Almost twelve months after their drubbing in the 2024 election, Democrats are still having a tired argument about the party’s future. Should it move left, reclaim the center, or lurch right to win back the working class?
The New York Times editorial board offered its answer in October, with an article titled “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” The story profiled a group of mostly Democratic elected officials characterized as moderates: Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Pat Ryan in New York, Jared Golden in Maine, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas. Citing a post-election analysis, it found that these “moderate” Democrats outperformed Kamala Harris by 2.8 points. At the same time, progressives—including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—lagged behind her. Of the 17 Democrats (13 House, four Senate) who won in places Trump carried in 2024, “moderation dominated their campaign messages,” the Times found.
Buried in the essay, though, is one line that really crystallizes what is going on:
The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. [Emphasis added]
You don’t say.
The Democrats who succeeded best in 2024—especially in purple and red territory—weren’t economically moderate in any recognizable Beltway sense. They were populists who focused relentlessly on prices, jobs, and manufacturing. On economic policy, these politicians are well to the left of the “moderate” consensus that has long dominated Washington think tanks and the columns of liberal-centrist luminaries like Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias, Derek Thompson, and Ezra Klein. These writers generally support industrial policy in principle but shy away from its populist edge—from talk of greedflation, strategic tariffs, corporate power, or monopolies—even as they celebrate the candidates whose victories were built on those themes.
In January, Chait, for example, argued in The Atlantic that the party’s Biden-era turn against free-trade orthodoxy—toward labor, antitrust, and industrial policy—was a bust. “The theory that populist economic policies can win back the working class for Democrats has been tried, and it has failed,” he wrote. Chait endorsed Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s “abundance agenda,” also co-signed by Yglesias, which promises faster growth in housing and energy through deregulation and preemption of local control. The “abundance” advocates mainly treat populist economics as a left-wing indulgence rather than the beating heart of today’s political center. “[Former Pennsylvania Senator] Bob Casey did more than any other frontline Democrat to make opposition to greedflation and price gouging the core of his campaign message,” Yglesias wrote in June, “It didn’t work.”
But that misreads what voters rewarded, and what they punished. The problem in 2024 wasn’t Biden’s focus on jobs and manufacturing or antitrust. It was essentially inflation plus his border policy, and Bob Casey never tried to distance himself from the latter. Democrats who survived in swing and red-leaning districts separated themselves from the administration’s immigration approach even as they embraced its populist economic policies. They championed the factories and infrastructure Biden helped deliver, not the chaos at the border that dominated national headlines. For example, Marcy Kaptur won her 22nd term in a Toledo, Ohio-based district that Trump carried by seven points. The 79-year-old, often a GOP target, ran on reviving American manufacturing and “what America makes and grows,” backing tariffs on Chinese steel and steering federal dollars toward Midwest battery plants. She argued in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course,” citing “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.”
Recent polling shows just how potent that kind of populism remains. Voters overwhelmingly support policies that take on corporate pricing power—preferring crackdowns on price gouging to the “abundance” liberal prescriptions of cutting red tape by a two-to-one margin. According to a Third Way post-mortem, voters in battleground states trusted Trump over Harris on border security by a staggering 21-point margin, far larger than the gap on economic issues. In short, border chaos and inflation, not populist economic policies, were 2024’s albatross for Democrats.
The very winners the Times lists as evidence of the broad appeal of “centrism” ran on anti-monopoly populism and place-based industrial policy. Culturally, they’re not movement activists but coalition builders—Democrats who speak to their districts, not just their base. They reject the punitive cruelty of the right and the moral absolutism that the left sometimes exudes, projecting a kind of moral seriousness without moral superiority. It’s a nuance that the centrist pundits recognize, and that many progressives dismiss as irrelevant. This, plus the working-class roots many of them have, gives them a better connection with voters. “If they went to a P.T.A. meeting at their school, they wouldn’t be viewed as a snooty middle-class parent,” observed Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, on Ezra Klein’s podcast. “Then you have somebody like an Elizabeth Warren, who has all this great stuff but doesn’t have that kind of effect.”
Consider the roster the Times celebrates: Jared Golden, a Marine veteran from Maine’s 2nd District, who is facing a stiff primary challenge, rejects the left-right dichotomy altogether. “The political spectrum does not exist in nature,” he says. His shorthand: “progressive economics, cultural conservatism”: “Tax the rich to cut the deficit: pro-business and pro-antitrust. Corporate welfare is bad; direct payments to families are good. Financialization of the economy is sometimes bad, protective tariffs are sometimes good.” Golden frustrates many Democrats because of his penchant to break ranks, as he did recently when he supported a Republican bill to keep the government open that lacked the Democratic Party’s demands. But such rogue moments are probably necessary for Golden to survive in a district Trump won handily. More importantly, on economic philosophy, it sounds to me like Golden has been reading the Washington Monthly or The American Prospect, not the well-funded new “abundance”-coded magazine, The Argument.
Meanwhile, Pat Ryan outperformed Kamala Harris by double digits in New York’s Hudson Valley and flipped a swing seat by hammering corporate price-gouging and monopolies. Ryan, an Iraq War veteran and the son of a small business owner and public school teacher, co-founded the Monopoly Busters Caucus, which is pushing the Federal Trade Commission to revive the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act to fight against predatory pricing for small businesses. (Yglesias has criticized the enforcement of the law and defends various forms of price discrimination. ) Ryan’s “patriotic populism,” he told New York magazine, targets “greedy and corrupt elites”—oil executives and tax-dodging tech moguls—while casting “scrappy, hungry innovators” as the heroes. At the anti-monopoly conference sponsored by the American Economic Liberties Project in Washington, D.C., last month, Ryan and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego gave rousing speeches about their fights against concentrated economic power, and for reshoring supply chains and manufacturing.
“Anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message,” Gallego declared at the conference. “It can be an antitrust, anti-monopoly, anti-big-business message, but it has to be centered on the person and making their life better and easier … Anything that we can do to make that person have a little more at the end of the month will make a huge difference,” he said. “If we do that, that’s a winning message. It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.”
When Gallego, an Iraq War vet who worked at a meatpacking plant as a teenager, talks about industry consolidation, he makes it very concrete. “It’s not a theoretical antitrust situation,” he said. “This is about how people are living now.” He pointed to grocery mergers, independent pharmacy closures, and algorithmic price-fixing that have made everyday life more expensive. And he skewered Silicon Valley’s sanitized self-image: “The old robber barons wore top hats and twirled their mustaches,” he said. “Today it’s the guy drinking matcha tea in a gray sweatshirt, going to yoga class. Those people are just as bad for consumers.”
Gallego certainly isn’t allergic to all the so-called “abundance” agenda. Like most pragmatic Democrats, he supports faster housing and energy infrastructure construction to bring down costs—areas where populists and “abundance” liberals overlap. But neither permitting reform nor growth is the core of his message.
Moving north to Wisconsin, Senator Tammy Baldwin fought for Buy America rules in the 2024 defense bill while her colleague, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, campaigned on reshoring semiconductors and EV supply chains through the CHIPS Act. In Texas, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, and in Nevada, Senator Jacky Rosen, both took tough stances on illegal immigration in their campaigns—criticizing their own party’s tolerance of a broken border—even as they also spoke against corporate greed. Both slammed oil companies for price gouging, and Rosen urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and crack down on Big Oil mergers that “greatly reduce competition and drive up gas prices at the pump.” And in Washington state, freshman Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crafted a rural Democrat brand by focusing on issues like right-to-repair for farm equipment, antitrust enforcement on Big Ag and Big Tech, and other pro-small-business populist ideas. Even Rep. Seth Moulton, whom Matt Yglesias has championed as a challenger to the 79-year-old Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, is a cofounder of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and has been a leader in the House on combating algorithmic rent hikes.
These are not “centrist Democrats” in the Kyrsten Sinema mold. They don’t sell moderation as a virtue in itself. Their populism defends production over speculation, competition over consolidation, and work over finance. None of them trumpet the supposed advantages of monopolies in ushering in new technological wonders—the way Yglesias, Thompson, Klein, and other “abundance” pundits do. The politicians who actually win in hard districts aren’t making paeans to the efficiency of big businesses; they’re fighting to keep power diffuse and local. In fact, it’s hard to think of a worse message than: “We’ll build data centers and solar farms in your rural community without your input.” That’s not moderation. Voters, especially rural ones with whom Democrats desperately need to become competitive again, call that insane.
Stanford Political Scientist Adam Bonica, who has challenged the statistical basis of the Times story, nevertheless agrees that winning moderate candidates are those “who can channel voter fury at a broken system into a concrete agenda for change.” The successful Democratic politicians don’t sound moderate because they’ve sanded off their edges. They sound moderate because they’ve rebuilt a moral vocabulary around work and place. At a moment when every argument is nationalized, they talk about the price of milk, the closing factory, and the bridge that finally got fixed. They are impatient with faculty lounge language, suspicious of elites, and generally allergic to bullshit. Call it whatever you want—populism, moderation, common sense. The country seems ready to reward it.
