The title of Ezra Klein’s column today is “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism.” The headline is clearly intended to draw as many left-wing readers as possible, which in one sense recapitulates Klein’s theme. But the headline is also a bit of a trick because this isn’t a gung-ho column full of attacks on Trump (something Times’ would enjoy) it’s really a column about how the Democratic party has failed and how, even now, it is failing to see how it has failed. An alternate but still accurate title could have been “Why Democrats Keep Losing.”
He opens with where things are. After nine months of Trump’s 2nd term, which many Democrats consider a daily disaster, Democrats still aren’t very popular. If this is a zero sum game, Democrats don’t seem to be gaining much ground.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average, Democrats are leading by about 2.5 points when you ask Americans which party they want to see control Congress. At about this time in 2017, Democrats were up just over 10 points in the same average.
The news gets worse. To win the House back next year, Democrats will need to overcome the chain of redistricting Republicans are setting off across the country: Republicans have already redrawn the maps in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; they are seeking to do the same in Florida and Indiana, and they have others in their sights.
The Senate is even harder for Democrats…
And this gets to his next point, which is that Democrats are competitive in fewer places than they used to be.
The number of places in which the Democratic Party is competitive has shrunk. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats held Senate seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia. How many of those states remain in reach for Democrats today?
Why is it like this? Here Klein insists on taking the long way around. He refuses to use the word woke, which never appears in the column. I guess he feels that word is too explosive on the left or too tainted by insensitive critics on the right. In any case, whether he uses the word or not, that’s clearly what he means.
…if I were to say where the Democratic Party went wrong over the last decade, it’s there. In too many places Democrats sought persuasion without representation, and so they got neither.
A Democratic strategist who has conducted countless focus groups told me that when he asks people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as “crazy” and Democrats as “preachy.” One woman said to him, “I’ll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn’t look down on me.”
That echoes what I have heard from the kinds of voters Democrats lament losing. I feel as if I have the same conversation over and over again: Sometimes people tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation: The Democratic Party, they came to believe, does not like them.
Who are these preachy people on the left? In case you can’t guess, Klein goes on to further narrow it down by specifying the specific place in political life where this group became powerful: On social media.
Social media has thrown everyone involved at every level of politics in every place into the same algorithmic Thunderdome. It has collapsed distance and profession and time because no matter where we are, we can always be online together. We always know what our most online peers are thinking. They come to set the culture of their respective political classes. And there is nothing that most of us fear as much as being out of step with our peers…
From 2012 to 2024, Democrats moved sharply left on virtually every issue. They often did so arguing that they were finally representing communities that had long suffered from too little representation. This was what they were told to do by the online voices and professional groups that claimed to represent these communities.
But it went wrong. Democrats became more uncompromising on immigration and lost support among Hispanic voters. They moved left on guns and student loans and climate, and lost ground with young voters. They moved left on race and lost ground with Black voters. They moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters. They moved left on economics and lost ground with working-class voters.
A little insider tip for people reading Klein’s columns. You can always tell a lot about what is true by looking at the arguments he leaves out. In this case, he offers this laundry list of hot-button issues on which Democrats moved left and leaves out one that is obviously relevant and which played a role in the last election: Trans issues. Democrats became maximally uncompromising on trans issues and this turned off a lot of normies of all races. Like the word “woke” he’s left it out here because it’s a little too hot. If he mentions it as a place where the left went too far, the very online mob he’s describing will come for his head. He knows this so he just sidesteps it, only mentioning it once in passing a few paragraphs later.
To be fair, it only proves the point he’s making. There is an online, woke left that is so vicious and uncompromising that they turn a lot of people off. Klein has expended a lot of paragraphs to say what he could have just summarized in a sentence: The woke left is a problem for Democrats. So what is his solution to this problem?
One worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them…
I would like to believe that all the Democrats need to do to win back these voters is to embrace an agenda I’m already comfortable with: economic populism or abundance or both. But I don’t think it’s true…
…what happened over the past 15 years is that the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right. For all the talk of what the Democratic Party should learn from Sanders and Mamdani, there should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Manchin or Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Sarah McBride. The party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement.
The big tent. He’s not willing to say we need less of AOC and Mamdani, he’d just like to see more of some of the moderate figures (like Manchin) who existed in the recent past.
The problem of course is that his whole column explains precisely why that can’t happen. Social media has changed the ball game. AOC and Mamdani aren’t just regional New York voices in the party, they are national figures. AOC is one of the Dems’ biggest fundraisers and also the person who has made a habit of trying to primary moderates in her own party. So you really can’t have a Democratic party that embraces both woke DSA members and pro-life moderates because the DSA members will seek to destroy the moderates at every turn.
The woke don’t want to compromise with moderates, they want to drive the party further left. Just to make the metaphor literal for a moment, you can’t have a big tent where the left-most pole holding the tent up is being dragged to one side in order to pull the tent down on the opposite side. That’s basically what is happening now and saying ‘why don’t we just make it bigger in both directions’ overlooks the main problem.
The woke left would rather tear it in half than share it.
Just as he can’t bring himself to say the work “woke” Klein can’t bring himself to look at just how extreme the woke left really is. He acts as if they are merely misguided liberals (in the classic sense) who don’t realize they are making a mess and shrinking the party’s appeal. In fact, they are anti-liberals who want to see liberalism in flames because they are heretics.
He mentions at one point that talking about politics seems more controversial than talking about religion. That’s probably true but if so it’s because the woke left treat their politics as a religion. To question their stance on anything is to make yourself a heretic in their eyes, someone who needs to be destroyed rather than persuaded.
Klein is a smart guy, whatever you think of his politics. If he could bring himself to admit that the right has a point about the fundamental nature of the woke left, that they aren’t the same as the rest of the party in some basic ways, he’d probably reach a different (and better) conclusion about what should be done to fix his party’s problems. But so long as he can’t even say the word, he’ll continue to come up with solutions that can never work in the world as it is.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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