The Vacuum Democrats Must Fill

What are the essential things Democrats believe?

Illustration by Donkey Hotey

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Never before has a party reeling from an election loss heard from so many people offering directions to locate the path to redemption. While the Democratic Party’s position is not nearly as dire as some have suggested, it does have a series of interconnected challenges, involving (among other things) policy, party building, messaging, and the structure of today’s informational environment. But today I want to talk about identity. Namely: What is the Democratic Party? What does it believe? What does it mean to be a Democrat? And what do voters think of, if anything, when they hear that name?

If the answer to any or all of those questions is “Beats me,” there’s a real problem. That doesn’t mean they can’t win elections without a more clearly defined and appealing identity, because they’ve done it in the past. Given how elections work in this era, Democrats could change literally nothing and they’d still be almost guaranteed to take back the House in 2026. Nevertheless, the vagueness of Democratic identity is something its candidates at every level struggle to overcome. Just imagine if its identity was a wind at their backs and not in their faces.

This is not a new problem

Back in 2006, I wrote a book called Being Right Is Not Enough: What Democrats Must Learn From Conservative Success. I thought it was pretty good, but almost nobody read it.

One of the things I argued was that while Republicans had identifiable positions and ideas on many issues, of greater political significance was the fact that they had a few foundational beliefs that they all agreed on and they repeated endlessly. If you asked a Republican candidate running for any office from dog-catcher to president what they believed in, they’d tell you some version of the same thing:

1. Small government

2. Low taxes

3. A strong defense

4. Traditional values

Any particular voter might or might not agree with them on any or all of those items, but their foundation of belief was clear. If you asked Democrats what basic things they believed in, on the other hand, you’d get dozens of different answers. I know, because when I was writing the book I spent months asking Democrats that question, and the answers were all over the place. They still are.

But even foundational ideas are not written in stone. Republicans have changed in recent years thanks to Donald Trump, who took over their party body and soul. While there are still Republicans who would cite those four pillars as the basis of their conservatism, Trumpism is something different. It isn’t concerned with the size of government. It wants low taxes and high defense spending, but treats them both as almost incidental. And it finds traditional values to be negotiable.

The foundations of Trumpism, which have now become the foundations of the GOP, are about who and what it hates. I’m fond of quoting Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, the mastermind of the Southern Strategy, who said that the key to politics is “who hates who.” That idea has come to complete fruition in the person of Trump and the party he has remade. The list of the hated is long, but the items at the top would include the following:

1. Immigrants and immigration

2. Liberals, especially those in cities

3. Diversity

4. Social change, especially around gender

5. “Political correctness,” i.e. being asked to treat people with respect

6. Established institutions and systems

7. “The elite” (cultural, but not economic)

We could go on, but the basic idea is that there is a relatively coherent collection of people and ideas that Republicans now hate, and hating them is the basis of their identity. Today, if you ask a Republican running for town council in Whipsnap, WY or Tumbleweed, TX what they stand for, they can just say “Donald Trump” and every voter will know who they hate, and how that hatred will determine their approach to governing.

Not everyone who voted for Trump or other Republican candidates in 2024 necessarily shares all these hatreds. Maybe they share only some of them, or maybe they were just pissed off about inflation, or maybe they had some other reason for voting how they did. And both parties are unpopular overall. But at the very least, the elements of Republican identity have been amply communicated to the electorate.

What do Democrats believe?

You couldn’t come up with a similar list of people and ideas that all Democrats hate, just as you couldn’t come up with a set of three or four foundational ideas that all Democrats believe in. That’s not just because the Democratic Party is more diverse than the Republican Party, though it is. It’s also because Democrats don’t seem to think that they have to have an ideological core and a simple way of communicating it that is repeated over and over.

One consequence is that in a situation like the one Kamala Harris faced when Joe Biden exited the presidential race, she had to quickly introduce herself to the public and didn’t have a familiar set of ideas to use as the basis of that introduction. Unfortunately, the vagueness of Democratic identity extended to Harris herself. If I asked you to name her foundational beliefs, what would you say? I’m guessing you’d have a hard time — and if you read newsletters like this one, you are almost certainly more informed about politics than at least 95% of your fellow citizens. Paying attention to politics is literally my job, and while I can tell you particular things Harris believes, I couldn’t articulate what they add up to.

That’s partly because Harris isn’t a “conviction” politician like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren who arrived to national politics with a set of ideas she had been advocating for her entire career. But it’s also because her party couldn’t provide her with a turnkey identity the way Republicans can with their candidates. The result was a campaign that was at once too vague and too specific, advocating “freedom” and a tax credit for first-time home buyers, but leaving too many voters without a clear sense of who Harris was and whose side she was on.

The lack of a clear Democratic identity becomes especially problematic when either 1) events have not conspired to give the party’s nominee an advantage, as they did for Bill Clinton in 1992 or Barack Obama in 2008; or 2) the candidate is not possessed of blinding charisma that wipes away the need for philosophical clarity, as was true of Clinton and Obama, but not true of less successful Democrats. (I’ll be addressing charisma, an under-analyzed topic, in a future post, likely later this week or next week.)

To be clear, I am not arguing that this is why Harris lost. There are many reasons why she lost, the most important of which was that people hate inflation and she was part of the administration that presided over it. And she lost by a very small margin, only about 1.5%. But the lack of a clear identity certainly didn’t help.

This is one part of a broad challenge Democrats face; they also need to rebuild their party as an organization (there’s more on that from Henry Farrell here), and address the fact that they are overwhelmed in the information environment by a sophisticated and well-funded propaganda apparatus the right spent decades building. But they also have to make sure every Democrat knows what it means to be a Democrat, and can repeat it to anyone who asks.

By now you’re probably asking, “Okay, so what are the key pillars of Democratic identity?” Alas, it’s a complicated question, and that too is something we’ll have to wait for a future post to address in full. Stay tuned.