a private fight or can anybody get in?’”Now in his sixth term representing a congressional district in the Hudson Valley, Maloney, 55, angled to run the House Democratic campaign arm for years: In 2017, he conducted an autopsy of the group’s poor performance in the previous year’s election; in 2018, he ran for its chairmanship before abandoning the race because of a medical emergency. That Maloney, a close ally of Pelosi’s, was finally elected D.C.C.C. chairman in late 2020, just in time to preside over the Democratic debacle that’s shaping up to be the 2022 midterms, can make him seem like the dog that caught the car — an analogy that he naturally rejected. “You’re not the first person who’s suggested that,” he said. “But I like that people are underestimating us.”Maloney was enjoying himself — sipping the remnants of a soda from Shake Shack, gesturing to the three aides monitoring our conversation — when we talked in the middle of March in the D.C.C.C.’s new Washington headquarters, where cubicle name plates provide both the job title and preferred pronouns of the mostly Gen Z employees.There was no denying the political headwinds Democrats were facing, but Maloney’s exuberance at the time didn’t seem entirely irrational: The D.C.C.C. was finishing up a record-breaking fund-raising quarter that would ultimately bring in north of $50 million — $11.5 million more than its Republican counterpart raised during the same stretch. Maloney pointed to the State of the Union address Biden gave earlier that month — “the first time in a long time the American people got to see, without a filter, the guy they actually voted for” — and the job Biden was doing marshaling international support for Ukraine — “the most impressive presidential performance since the first Gulf War.” He believed both would improve Biden’s languishing support, which in turn would redound to the Democrats’ benefit in November. (Since then, Biden’s approval rating has dipped below 40 percent and the number of House seats Democrats are predicted to lose has increased.)More than money and polls, what was fueling Maloney’s swagger that afternoon was maps. At the start of the redistricting process that followed the 2020 census, Republicans appeared to hold the upper hand, with total control of the process in 19 states. Indeed, some election experts predicted that the G.O.P. would be able to retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly redrawn congressional maps. But working closely with Democratic officials in the handful of states where they controlled redistricting — including Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico — Maloney and the D.C.C.C. were able to engineer Democratic gains through aggressive gerrymandering of their own. Maloney’s most audacious move was in his home state of New York. There, Democratic legislators went around an independent redistricting commission and approved a heavily gerrymandered map. Their party gained an advantage in 22 out of 26 House districts, halving the number of safe Republican seats from eight to four.When I met with Maloney at the D.C.C.C., it looked as if Democrats had not just fought Republicans to a draw in the redistricting battle but had actually gained a few seats. “We beat ’em,” Maloney crowed. Of course, one driver of the political polarization that Maloney and other moderate Democrats denounce is the sort of aggressive gerrymandering that creates so many safe seats and so few competitive ones: In 2022, fewer than 40 seats out of 435 are considered competitive — in other words, seats in districts that Biden or Trump won by 5 percent or less in 2020.“Competitive districts marginalize ideological extremism and foster moderation in Congress,” Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor, has written. “Safe seats foster extremism.” Given that reality, I asked Maloney if he had any mixed feelings about the victory, considering the Democrats achieved it with such extreme gerrymanders — noting, of course, that Republicans would have done the same thing if given the opportunity. “They did have the opportunity and they [expletive] it up,” he shot back. “That’s what beating them means.”But the beatdown would prove ephemeral. Later that month, a Maryland judge threw out the state’s congressional map, calling it an “extreme partisan gerrymander.” A week after that, a judge in New York ruled that state’s new map unconstitutional. In May, the New York judge approved a new congressional map, drawn by a Carnegie Mellon political scientist, that undid all of the Democratic gains by creating what experts deemed 15 safely Democratic seats, five safely Republican seats and six tossups. Adding to New York Democrats’ misery, the new map either eliminated or drastically altered the districts of at least six Democratic incumbents.One of them was Maloney. An hour after the new, court-ordered maps were released, he announced on Twitter that he was switching from the Hudson Valley district he has represented since 2013 to a neighboring, now bluer district rooted in Westchester County but extending north to Putnam County, where he lives. (Members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent.) The only problem? Much of the district he was moving to is currently represented by his Democratic colleague Mondaire Jones. The prospect of the Democrats’ midterms chief forcing a member-on-member primary — much less a member-on-member primary involving a Black freshman incumbent like Jones — did not go over well with many House Democrats. Suddenly, all the internecine Democratic tensions that were Maloney’s job to resolve, or at the very least elide, were focused squarely on him.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones told Politico. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, a Black freshman member like Jones, complained about the “thinly veiled racism” of Maloney’s maneuverings. Others noted the presumption of Maloney, the man tasked with protecting the Democrats’ House majority, creating an open seat and giving Republicans a better opportunity to win his current district this fall. Ocasio-Cortez called on Maloney to step down as D.C.C.C. chairman if he wound up in a primary versus Jones.In the end, Jones switched from his Westchester district to a new one miles away in New York City. But that didn’t completely defuse the situation. Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive New York state senator from Westchester, decided to challenge Maloney in the August primary, securing the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Biaggi attacked Maloney not just as “an establishment, corporatist” Democrat but for putting his own political fortunes above those of the Democratic Party’s. “What hurt the party was having the head of the campaign arm not stay in his district,” she told reporters, “not maximize the number of seats New York can have to hold the majority.”“This is so counterproductive,” Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, wrote on Twitter about Ocasio-Cortez’s support of Biaggi’s primary challenge to Maloney. “The Supreme Court is about to outlaw abortion. We could lose both houses. So we are going to focus our time running against each other. Now we’re primarying committed progressives because … why? If we lose the House it’s because of dumb [expletive] like this.”With their majority or their own re-elections in doubt, many House Democrats are already heading for the exits in a pre-midterm exodus. So far, 33 House Democrats have announced that they will not compete for their seats in November. Some are leaving to run for other offices, but most are retiring. And while some Democratic retirees represent solidly blue districts and will almost certainly be replaced by other Democrats, many of them hold the sort of purple — or even red — seats that Democrats have little chance of keeping unless they have an incumbent running.In the middle of March, the mood was funereal in the office of Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida who announced last December that she would not be running again for her purple Orlando-area seat. She had just watched the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky give a video address to a joint session of Congress, during which he shared footage of Ukrainian women and children packing bags and weeping as they said goodbye to their husbands and fathers who were staying to fight the Russians. Murphy, whose family escaped Vietnam by boat when she was an infant, wiped away tears. “I’m a little emotional about it,” she explained. “Those images have been hard for me to watch.”As Murphy reflected on her time in Congress, her emotions seemed no less raw. She was first elected to the House in 2016, defeating a 12-term Republican incumbent whose district had become more Democratic after the state Supreme Court made lawmakers redraw Florida’s congressional lines. But it was hardly blue and Murphy won by hewing to the center on fiscal issues and foreign policy.Once in Washington, she joined the Blue Dogs. In the group’s early years, most of its members were older white men from the South who were not just fiscal conservatives but cultural ones as well — firm in their opposition to gun control, abortion and gay people serving in the military. In 2018, when Murphy, an Asian American woman who just turned 40, became the group’s co-chairwoman, it was a sign of how even the Blue Dogs had changed amid the Democratic Party’s leftward march. “I’d love for the world to stop using ‘conservative Democrat’ to define Blue Dogs,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “Because I am pro-choice, I am unabashedly pro-L.G.B.T.Q., I am pro-gun-safety.” (In addition to Murphy, the Blue Dogs also now have two Black and four Hispanic members.)Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMurphy preferred to describe herself as a moderate; her main areas of disagreement with her fellow House Democrats were about national security and pocketbook issues (she supported a law that toughened penalties for deported immigrants who try to re-enter the United States and another that allows new businesses to deduct more of their start-up expenses). For her first two years in Congress, with Trump as president and Democrats in the minority, she was able to stake out moderate positions with little pushback from members of her caucus. But after 2018, when Democrats took back the House, her moderation became a sore point.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More

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      Democrats Can’t Just Give the People What They Want

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      Over the 20-year period from 1970 to 1990, whites, especially those without college degrees, defected en masse from the Democratic Party. In those years, the percentage of white working class voters who identified with the Democratic Party fell to 40 percent from 60, Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote in “The Democrats and Working-Class Whites.”Now, three decades later, the Democratic Party continues to struggle to maintain not just a biracial but a multiracial and multiethnic coalition — keeping in mind that Democrats have not won a majority of white voters in a presidential election since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964.There have been seven Democratic and seven Republican presidents since the end of World War II. Obstacles notwithstanding, the Democratic coalition has adapted from its former incarnation as an overwhelmingly white party with a powerful southern segregationist wing to its current incarnation: roughly 59 percent white, 19 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent Asian American and other groups.William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard, put the liberal case for the importance of a such a political alliance eloquently in “Rising Inequality and the Case for Coalition Politics”:An organized national multiracial political constituency is needed for the development and implementation of policies that will help reverse the trends of the rising inequality and ease the burdens of ordinary families.Biden won with a multiracial coalition, but even in victory, there were signs of stress.In their May 21 analysis, “What Happened in 2020,” Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, a liberal voter data analysis firm, and Jonathan Robinson, its director of research, found that Black support for the Democratic presidential nominee fell by 3 percentage points from 2016 to 2020, and Latino support fell by eight points over the same period, from 71 to 63 percent.At the same time, whites with college degrees continued their march into the Democratic Party: “The trends all point in the same direction, i.e., a substantial portion of this constituency moving solidly toward Democrats in the Trump era.” Among these well-educated whites, the percentage voting for the Democratic nominee rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 50 percent in 2016 to 54 percent in 2020. These gains were especially strong among women, according to Catalist: “White college-educated women in particular have shifted against Trump, moving from 50 percent Democratic support in 2012 to 58 percent in 2020.”In a separate June 2021 study, “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory,” by Ruth Igielnik, Scott Keeter and Hannah Hartig, Pew Research found thatEven as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41 percent vs. 30 percent).Biden, according to Pew, made significant gains both among all suburban voters and among white suburban voters: “In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45 percent supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54 percent for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51-47); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54-38).”Crucially. all these shifts reflect the continuing realignment of the electorate by level of educational attainment or so-called “learning skills,” with one big difference: Before 2020, education polarization was found almost exclusively among whites; last year it began to emerge among Hispanics and African Americans.Two Democratic strategists, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, both of whom publish their analyses at the Liberal Patriot website, have addressed this predicament.On Sept. 30 in “There Just Aren’t Enough College-Educated Voters!” Teixeira wrote:The perception that nonwhite working class voters are a lock for the Democrats is no longer tenable. In the 2020 election, working class nonwhites moved sharply toward Trump by 12 margin points, despite Democratic messaging that focused relentlessly on Trump’s animus toward nonwhites. According to Pew, Trump actually got 41 percent of the Hispanic working class vote in 2016. Since 2012, running against Trump twice, Democrats have lost 18 points off of their margin among nonwhite working class voters.In an effort to bring the argument down to earth, I asked Teixeira and Halpin three questions:1. Should Democrats support and defend gender and race-based affirmative action policies?2. If asked in a debate, what should a Democrat say about Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools?”3. How should a Democrat respond to questions concerning intergenerational poverty, nonmarital births and the issue of fatherlessness?In an email, Teixeira addressed affirmative action:Affirmative action in the sense of, say, racial preferences has always been unpopular and continues to be so. The latest evidence comes from the deep blue state of California which defeated an effort to reinstate race and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting by an overwhelming 57-43 margin. As President Obama once put it: ‘We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,’ There has always been a strong case for class-based affirmative action which is perhaps worth revisiting rather than doubling down on race-based affirmative action.Teixeira on Kendi’s arguments:It is remarkable how willing liberal elites have been to countenance Kendi’s extreme views which ascribe all racial disparities in American society to racism and a system of untrammeled white supremacy (and only that), insist that all policies/actions can only be racist or anti-racist in any context and advocate for a Department of Anti-Racism staffed by anti-racist “experts” who would have the power to nullify any and all local, state and federal legislation deemed not truly anti-racist (and therefore, by Kendi’s logic, racist). These ideas are dubious empirically, massively simplistic and completely impractical in real world terms. And to observe they are politically toxic is an understatement.The left, in Teixeira’s view,has paid a considerable price for abandoning universalism and for its increasingly strong linkage to Kendi-style views and militant identity politics in general. This has resulted in branding the party as focused on, or at least distracted by, issues of little relevance to most voters’ lives. Worse, the focus has led many working-class voters to believe that, unless they subscribe to this emerging worldview and are willing to speak its language, they will be condemned as reactionary, intolerant, and racist by those who purport to represent their interests. To some extent these voters are right: They really are looked down upon by elements of the left — typically younger, well-educated, and metropolitan — who embrace identity politics and the intersectional approach.In March, Halpin wrote an essay, “The Rise of the Neo-Universalists,” in which he argued thatthere is an emerging pool of political leaders, thinkers and citizens without an ideological home. They come from the left, right, and center but all share a common aversion to the sectarian, identity-based politics that dominates modern political discourse and the partisan and media institutions that set the public agenda.He calls this constituency “neo-universalists,” and says that they are united by “a vision of American citizenship based on the core belief in the equal dignity and rights of all people.” This means, he continued,not treating people differently based on their gender or their skin color, or where they were born or what they believe. This means employing collective resources to help provide for the ‘general welfare’ of all people in terms of jobs, housing, education, and health care. This means giving people a chance and not assuming the worst of them.How, then, would neo-universalism deal with gender and race-based affirmative action policies?“In terms of affirmative action, neo-universalism would agree with the original need and purpose of affirmative action following the legal dismantling of racial and gender discrimination,” Halpin wrote in an email:America needed a series of steps to overcome the legal and institutional hurdles to their advancement in education, the workplace, and wider life. Fifty years later, there has been tremendous progress on this front and we now face a situation where ongoing discrimination in favor of historically discriminated groups is hard to defend constitutionally and will likely hit a wall very soon. In order to continue ensuring that all people are integrated into society and life, neo-universalists would favor steps to offer additional assistance to people based on class- or place-based measures such as parental income or school profiles and disparities, in the case of education.What did Halpin think about Kendi’s views?A belief in equal dignity and rights for all, as expressed in neo-universalism and traditional liberalism, rejects the race-focused theories of Kendi and others, and particularly the concept that present discrimination based on race is required to overcome past discrimination based on race. There is no constitutional defense of this approach since you clearly cannot deprive people of due process and rights based on their race.In addition, theories like these, in Halpin’s view, foster “sectarian racial divisions and encourage people to view one another solely through the lens of race and perceptions of who is oppressed and who is privileged.” Liberals, Halpin continued, “spent the bulk of the 20th century trying to get society not to view people this way, so these contemporary critical theories are a huge step backward in terms of building wider coalitions and solidarity across racial, gender, and ethnic lines.”On the problem of intergenerational poverty, Halpin argued thatReducing and eradicating poverty is a critical focus for neo-universalists in the liberal tradition. Personal rights and freedom mean little if a person or family does not have a basic foundation of solid income and work, housing, education, and health care. Good jobs, safe neighborhoods, and stable two-parent families are proven to be critical components of building solid middle class life. Although the government cannot tell people how to organize their lives, and it must deal with the reality that not everyone lives or wants to live in a traditional family, the government can take steps to make family life more affordable and stable for everyone, particularly for those with children and low household income.Although the issue of racial and cultural tension within the Democratic coalition has been the subject of debate for decades, the current focus among Democratic strategists is on the well-educated party elite.David Shor, a Democratic data analyst, has emerged as a central figure on these matters. Shor’s approach was described by my colleague Ezra Klein last week. First, leaders need to recognize that “the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level” and then “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”How can Democrats defuse inevitable Republican attacks on contemporary liberalism’s “unpopular stuff” — to use Klein’s phrase — much of which involves issues related to race and immigration along with the disputes raised by identity politics on the left?Shor observes that “We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment’, ” before adding, “So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.”The result?“The joke is that the G.O.P. is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,” Shor told Politico in an interview after the election in November.On Oct. 9, another of my colleagues, Jamelle Bouie, weighed in:My problem is that I don’t think Shor or his allies are being forthright about what it would actually take to stem the tide and reverse the trend. If anti-Black prejudice is as strong as this analysis implies, then it seems ludicrous to say that Democrats can solve their problem with a simple shift in rhetoric toward their most popular agenda items. The countermessage is easy enough to imagine — some version of ‘Democrats are not actually going to help you, they are going to help them’.Bouie’s larger point is thatThis debate needs clarity, and I want Shor and his allies to be much more forthright about the specific tactics they would use and what their strategy would look like in practice. To me, it seems as if they are talking around the issue rather than being upfront about the path they want to take.Shor’s critique of the contemporary Democratic Party and the disproportionate influence of its young, well-educated white liberal elite has provoked a network of counter-critiques. For example, Ian Hanley-Lopez, a law professor at Berkeley, recently posted “Shor is mainly wrong about racism (which is to say, about electoral politics)” on Medium, an essay in which Lopez argues thatThe core problem for the Democratic Party is not too many young, liberal activists. The fundamental challenge for Democrats is to develop a unified, effective response to the intense polarization around race intentionally driven by Trump and boosted by the interlocking elements of the right-wing propaganda machine.Haney-Lopez agrees thatDemocratic messages alienate voters when they are predicated on a sense of identity that voters do not share. For instance, “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” are deeply connected to a story of the police and ICE as white supremacist institutions that oppress communities of color. In turn, this story depicts the country as locked into a historic conflict between white people and people of color. It thus asks white voters to see themselves as members of an oppressive group they must help to disempower; and it asks voters of color to see themselves as members of widely hated groups they must rally to defend. This framing is acceptable to many who are college educated, white and of color alike, but not to majorities of voters.But, in Lopez’s view,Shor weds himself to the wrong conclusion. As the Ezra Klein piece reports, Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.’” This is Shor’s most dangerous piece of advice to Democrats. For Shor, this has become an article of faith.Lopez argues that the best way to defuse divisive racial issues is to explicitly portray such tactics as “a divide-and-conquer strategy.”The basic idea, Lopez wrote,is to shift the basic political conflict in the United States from one between racial groups (the right’s preferred frame) to one between the 0.1 percent and the rest of us, with racism as their principal weapon. In our research, this race-class fusion politics is the most promising route forward for Democrats.Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color (and, like Haney-Lopez, a frequent contributor to The Times), goes a giant step further. In an email, Phillips argued that for over 50 years, “Democrats have NEVER won the white vote. All of it is dancing around the real issue, which is that the majority of white voters never back Democrats.” Even white college-educated voters “are very, very fickle. There’s some potential to up that share, but at what cost?” The bottom line? “I don’t think they’re movable; certainly, to any appreciable sense.”Phillips wrote that hisbiggest point is that it’s not necessary or cost-efficient to try to woo these voters. A meaningful minority of them are already with us and have always been with us. There are now so many people of color in the country (the majority of young people), that that minority of whites can ally with people of color and win elections from the White House to the Georgia Senate runoffs,” noting, “plus, you don’t have to sell your soul and compromise your principles to woo their support.In his email, Phillips acknowledged that “it does look like there has been a small decline in that Clinton got 76 percent of the working class vote among minorities and Biden 72 percent. But I still come back to the big picture points mentioned above.”On this point, Phillips may underestimate the significance of the four-point drop, and of the larger decline among working class Hispanics. If this is a trend — a big if because we don’t yet know how much of this is about Donald Trump and whether these trends will persist without him — it has the hallmarks of a new and significant problem for Democrats in future elections. In that light, it is all the more important for Democratic strategists of all ideological stripes to spell out what specific approaches they contend are most effective in addressing, if not countering, the divisive racial and cultural issues that have weakened the party in recent elections, even when they’re won.Saying the party’s candidates should simply downplay the tough ones may not be adequate.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Democrats Can Save Themselves

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      Normally the political party that loses an election goes through a period of soul-searching and vigorous internal debate, while the winning party embraces a smug certainty about its own inevitable multigenerational dominance. In 2021, though, the roles are reversed.The widespread belief that Donald Trump was, in some sense, the real winner of an election that he lost has succeeded in pre-empting a Republican debate about why the Democrats captured the White House last year. Meanwhile, the Democrats, despite their control of the Congress and the presidency, are increasingly the ones arguing as though they’re already in the wilderness.The Democrats’ angst strikes me as a healthy development for liberalism. One problem with the emergency thinking that Trump inspires in his opponents — and one reason to resist it — is that it occludes real understanding of the political conditions that put him in power, and that might do so again. This is what you saw happen to the Democrats after 2016: The sense of being lightning-struck sent the center-left wandering into a maze of conspiracies, a haunted wood where villains like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg loomed larger than the swing voters they had lost and savior figures like Robert Mueller were supposed to unmake Trump’s power for them.Only the party’s left, its Bernie Sanders wing, fully developed a more normal theory of the 2016 defeat, trying to understand Obama-Trump voters in the context of globalization and deindustrialization as well as racism, fascism and Putinist dirty tricks. But this created a fundamental imbalance in the party’s conversation: With the Sanders faction trying to pull the party toward social democracy and the establishment acting as if its major challenges were Russian bots and nefarious Facebook memes, there was hardly anyone left to point out the ways that Democrats might be in danger of moving too far left — and the writers who did so were generally dismissed as dinosaurs.So it was up to Democratic voters to exert a rightward tug on their party — first by saving the party from the likely disaster of nominating the intelligentsia’s candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and ultimately by putting up a nominee, Joe Biden, whose long career as a moderate gave him some distance from the “Great Awokening” that swept liberal institutions in 2020.Now, though, with the increasing awareness that Bidenism is probably not a long-term strategy, we’re finally getting the fuller argument that should have broken out after 2016 — over what the Democrats can do, and whether they can do anything, to win over the working-class and rural voters alienated by the party’s increasingly rigorous progressive litmus tests.A key player in this argument is the pollster and analyst David Shor, whom my colleague Ezra Klein interviewed for a long essay last week, and who has emerged — after a temporary 2020 cancellation — as the leading spokesman for the pragmatic liberal critique of progressive zeal.This critique starts with a diagnosis: Democrats misread the meaning of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, imagining that it proved that their multiracial coalition could win without downscale and rural white voters, when in fact Obama had beaten Mitt Romney precisely because of his relatively resilient support from those demographics, especially across the industrial Midwest. And this misreading was particularly disastrous because these voters have outsize influence in Senate races and the Electoral College, so losing them — and then beginning to lose culturally conservative minority voters as well — has left the Democrats with a structural disadvantage that will cost them dearly across the next decade absent some kind of clear strategic adjustment.From this diagnosis comes the prescription, so-called popularism, glossed by Klein as follows: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”You will note that this banal-seeming wisdom is not an ideological litmus test: Where left-wing ideas are popular, Shor Thought would have Democrats talk about them more. But where they are unpopular, especially with the kind of voters who hold the key to contested Senate races, Democrats need a way to defuse them or hold them at a distance.Thus a “popularist” candidate might be a thoroughgoing centrist in some cases, and in others a candidate running the way Bernie Sanders did in 2016, stressing the most popular ideas in the social-democratic tool kit. But in both cases such candidates would do everything in their power not to be associated with ideas like, say, police abolition or the suspension of immigration enforcement. Instead they would imitate the way Obama himself, in his first term, tried to finesse issues like immigration and same-sex marriage, sometimes using objectively conservative rhetoric and never getting way out ahead of public opinion.Which is easier said than done. For one thing, the Democratic Party’s activists have a different scale of power in the world of 2021 than the world of 2011, and the hypothetical “popularist” politician can’t make their influence and expectations just go away. For another, as my colleague Nate Cohn points out, Obama in 2011 was trying to keep white working-class voters in the Democratic fold, while the popularist politician in 2022 or 2024 would be trying to win them back from the G.O.P. — a much harder thing to achieve just by soft-pedaling vexatious issues.At the very least a Democratic strategy along these lines would probably need to go further along two dimensions. First, it would need to overtly attack the new progressivism — not on every front but on certain points where the language and ideas of the progressive clerisy are particularly alienated from ordinary life.For instance, popularist Democrats would not merely avoid a term like “Latinx,” which is ubiquitous in official progressive discourse and alien to most U.S. Hispanics; they would need to attack and even mock its use. (Obviously this is somewhat easier for the ideal popularist candidate: an unwoke minority politician in the style of Eric Adams.)Likewise, a popularist candidate — ideally a female candidate — on the stump in a swing state might say something like: I want this to be a party for normal people, and normal people say mother, not “birthing person.”Instead of reducing the salience of progressive jargon, the goal would be to raise its salience in order to be seen to reject it — much as Donald Trump in 2016 brazenly rejected unpopular G.O.P. positions on entitlements that other Republican rivals were trying to merely soft-pedal.But then along with this rhetorical fire directed leftward, popularists would also need go further in addressing the actual policy concerns surrounding the issues they’re trying to defuse. Immigration is a major political problem for Democrats right now, for instance, not just because their activists have taken extreme positions on the issue, but because the border is a major policy problem: The effects of globalized travel and communication make it ever-easier for sudden migrant surges to overwhelm the system, and liberalism’s shift away from tough enforcement — or at least its professed desire to make that shift — creates extra incentives for those surges to happen under Democratic presidents.So in the long run — especially given climate change’s likely effect on mass migration — there is no way for Democrats to have a stable policy that’s pro-immigration under the law without first having a strategy to make the American border much more secure than it’s been under the Biden administration to date. How to do that humanely is a policy challenge, but if you really want to court voters for whom the issue matters, you have to take the challenge seriously — because the problem makes itself salient, and it isn’t going away.It’s worth nothing that even this combination — attack progressive excess, show Obama-Trump voters that you take their issues seriously — is still a somewhat defensive one. As Cohn notes, when Trump reoriented the Republican Party to win more working-class votes, he made a sweeping and dramatic — and yes, demagogic — case that he would be better than Hillary Clinton for their interests and their values. Democrats have specific ideas that poll well with these voters, but it’s not clear that even a sweeping “heartland revival” message could actually reverse the post-Trump shift.But even a strictly defensive strategy, one that just prevents more Hispanic voters from shifting to the Republicans and holds on to some of Biden’s modest Rust Belt gains, would buy crucial time for Democrats — time for a generational turnover that still favors them, and time to seize the opportunities that are always offered, in ways no data scientist can foretell, by unexpected events.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

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      President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]That, at least, is what David Shor thinks. Shor started modeling elections in 2008, when he was a 16-year-old blogger, and he proved good at it. By 2012, he was deep inside President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, putting together the fabled “Golden Report,” which modeled the election daily. The forecast proved spookily accurate: It ultimately called the popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point in every swing state but Ohio. Math-geek data analysts became a hot item for Democratic Party campaigns, and Shor was one of the field’s young stars, pioneering ways to survey huge numbers of Americans and experimentally test their reactions to messages and ads.But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.A socially distanced arrangement for state delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFreed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear. He became ubiquitous on podcasts and Twitter, where Obama posts his analyses and pundits half-jokingly refer to themselves as being “Shor-pilled.” Politico reported that Shor has “an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country,” calling his following “the cult of Shor.” Now he is a co-founder of and the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a progressive data science operation. “Obviously, in retrospect,” he told me, “it was positive for my career.”At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate. You can see Shor’s work below. We’ve built a version of his model, in which you can change the assumptions and see how they affect Democrats’ projected Senate chances in 2022 and 2024. More