This morning on Bluesky Politico’s Josh Gerstein flagged to me and others a piece by Matt Yglesias in which, he said, Matt “says progressive Dems [are] too obsessed with fighting Trump rather than winning in marginal states/districts [and] picks fight with Josh Marshall over it.”
It turns out Yglesias is responding to a piece I wrote a couple weeks ago entitled “Centrists, This Is on You.” I sat down and read Matt’s piece and found myself kind of baffled because he has me saying perhaps not the diametric opposite of what I wrote but pretty close to the opposite of it. I always try to be sensitive to the possibility that when someone so thoroughly misunderstands what I wrote that it may be that I just wasn’t clear. There’s the additional factor that I usually write assuming familiarity with the stream of posts I’ve written on the same topic in recent days and weeks. People read a single post and some of my meaning might not be clear. Here though I can’t help but think that Matt zipped through the post in question, zeroed in on a few buzzwords like “fight” and then just plugged those into his existing framework and didn’t actually pay attention to my argument. Because, as I said, he’s just arguing against these stock arguments that I never made.
Still, there are some illuminating things that can be drawn from the misunderstanding and/or disagreement.
To hear Matt tell it, I am sort of coming to the defense of DSA world and arguing that what Democrats need is a more expressive politics based on maximal anti-Trumpism, a kind of politics of primal screams turned up to 11. They need to lean into positions on immigration or trans rights and perhaps Israel that are in maximal opposition to Donald Trump. What I need to do, Matt claims, is decide whether I want to “fight” and feel good or whether I want to win. Presumably we want to win, which I certainly agree with. And to do that, Matt says, we have to have the self-discipline and impulse control to focus on winning even it might not be as expressively satisfying as “fighting.” To do that, you need to find candidates well matched to swing or frontier districts and states who can turn Trump voters, win new seats and thus take control of Congress. You do this mainly by focusing on issues like affordability, the ways Trump has worsened the economy, etc.
This is actually the opposite of what I wrote. Indeed, my central point is that you need to have more ideologically moderate candidates who can operate in the “fight” lane precisely because you don’t want to end up with nominees who are too left -wing or DSA-adjacent and aren’t going to be viable in the swing states and districts where majorities are built. Probably one of the two or three premises I’m most identified with in a couple decades of writing is that politics is not a lifestyle or a space for self-expression. It’s about shaping the country we live in and acquiring political power through elections to do that. Matt has set up this dichotomy between “fighting” and “winning” because he doesn’t understand what I mean by fighting. Or, I think more likely, he’s zeroed in on the buzzword and then just plugged into it his pre-existing stock argument in which it means something different. I get it. Time is precious. It’s hard to stay focused sometimes.
Here’s what I mean by the “fight” spectrum and why it’s important.
I’ve written a number of times that there are two key spectrums today in intra-Democratic politics. One is the conventional ideological one: liberal versus more social democratic and socialist, Obamacare vs Medicare for All, etc. There’s there’s a “fight” spectrum, where you have different theories of power in politics, some more focused on comity, consensus and norms, and others more focused on what’s been called “constitutional hardball.” You see this play out on issues like the filibuster or Supreme Court reform. What I’ve argued is that the assumptions that these spectrums line up — that left means fight and liberal means accommodation — has led to all sorts of confusion and bad decision-making because the two things really have no inherent connection. What I’ve argued is that the center-left wing of the party is to a great extent ceding the the “fight” spectrum to the party’s left. And thus they’re getting a lot of primary candidates from the left, often with policy positions which are unpopular with most voters, despite the fact that I don’t think Democratic voters are really moving left ideologically.
The point of prying apart the “fight” and the ideology spectrums is precisely because you don’t want to run outer borough New York City candidates in purple or red states. You want candidates matched to those states and districts. And by definition it is in purple and red parts of the country where you are going to build congressional majorities. This seems to be exactly what Matt wants, and for good reason. If you want to shift the balance of power within the party you do most of that work in safe seats where you’re at no risking losing the seats all together. You tread more carefully in marginal jurisdictions where a different kind of candidate might not be sellable and where you might lose the seat altogether.
There are two reasons “fight” is critical and they’re interrelated. The first is substantive. We are not in the 1990s. We are not in an ordinary legislative or consensus political moment. We are in a moment that requires major structural changes to our political system to secure our basic liberties and the civic democratic nature of our government. This is a great work of repair and structural reinforcement. To me, and I think to many others, the lessons of the last decade and the Biden years is that there’s no path forward for civic democracy in this country without these major structural reforms. We fight to win elections not simply to win them but to do specific things with the power you get from winning them. A lot of the “fight” argument is about shifting the goals and attitudes of elected officials so they will be ready to make these major structural reforms once they are in power and in a position to do so.
Basically what we are talking about is shifting the attitudes, goals and assumptions of elected Democrats so they are ready and prepared to play constitutional hardball to make reforms to secure the future of democracy and all of our liberties. This in itself is not an electoral or campaign argument. It is a substantive argument about what Democrats need to do once they are in power. It goes without saying that of course you want to win but it is also important, in some ways just as important, to know what you want to do once you win. Maybe I’m wrong about filibuster and Supreme Court reform. But it’s a substantive and not an electoral argument. So if I’m wrong on that front you need to address why. And Matt simply doesn’t.
Some people have told me, sure those things are important. But it’s probably better to keep quiet about them or ignore them until you get a trifecta and just do it then. In the abstract that may make sense. But right now, most of the top elected officials in the Democratic Party aren’t on board with these reforms. So changing that is inevitably public, a mix of persuasion and primary fights.
But the substantive issue is not the only one. There’s also very much a political and electoral one. Matt’s big hobbyhorse in recent years is that Democrats’ problem is that they got too far out on a limb on hot-button social issues like immigration, policing, trans rights, wokeness in general, etc. and that’s put whole swathes of the country beyond their reach. There is a significant degree of truth to this, though that was more the case in 2024 than it is today. Democrats have already spent a couple years furiously repositioning on these topics. And the political environment, in which the central issue for most voters is Trump, simply makes them less salient.
But a clear look at the available polling data shows that this is not the main cause of Democrats’ low public standing. The main thing both Democratic partisans and those loosely-attached voters in the middle of the electorate who are most up-for-grabs don’t like about Democrats is that they are some mix of weak, feckless and either unwilling or unable to fight for what they claim to believe in. Critically, this is a perceived failing affecting opinions of Democrats across a good bit of the political spectrum, making their core supporters angsty and demoralized and potential voters in the middle of the electorate unreachable. Often a party has “problems” that if you solve for your own voters make it more difficult for you to get new voters who are more ideologically up for grabs. This is very different. Here you have the same discontent across the whole spectrum of gettable voters. That speaks both to a major shortcoming and a big opportunity since there’s lots of upside and very little downside. I don’t want to recapitulate the data on this. G. Elliot Morris has done so far better than I’m able. Here’s one post of his on this from February and another from April.
Why do so many voters see Democrats as “weak”? I’m tempted to say that if you follow Democratic politics you probably don’t need a lot of help with this. But I would say that it is mostly a big disjuncture between the threat of Donald Trump’s rising autocracy and the way Democrats characterize that threat and what elected Democrats are willing to do to counter it. You have a Republican Party that, when it’s not actually breaking the law or violating the Constitution, is willing to extract every ounce of advantage out of the mechanisms of state power, while the top elected Democrats are still largely wedded to proceduralism and norms (though this is changing and I think rapidly). Voters are unhappy with the mismatch and want something different. Matt somehow claims that I am saying Democrats need to just be more angry at Trump, more taking the opposite position to whatever he’s doing or I guess doing some kind of mass joint primal scream therapy and that’s how you “fight.” But anyone who’s read what I’ve actually written can see I’ve never said anything like that. There are both big substantive reasons for Democrats to adopt constitutional hardball and political/electoral reasons to signal to voters that they will do so in power.
Matt keeps coming back to this “do you want to fight or win” dichotomy which is more than a bit self-satisfied and condescending. So for instance, he starts one paragraph writing, “From my perspective as someone who wants to win …” He even has these digressions where he says something about liking anti-Trump rock groups as much as the next guy but how that’s not the same as winning elections in swing states. (He even has embedded YouTube videos of some of the best songs. It’s really quite something.) In any case, this is just some kind of undergrad debating trick where you misstate what the other person is saying to easily knock it down. That’s good for college debate, less good for actually convincing anyone.
A final point. As I’ve tried to argue above, to me the substance of what we need to do for the country (what’s necessary to do) and the politics (how to gain power to do those things) are aligned. This is far from always the case. But if we believe in democratic self-governance, it shouldn’t be totally shocking since broadly speaking we should expect voters to have some sense, albeit often expressed in an inchoate fashion, of what is necessary to do to achieve certain objectives. But the style of commentary Matt has adopted here can’t help but remind me of Bertholt Brecht’s satirical quip (playing off a workers uprising in East Berlin in 1953) that if the People had lost the confidence of government that the government should dissolve the People and elect another.
There is a persistent strain in this kind of commentary that the Democratic Party could be doing so much better if it just didn’t have such shitty voters. And yeah, the people are revolting. They stink on ice, as Mel Brooks (playing Louis XVI) once put it in History of the World, Part I. But Brecht’s quip was satirical. At least in America we can’t dissolve the people, or in this case Democratic voters. They’re all we’ve got. And if our game here is the real world as opposed to some kind of electoral Dungeons and Dragons, we need to grapple with their perceptions, enthusiasms, anger and everything else. We live in a climate of profoundly low public trust and an anti-establishment mood. Democratic voters and large numbers of loosely tethered swing voters (certainly not just far-left primary voters) believe that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement pose a dire threat to the country’s future and the liberties of its citizens. If your public statements, campaign promises and political style seems too out of sync with that perceived threat, voters are not going to buy what you’re selling. In Democratic primaries, you will lose to candidates with a more confrontational political style even if those same candidates are too ideologically extreme to be viable in a general election.
Voters are telling Democrats that they want them to be ready to use political power in ways that are smart, effective and maximal. This is not a complicated ask and it is not an unreasonable one. It is not the same as getting into spittle contests about who can be the most angry about Trump or who’s most likely to have a stroke when they’re gnashing their teeth about how much they don’t like him. It’s about the ability and willingness to use political power effectively and maximally. If that is what voters want, you need to be ready to do that and be able to communicate that ability and willingness on the campaign trail. It’s not complicated. It’s bread and butter electoral politics.