Democrats are realizing they can do populism, too

The midterms are coming up, and while I’m generally loath to prognosticate, I’m going to venture that Democrats are going to outperform even already favorable polling. At this point, pretty much every serious political observer and analyst is expecting Dems to take back the House and the Senate, potentially by sizable margins. Races that were just weeks ago considered leaning red have been moved to tossups, many tossups now lean blue and some races that seemed out of reach – like the Senate contest in Kansas – are now in play. This effect may be magnified by the apparent trend of the once-disengaged voters President Donald Trump had brought into the MAGA fold — the nonvoter-to-Trump voter who helped him surmount Never-Trump sentiment — becoming disillusioned with him and potentially staying away from the polls altogether.

The reasons for this are varied, but relatively simple at their core: while some slice of his base is racist and conspiratorial and saw their once socially unacceptable views championed by Trump, the voters who got him over the finish line in 2024 were people upset above all at inflation. They didn’t really follow politics but remembered that the economy had been strong in Trump’s first term, at least until the pandemic, and decided that he would probably be the best choice to bring prices down. That idea has now been rather dramatically falsified. Large numbers of people feel that the economy has never been worse, and that they can lay this at Trump’s feet in ways that are rarely this clear. The difference between prices before and after Trump imposed large tariffs was stark, as was the shift in gas prices after Trump launched an unsanctioned and unpopular war in Iran — exactly the kind of open-ended military entanglement in the Middle East Trump the candidate had promised to avoid. Plus, even people who supported Trump’s pledges of mass deportation in the belief that it would be aimed at some shadowy subset of cartels and rapists have seen that this is not at all what the crackdown is about.

Back to normal, or something bigger?

This leads to a question that I think lies at the root of debates over what we’re seeing in the run-up to the midterms: Does a widespread rejection of the Trump project reflect a desire for a return to “normalcy,” defined as the ‘90s-era neoliberal consensus that many feel was our apex of stability and prosperity? Or is it a mandate to reject not only Trumpism but the milieu that produced him in the first place and adopt a more ambitious agenda of social programs, anti-corporatism and other planks of the Depression-era New Deal adopted by Democrats under FDR? Or is it a rejection of everything that’s come before? I will say that, personally, I find the first analysis unconvincing, particularly when it comes to the Democratic base. I think that to assert that what the voters not bought into MAGA, who are increasingly disgusted with it,  want right now is reliably moderate — some would say milquetoast — leadership that would try to box Trump in but otherwise go back to business as usual is a misreading of the level of anger and fear that the base holds.

People are genuinely angry about a lot of what they’ve seen — the unrestrained corruption, the gutting of government, the Epstein files, the consolidation of so much tech industry sentiment under plainly anti-democratic visions. They are also fearful, terrified that what remaining stability they have will be siphoned away by encroaching AI labor replacement and climate catastrophe and the solidification of a moneyed superclass. I think the Democratic Party and its consultants are setting themselves up for some significant blowback if they fail to understand this. But I also don’t really think that we have to choose between ambition and pragmatism. Commentator Jonathan Chait recently penned a piece in The Atlantic titled “Mamdani Is the Centrist We’ve Been Waiting For,” whose thesis is that the New York City mayor is fundamentally a pragmatist who knows how to govern by deal-making when necessary and who is executing a vision that is not just about the preoccupations of the “hard left,” as Chait sees it.

The pragmatic case for ambition

Now, I’ve long had issues with Chait, and I don’t really agree with portions of his analysis, for example that Mamdani is a “centrist” because he favors relatively unrestrained housing construction in partnership with the private sector, something opposed not by the organized political left but by a caricature of the left that Chait is imagining – blue-haired Brooklyn baristas with art degrees or whatever. That said, I think there’s something to seeing Mamdani’s main distinction from a predecessor like Bill de Blasio, with whom he shares certain political leanings, as a certain pragmatism, an ability to govern in a complex system that de Blasio lacked. Mamdani has both forged a close-knit relationship with centrist Gov. Kathy Hochul and endorsed upstart progressive candidate Darializa Ávila Chevalier in her primary race against powerful Harlem Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Those are political gambles that appear to have basically opposite ideological valences but which share the characteristic of paying off tactically.

I think insofar as certain liberal candidates are surging, even in places you would assume are hostile — think of James Talarico having a real shot at a Senate seat in Texas — it’s because they’ve been able to communicate about liberal policy priorities like antitrust and accountability in the language of voters’ immediate material interests. Much as the MAGA contingent has tried to make these races about culture war churn like fights over transgender rights — as they know they cannot win on the economy or the state of our institutions and government — effective Democratic candidates are parrying these attacks not by throwing vulnerable people under the bus but instead pivoting to making the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society cool again. They’re marrying social and economic policy with clear executive intent and couching it all in the language of a national rebirth after the brutal Trump years. There’s something there for everyone from Mamdani to Hochul to like.