This piece originally ran in The American Prospect. Read the original here.
For decades, many Democratic pundits and strategists have had a simple answer for how the party could win: move to “the center.” Just look at Bill Clinton: After three consecutive routs in presidential elections from 1980 to 1988, Clinton ended the longest period of continuous Republican White House occupancy since the run-up to the Great Depression.
Democrats’ 1992 win is often attributed to Bill Clinton’s embrace of “Third Way” neoliberal politics, seasoning conservative economic policy with a pinch of putative social liberalism. However, as his secretary of labor (Robert Reich) recently observed, the 1992 campaign was far more heterogeneous than that telling lets on. In line with his iconic “it’s the economy, stupid” declaration, Clinton ran on significant fiscal stimulus, raising taxes on the wealthy, and public health care. Crediting moderation for the 1992 win misstates the order of events; tacking to the right followed winning the election.
Moreover, Clinton’s “New Democrats” did worse in congressional elections following the party’s embrace of Third Way politics over the course of early 1993, when advisors like Robert Rubin successfully pushed for abandoning more populist campaign promises in favor of austerity. From 1930 to 1994, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for all but four years, or about 94 percent of the time. From 1994 to the present, the party has held a House majority only 27 percent of the time—eight years total. Democratic dominance in the Senate in the 20th century was less pronounced, with Republican majorities for 12 years between 1930 and 1994. Since 1994, Democrats have held Senate majorities for 12 years. That’s a drop from controlling the upper chamber 81 percent of the time to just 40 percent.
Now, this was not entirely about neoliberalism. The main reason for the party’s dominance in that period was the Democratic “Solid South,” and that was doomed once Democrats became the party of civil rights (though it took some years to shake out). Still, if Clintonite politics was so powerful, then one would expect winning the House more than a quarter of the time.
Whatever the case, on the heels of the party’s 2024 defeat, Democrats are again searching for a way out of the wilderness. Unsurprisingly, a loud chorus is insisting the shortest path is a sharp right turn. It is hard to predict exactly what will work in politics, but compulsively playing up moderation and savvy positioning on key issues undermines the party’s brand, legitimates Republican talking points, and reinforces the perception that the Democratic Party stands for nothing.
THE EMPIRICAL CASE FOR CLINTONITE TRIANGULATION runs into some immediate difficulties. Political scientists have argued that moderate candidates are historically more likely to win, but as G. Elliott Morris demonstrates, any such advantage was barely detectable in 2024. There is a debate about the statistical analysis here, as it’s hard to be certain about just how little the benefit is, or what “moderation” even means, but it’s simply undeniable that the centrist elements of both parties have dwindled. Most of the “electable moderates” of ages past have lost.
More concretely, in 2024, Kamala Harris ran a fairly moderate campaign: she boasted about her gun ownership, pandered to cryptocurrency holders, promised to secure the border and deploy more police to fight crime, campaigned with the Republican Liz Cheney, and picked a straight, cis white man (albeit a fairly progressive one) as her running mate. Indeed, in her book, Harris says that she opted not to select Pete Buttigieg as her running mate out of a concern for backlash to a woman of color and a queer person sharing the ticket.
Harris also refused to give protesters against the Gaza genocide so much as a hearing. This clash reached its acme at the Democratic National Convention, where protestors demanded the party allow a pro-Palestine speaker (whose proposed speech was completely reasonable) to take the stage. Democratic leadership, and Harris specifically, rebuffed this demand, despite turning the stage over to multiple pro-Israeli speakers.
Conversely, when various big donors and moderate pundits criticized Harris’s anti-price gouging program, which included a fairly mild program to control large increases in grocery prices, which polled extremely well, she backed away from it. “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls,” suggested former Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell. The Post editorial board lamented that Harris had wasted her economic policy’s potential by caving to “populist gimmicks.” Neoliberal mainstays Ken Rogoff, Jason Furman, and Noah Smith all lambasted the Harris campaign.
Following this outcry, Harris all but abandoned her winning economic populist bent out of concern of alienating centrists and wealthy businesspeople. As The New York Times reported, the campaign handed off economic messaging to Uber executive and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, who made a point, as he did while a member of Obama’s Justice Department, to defer to the wishes of corporate titans.
While Harris was not as conservative as Clinton in 1996, all in all it was a fairly triangulate-y campaign. It did not work.
And if Harris’s relatively moderate campaign has somehow been memory-holed by the politics experts of 2025, Joe Biden’s fairly progressive campaign of 2020 has also been carefully forgotten. His abominable later record on Gaza notwithstanding, he ran on a massive welfare state buildout, full employment, “at least three” genders, and with a Black woman running mate. That did work.
Of course, it would be going too far to conclude that progressive policy and messaging is guaranteed to work, while centrist moderation will always fail. Political success depends on many things—the particular talents and weaknesses of each candidate, incumbency, the economic and historical moment, the bias of journalists, the information environment, and on and on.
But it is clear that centrist Democrats are much more concerned with shutting down the left than providing a good-faith case that moderation wins. The fact that they largely ignore Harris’s Clintonite campaign is proof of that.
In 2024, voters concerned about Gaza were met with the casual, callous deflection of “Trump will be worse.” Centrists insisted, ad nauseum, that protesters needed to shut up and fall in line. On the flip side, when Harris did something that offended neoliberal sensibilities by suggesting that companies shouldn’t be able to charge consumers exorbitant prices for food immediately following natural disasters, those same commentators and establishment figures tripped over themselves to smear Harris as a communist. In both instances, the rush toward the center was accomplished by punching left, harming the party’s image by branding large swathes of their copartisans as dangerous radicals who can’t be trusted to lead.
This tendency is a hallmark of Democratic triangulation. When Republicans moderate, they rarely do it by tarring their conservative flank. They disagree without denigrating. On the other hand, centrist Democrats seeking to distance themselves from the left seem compelled to regurgitate Republican broadsides against the left as if driven by some primal instinct. They seem unable to envision a way of toning down their progressivism without fundamentally validating the Republican critique such a move is intended to address.
This compulsion to validate the right also leads centrists to misjudge public opinion, or fail to anticipate obvious trends. Ezra Klein, for instance, caused a stir recently when he suggested that to be nationally competitive, Democrats needed to run pro-life candidates in Missouri, Ohio, and Kansas. Notably, Klein managed to select three states where recent pro-choice ballot initiatives passed easily. Who’s laser-focused on public opinion, again?
Centrists also played into the right’s hands with Gaza protests, joining with conservatives to tar universities as radicalizing, anti-free speech cesspools of antisemitism. That falsehood is now the justification for Trump and Vance’s war on higher education as they seek to end free speech on campuses and subjugate academia to the regime’s ideology. And now as public opinion has steadily and predictably soured on Israel, particularly among Democrats, even some of the most fanatical pro-Israel centrists are scrambling to hedge their bets.
Elsewhere, at the centrist confab WelcomeFest, speakers specifically cautioned against highlighting ICE’s illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and lamented that Democrats had opposed Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill. However, while a narrow majority supported Florida’s original bill, the expansion to exclude LGBTQ content all the way up to 8th grade was unpopular and resulted in 40 percent of Florida parents reporting they’d like to move. And highlighting Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation to an El Salvador gulag allowed Democrats, particularly Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, to turn the tide of public opinion against Trump on draconian immigration enforcement. It was a safe bet that the public would turn on Trump’s horrible immigration policies once they got a good look at them, because that’s what happened last time.
Empirically, research has found that when left-wing parties embrace anti-immigration politics, they lose vote share and empower the far right. For a concrete example, look at the U.K., where Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer has attempted to outflank Nigel Farage’s Reform party to the right, and earned himself a 69 percent disapproval rating. Democrats’ leading lights apparently aim to replicate this disastrous failure.
As Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen write in their book The Truce, Joe Biden was the first Democratic president in decades to cut a genuine deal with his party’s progressive wing (at least until he threw it away on Gaza). The result was a productive working relationship that would have gotten a lot more done if he hadn’t been repeatedly betrayed by centrists like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
It is one thing for moderates to argue for their position within the Democratic coalition. It is quite another to constantly smear their own coalition members—and by extension their party as a whole—with transparently fraudulent arguments that progressivism can never win.
Image credit: “Democratic Donkey – 3D Icon” by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY 2.0.