Tough Medicine for Democrats: “Too Liberal” and “Out of Touch”

Less than a year into his second term, President Donald Trump is already hobbling toward lame duck status. His approval rating has plummeted to 36 percent, according to Gallup’s latest survey, including just a 25 percent thumbs-up among independents. He’s squandered his gains with Latino voters, with nearly 80 percent now telling Pew that his policies are more harmful than helpful. 

Democrats, meanwhile, are enjoying an uptick in their electoral fortunes. Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to victory in Virginia and New Jersey, while generic Congressional ballots have begun to show commanding leads for Democrats hopeful of capturing the House. 

But don’t mistake Trump’s unpopularity with newfound affection for Democrats, warns strategist Simon Bazelon, a Research Fellow at the Democratically aligned organization Welcome. Democrats have increasingly shifted leftward in recent years, Bazelon argues, and are perceived as too liberal and out of touch. 

Bazelon is the lead author of Deciding to Win, an exhaustive, data-driven autopsy of the Democratic Party recently published by Welcome. He advocates a new brand of “moderation” among Democratic candidates, defined not by old models of compromise and “triangulation” but by the dictates of popular opinion. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

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You’ve co-written an incredibly thorough autopsy of the 2024 election and of the Democratic party that’s gotten quite a bit of attention. Before we get into the substance of the report, I have to ask why it’s called “Deciding to Win.” That implies that up to this point, Democrats have been deciding to lose.

Simon Bazelon: The title of the report comes from a quote by Nancy Pelosi, whom I obviously have lot of fondness for. She said an election is a decision. You make a decision to win, and then you make every decision in favor of winning. My own view is that Democrats haven’t been doing everything we can to win elections. We talk a lot about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and how it’s really important to beat him. I agree with all of that. I think he’s doing a poor job running the nation, and a big part of deciding to win is figuring out how to beat Trump and other Republicans. But I don’t think the Democrats have necessarily been putting our best foot forward in that effort.

Let’s move on to the substance then. Your report argues that Democrats have huge problems on three fronts: branding, messaging, and tactics. Drilling down on each of these, you conclude that Democrats are perceived by most voters as way too liberal, that they are focused too much on issues that a lot of voters don’t consider to be top priorities, and that they’re focused on turning out the base versus wooing genuinely swing voters. Is that a fair summary? 

Simon Bazelon: I think that’s a fair summary. We break the Democratic Party’s problems into two buckets. One is prioritization—the issues Democrats are focused on versus the issues voters think Democrats should be focused on. And the second is positioning—making sure that Democrats are advocating for policies that make sense to voters and that have broad-based support.

Let’s go back to this first question of voter perceptions of the Democratic Party. Can you walk through a little bit of the evidence that you cite in your report about how voters see the party as too liberal? And why is that a problem given how extreme Republicans have become? Don’t voters also see Republicans as too conservative?

Simon Bazelon: There are a number of things going on here. First, the Democratic Party is a lot more liberal and left-wing than it used to be. For example, the share of congressional Democrats who support Medicare for All or paid family leave or an assault weapons ban or expanded abortion rights has gone way up in the last 12 years. And as that shift to the left has happened, we see in public polling that the share of voters who think Democrats are too liberal has gone up a lot. 

In 2013, roughly 46 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too liberal, and now that’s about 55 percent. What’s interesting is that during that time, the share of voters who thought Republicans were too conservative actually declined by about 3 percent.

Now, since Trump has taken office, the share of voters who think Republicans are too extreme has gone way up, but the share of voters who think Democrats are too liberal is still substantially higher than the share of voters who think Republicans are too conservative, even after 10 months of the Trump administration.

Wow. Can you talk a little bit about the ideological makeup of voters? Has there been any shift in one direction or another toward conservative or liberal over the period you’re looking at?

Simon Bazelon: The share of voters who identify as liberal has gone up by a little bit since 2012—about 3 or 4 percent. The problem is that the Democratic Party has moved to left more quickly than the electorate has. 

This slight increase in the liberal share of the electorate is not nearly enough to offset big declines among voters who identify as moderate and conservative. Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans identify as either moderate or conservative. 

As the party becomes more liberal, you argue, it’s spending a lot more time talking about the issues that matter to the base versus the issues that are of concern of the electorate at large. Can you drill down about the particular issues you’re talking about? We’re not hearing that much anymore about defunding the police or reparations, but are there other issues that are coded as “too liberal”?

Simon Bazelon: I think the big issues here are immigration and public safety. Obviously, the mainstream of the Democratic Party does not endorse defunding the police, but that doesn’t mean voters think we’re in the right place on crime. Democrats no longer endorse decriminalizing border crossings, but that doesn’t mean voters think we’re in the right place on immigration. 

It’s not just about being out of step in terms of our positions. It’s also about being out of touch in terms of our priorities. One thing we looked at was comparing the 2012 Democratic Party platform to the 2024 Democratic Party platform. We analyzed the frequency with which a variety of words appeared in those two documents. What we saw was really striking. For example, the phrase “middle class” declined by 79 percent between 2012 and 2024, “economy” was down 49 percent, “economic” was down 51 percent. 

On the flip side, words like “Black,” “white,” and “Latino” were up 1,000 percent, “LGBT” was up 1,000 percent, words like “equity,” “hate,” “justice,” “reproductive,” “democracy,” “criminal justice,” “environmental justice,” “climate,” “guns,”—all of these words increased dramatically in frequency. I think that’s pretty telling of a party that has shifted our priorities away from some of those working class issues that used to define us and towards these more abstract cultural concerns that are higher priorities for Democratic elites.

The share of voters who say that Democrats are “out of touch” has gone from about 50 percent in 2013 to 70 percent in 2025. It’s going to be pretty hard to win any election when 70 percent of voters think that your party is out of touch.

Before we turn to the suite of solutions you offer, I want to talk about one more large problem that you raise: tactics. You argue that because the Democratic Party is overly beholden to its base, its electoral strategy also overly relies on turnout. Your report points out two very important facts about the mathematics of the electorate: (1) that most voters are white, non-college educated and over the age of 50; and (2) a supermajority of voters are moderate, self-identified or conservative. Taking those two facts together means that a turnout strategy isn’t going to work, right?

Simon Bazelon: The idea of the mobilization thesis is that by moving left, Democrats will excite voters who might be skeptical of Democrats because they don’t feel like we’re progressive enough. And those people will come to the polls and deliver a big Democratic victory. This doesn’t line up with what we see in the data at all.

When we look at candidate performance, what we see is really clear. The most progressive Democrats—the folks endorsed by Justice Democrats, Our Revolution—are  running behind the top of the ticket. On the flip side, folks endorsed by the Blue Dogs Coalition or who have more moderate voting records are running ahead of the top of the ticket. In a world in which the mobilization thesis is true, you wouldn’t expect to see that at all. You’d see the opposite.

The kind of voters that Democrats need to turn out and the kind of voters that Democrats need to persuade actually have a lot of structural similarities. They tend to be lower engagement voters, people who don’t follow politics as closely, people for whom politics isn’t as big a part of their identity.

These voters tend to be overwhelmingly concerned with economic issues, and they also tend to be more conservative than Democratic-based voters on a wide range of issues. There’s really no trade-off between this idea of persuading swing voters and mobilizing non-voters. The way to do both is to have an economic-first message that also meets these voters where they are on non-economic cultural issues.

To sum up your bottom line recommendation for winning 2026, 2028 and beyond, Democrats generally need to become more “moderate.” But you define “moderate” in a very specific way—what do you mean?

Simon Bazelon: This is an extremely important distinction to make. Oftentimes, I think people see being “moderate” as defending the establishment or taking the side of corporations or always taking the middle ground between the progressive position and the conservative position. 

That’s not what moderation is. Moderation is taking positions that voters agree with on the issues they care about, particularly when that breaks from unpopular party orthodoxy.

I’ll give a good example of this. Former Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was opposed to some of the prescription drug reforms that Democrats tried to pass in the Inflation Reduction Act. That was a quite unpopular position. Voters are extremely supportive of prescription drug price negotiation. So that was a more conservative position that she took, but it was also an unpopular position. We don’t think that’s what it means to be moderate. What it means to be moderate is to have views that voters agree with on the issues that they care about. The norm is that the more popular position is going to be closer to the center ideologically for the most part.

Just to play devil’s advocate though, progressives would argue that you’re asking people to abandon their principles. It is not right what ICE is doing. It is not right to give up reproductive freedom, and so on. What is your response to the argument that what you’re asking Democrats to do is to disavow some of the values that they have held dear?

Simon Bazelon: First of all, we live in a democracy, and living in a democracy means taking public opinion really seriously. It means not trying to just impose your own values and worldview on the voters. It means listening to them and respecting them and taking them seriously as people who deserve to have a defining role in our politics and in our policy making. If Democrats aren’t willing to respect public opinion, then we’re going to lose elections to people who don’t respect democracy.

And if we don’t win elections, then we can’t help any of the core constituencies that we want to. I’ll also say a lot of these commitments are relatively new. Every Democrat I know was super excited when Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, but Barack Obama’s 2012 platform looked a lot different from the Democratic agenda of the last four or five years. It was a lot more moderate on a lot of issues, and yet Democrats were still quite excited about him. 

I’m just going to keep pushing back a little bit just because I know people out there are pushing back. You’ve said a few times now that Democrats should talk about what’s popular versus what’s not. But there are at least a couple potential problems with that approach. First, some people might ask how this is leadership if you are led by the polls. And if you are following what’s popular, is there room for new ideas?  Second, what’s popular right now tends to be the MAGA point of view, such as on immigration. Does that mean ceding the field to Republicans and talking about all of these issues from the perspective of Republicans? Isn’t that overly defensive versus offensive?

Simon Bazelon:  There are absolutely huge roles for people to shape public opinion and move public opinion in a more progressive direction. And I fully support that on a lot of issues. With that said, is it an elected official’s role to tell their constituents that their own preferences on these issues aren’t correct and that they should have different preferences? Or is it an elected official’s role to represent the views of the people they’re supposed to be serving? I think I have a representative view of this, which is that in a democracy, an elected official’s job is to serve the will of the voters and to represent their views. And I think where we’ve gone wrong a lot of the time is by assuming that the work of public opinion change should be this top-down model coming from elected officials themselves, rather than from people in their own communities building support every day to change public opinion over the long run. 

What we see in a lot of the data is that when Democratic elites embrace an issue, the hardest-core Democratic partisans become much more supportive of that new position but swing voters are negatively polarized against it because they don’t trust Democratic elites. If you want long lasting public opinion change, it’s going to have to happen from the ground up rather than from the top down.

I’m wondering how hard it’s going be to dislodge some old habits, in part because you have very progressive politicians who’ve become influencers dependent on large social media followings. One of the more fascinating findings I found in your report was that you challenged this idea that social media following translates into electoral advantage. In fact, you decisively show that it does not. Nevertheless, how do candidates and politicians break the grip of having that large social media following and having to cater to what that following wants from day to day, moment to moment?

Simon Bazelon: I think it’s really hard. One of the biggest problems in American politics right now is that on both sides, the incentives of elected officials are to play to constituencies whose policy preferences are more extreme than the average American and whose priorities are different from the average voter.

I do think one thing going for us is that Democratic voters deeply care about winning elections. In the 2020 primary, 65 percent of Democratic voters said they cared more about having a nominee who could win than having a nominee who shared their positions on the issues. 

The problem for Democrats is there’s been a lot of confusion about what electability means. A lot of people have put a lot of time and energy into misleading Democrats about how popular various parts of our agenda are. 

On this question of electability, one of the most interesting charts in your report is an electability index that handicaps the potential 2028 contenders. It was really surprising because you have Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at the very top of the list, and two of the highest profile governors right now, Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker, down at the bottom. How does that happen, especially given all the excitement around Newsom right now and Pritzker for their resistance to Trump and the meme-friendly stuff that Newsom is doing? 

Simon Bazelon: What we’re seeing right now is that the kinds of candidates that the Democratic base is getting excited about are the kinds of candidates who are engaging in meme warfare against Donald Trump on Twitter. 

But that approach isn’t the kind of thing that is winning over voters who are skeptical of Democrats. What they want to see is that Democrats are focused on the economic issues they care most about, and that Democrats share their values on non-economic issues. That is unfortunately not the kind of thing that’s getting lots of clicks and retweets right now. It’s a real issue for Democrats going forward.

How do you apply the lessons of your report to the results from New Jersey and from Virginia? To what extent do those outcomes validate what you are saying in your report? And to what extent does the outcome in New York City with the election of Zohran Mamdani push against what you are arguing?

Simon Bazelon: Broadly speaking, all the election results are roughly in line with a lot of the things we’re saying. Also, I think it’s really important not to overlearn lessons from off-year special elections. 

Democrats’ problem is not figuring out how to win federal races in New Jersey and Virginia or New York City. It’s figuring out how to win presidential elections in Wisconsin and Michigan. It’s figuring out how to win Senate races in states like Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas—places that voted for Donald Trump by double digits in 2024. 

But with that said, I do think that the Democrats who won mostly ran quite disciplined campaigns focused on affordability, which is voters’ top issue.

I hear your point about economy and affordability. But how do candidates not run against corruption and all the things that are just horrific about this presidency?  

Simon Bazelon: Donald Trump provides more lanes of attack than Democrats know what to do with. And I think this is sometimes a little bit of a problem for us. You can only have one top priority. Every time you as a candidate or as a staffer write a tweet, give a speech, post a video on social media, or put a policy item on your website, you are making a signal to voters about what you care about and about what your priorities are. 

It’s important to remember that the issues that voters don’t think we care about enough are lowering costs, securing the border, reducing crime, cutting taxes on the middle class, and making healthcare more affordable. What we need to be focused on is closing that gap between what voters think we should be focused on and what voters think we are currently focused on.

I definitely think there’s room in our message for criticizing Trump’s corruption. Voters are very upset at the status quo. They see elites as out of touch and not serving their interests. Trump has provided a lot of fodder for Democrats on that point.

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