Fighting Denial. And Winning.

35 years after the New Orleans Declaration, the party must learn combative centrist lessons anew to win

“Democrats Are in Denial About 2024,” says The New York Times editorial board in a scorching takedown this weekend. Democrats not only lost the presidency, but:

lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That plight is similar to one were Democrats experiencing in 1990.

Thirty-five years ago this week, a group of combative centrist Democrats launched a vision that would capture the White House for the rest of the decade.

Entering the 1990s, Democratic powerlessness was different than it is today. It was mainly a presidential problem.

Over three elections in the 1980s, Democrats won 173 electoral votes, nearly 100 short of winning the presidency.

Democrats did not average 173 electoral votes across three elections. That was the total. Republicans won the electoral college 1,440 to 173 across the Eighties, cruising to the White House in 1980 (49 electoral votes for Democrats), 1984 (13), and 1988 (111).

While the presidency was the main problem for Democrats entering the 1990s, today it is the Senate. Democrats are lucky to hold even 47 Senate seats and have no clear path to consistently winning a majority (Where’s the plan, Chuck?).

The New York Times is late to this realization.¹ Two years ago, we outlined how troubled Democrats were. The early 2020s was not a time for “Hopium,” but for restructuring a party to win durable majorities:

Early 2020s trends show Democrats must now relearn the lessons they took out of the Eighties. Since 2016, the share of every demographic saying “Republicans care about people like me” has gone up. Black, Hispanic. Rich, poor. The share of every demographic saying “Democrats care about people like me” has declined – except among the highly educated.

But here we are — and we can only change moving forward.

Lessons from the 1990s turnaround are instructive on how to change.

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New Orleans in 1990

Back to The New York Times from March 25, 1990. The article “Eyes to Left, Democrats Edge Toward the Center” describes the intra-party jockeying that resulted from those three blowout presidential losses of the 1980s:

Two very different political visions collided here today: A group of centrist Democrats asserted that the national party must change to reclaim the support of middle-class voters, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson asserted that the American mainstream was moving toward him.

The Democratic Leadership Council, a group of elected officials who are trying to nudge the party toward the center, spent two days arguing that the party must reject the orthodoxies of the past and move toward a philosophy that emphasizes economic growth, ''expanding opportunity, not government,'' getting tough on criminals, and helping America compete in the world marketplace.

...

The debate reflects a party groping toward the 1992 Presidential election, trying to rebuild a Presidential majority in the electoral college and a national image after losing five of the past six Presidential elections.

The council, founded in reaction to the party's landslide Presidential defeat in 1984, is pushing a party philosophy intended to recapture the middle-class voters who deserted the Democrats in droves in the past three Presidential elections.

Losing middle class voters, and losing lots of elections. Sound familiar?

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Time to Party

A key takeaway here is the time between the organizational founding (1984) and this article on a major conference (1990).

Six years is a long time!

Like modern Democrats - including even Bernie Sanders, who pivoted hard on immigration earlier this week - the council knew that a break with the past was needed:

A ''New Orleans Declaration'' embraced here this weekend emphasizes civic obligation rather than entitlement, getting tough on criminals rather than ''explaining away their behavior,'' and implementing social welfare programs that ''bring the poor into the nation's economic mainstream, not maintain them in dependence.''

But over its six years, the council had already experienced a challenge in following through on such breaks - as Bernie himself found out in 2020, when he abandoned some of his popular 2016 stances in favor of more permissive policies in his second run for the presidency. Four years after the DLC was founded, the Democratic Party nominated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and Republicans gained a rare third consecutive term:

Still, despite the group's efforts to redefine and redirect the party, it faces a ''fourth-year problem,'' as Elaine Kamarck, one of its analysts, put it. ''We start out to rethink and then the fourth year comes along and what do we do? We nominate a New Deal liberal,'' she said.

It is hard to resist activist pressure, and it takes a strong community to do so. The DLC didn’t give up, and in 1992, Bill Clinton’s victory was the culmination of a half-decade of work shepherding an entrepreneurial ecosystem that could keep the focus on winning.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as Aesop noted. And Democrats had the necessary motivation to try new things heading into the 1990s.

And plenty of inventions followed.

The electoral wilderness of the 1980s produced organizations that would forge the way back to the White House. Led by the Democratic Leadership Council, affiliated groups socialized policy innovations and built a community of partisan centrists – “New Democrats.” They held luncheons, developed policies, hosted forums and created a social and political network of centrist politicians, culminating in the generation of leaders helmed by the young Arkansas governor.

Embracing the center, Clinton resuscitated the party. Democrats captured the White House in 1992 for the first time since 1976.

Unifying Fighters into the 2000s

During the George W. Bush years, liberal Democrats for the most part did not organize around pulling the party left ideologically. Instead, the Democrats popular among the “Netroots” activists and online bloggers were so-called “fighting Democrats” (as

Matthew Yglesias

has recalled), using hardball to deny Bush wins. Youngsters coming of political age during the Trump resistance might be forgiven for their surprise upon learning that a hero of the Netroots was former Reagan Navy Secretary and moderate Democrat Jim Webb.

Like the pre-woke version of Bernie Sanders (pro-gun, anti-immigration), the early 2000s resistance was marked by heterodox views but a pugnacious spirit. While the Netroots were progressive, they were also pragmatic fighters, understanding the need to appeal to the median voter to win. They prized candidates like Webb who would make Republicans look hypocritical, rather than candidates designed to “mobilize” the base.

In 2008, Barack Obama leaned into this middle ground. He did not seek to be a “movement progressive.” He meticulously avoided stoking the nation’s ever-simmering racial passions, was slow to embrace gay rights, supported “clean coal,” quietly killed a Medicare public option, was known as the “deporter in chief” by the left, and rejected a command-and-control response to health care and the financial crisis, earning praise from the DLC. Nevertheless, Obama was a hero to progressives because of what he stood for: an opponent of the Iraq War (from the relative safety of the Illinois state Senate), and someone whose blitzkrieg U.S. Senate career suggested a liberal policymaking bent.

Obama managed a deeply moderate party with a large Senate majority created by DLC-style moderation and ideological diversity. These senators identified with a variety of positions that would have earned them the boot from late-2010s progressive partisans: the Democratic majority contained pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business, pro-military and pro-fiscal responsibility Senators.

It’s worth recalling how truly moderate-to-conservative the members of the Obama-era supermajority were: Pro-lifers like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Fossil fuel enthusiasts like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Fiscal hawks like Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

The 2010s and Today

Today’s intra-party Democratic debate is shaping up similarly to the debates of March 1990, which pitted Clinton’s network of an inclusive policy vision with the rallies of the left.

Bernie Sanders and AOC are on a sold-out national tour, while Ezra Klein is on an Abundance policy tour of his own and small collections of pragmatic Democrats do lunch & learns. Back to The New York Times from March 1990:

Governor Clinton told the group today that it should focus more on ideas than on the mechanics of winning the White House, asserting, ''Any political resurgence depends on the intellectual resurgence of our party.''

This sense, that the party needs that kind of debate, accounts, in part, for the group's preoccupation with Mr. Jackson, widely seen as the leader of the party's liberal wing. It invited him to speak at today's event.

This weekend’s NYT editorial offers a trio of actions for Democrats. First, “admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age.” Second, “recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017.” And:

Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.

Ideas are essential, and the DLC’s 1990 manifesto - the New Orleans Declaration - is worth reading today.

But the path back to power was not simply great ideas, it was built on deliberate organizing for a vision that could win a majority. The New Orleans Declaration rippled out into victories because of the lunches and local meetups and annual events and relationships built up over the six years before it.

Don’t be in denial. Join us at the second annual WelcomeFest on June 4 in DC - and check out the highlights of last year’s inaugural gathering. There are effective groups and leaders out there fighting denial, with lots of good ideas. Winning this fight requires doing it together.

1. We should note The New York Times got a new editorial director weeks ago. David Leonhardt has not been as late to this reality.