.png)
4 days ago
5
Republicans jubilant after winning the White House with a candidate who promised to “make America great again”. Democrats lost in the political wilderness, apparently out of touch with working people. America, apparently, shifting inexorably to the right. Not 2024 but 1984, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.
Al From remembers it well. The political strategist responded by launching the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) with a mission to rebuild the party and make it electable again. He succeeded in 1992 when Bill Clinton led the “New Democrats” back into power – and four decades on he has advice for how the party can rise from the ashes of another election defeat.
“If you’re going to change the definition of a party, the change has to be big enough that people recognise it, and that’s why you can’t do it incrementally,” From, 81, says by phone from his home in Annapolis, Maryland. “It’s time for a new generation of leaders to emerge to think about the Democratic brand and what can sell long term. The question for me is, how do you build a solid Democratic centre to a centre-left majority?”
The party has been plunged into painful soul-searching following Kamala Harris’s defeat by Donald Trump in November. Should Joe Biden have quit the race earlier? Was Harris a victim of global trends in inflation and immigration? Were gender, race and culture war issues in play? Have Democrats become too obsessed with identity politics and forgotten the language of working people?
According to From’s diagnosis, “the fundamentals” dominated all else. “People were terribly dissatisfied. You have two-thirds to three-quarters of the electorate saying the country’s going in the wrong direction. Joe Biden had an approval rating in the toilet – 38, 39, 40%.
“Inflation was a big issue, and I’m old enough to have been in the [Jimmy] Carter White House, so I remember what inflation did to us. The security/safety/disorder issues were big in terms of the border. The crime statistics may be going down but you didn’t get that impression from watching television. People were not happy with the way their lives were going.”
Towards the end, Harris focused her message on dire warnings about Trump posing an authoritarian danger – but in vain. From adds: “A lot of us felt that Trump was an existential threat to democracy, our way of life, and the number one thing was to beat Trump. But too many Americans around the country didn’t think that way. They just basically said our lives aren’t going the way we’d like and we want them to be better and Trump, if nothing else, will disrupt things.”
On a devastating night for Democrats, Republicans won the trifecta of White House, Senate and House of Representatives. But for From the comparisons with the 1984 wipeout only go so far. Reagan won 49 states out of 50 against Democrat Walter Mondale. It was an era before the House speaker Newt Gingrich’s brand of bareknuckle partisanship or the echo chambers of cable news, social media and podcasts.
“This country’s a lot more intensely split than it was back in the 80s,” he says. “The allegiances to both sides are much stronger. Trump is a guy who has had, for the most part, poor approval ratings. The Republicans have been almost a dysfunctional party for the last six or eight years and couldn’t even elect a speaker of the House in the last Congress when they had control.
“You’d think the Democrats would do better. I look at it from that perspective and so are we in as deep trouble as we were in 1984, 1988? Probably not. But there are trends like what’s happening among working-class voters of all colours and ethnic groups that are concerning. If they aren’t arrested, they could lead us into the wilderness again.”
Voter surveys from the Associated Press show Trump won 43% of the national Latino vote, an eight-point increase from the 2020 election, flipping one-time Democratic strongholds such as south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and Florida’s Miami-Dade county. About three in 10 Black men under 45 voted for Trump, roughly double the share he got in 2020.
Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont and former presidential candidate, argued in a withering statement that a party that had forsaken the working class should not be surprised to “find that the working class has abandoned them”. He added: “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”
From is also sounding the alarm. “We’ve lost white working-class voters for a long time. I’ve been nervous about the Hispanic vote for a while because, as immigrant groups settle in and they get the second and third generations there, they don’t necessarily stick with their original political views. There are a lot of reasons that Hispanic voters might be attracted to Republicans: they’re religious conservatives on social issues, they’re entrepreneurial.
“You look at those districts down in Texas around the border that went red for the first time in the presidential; you look at what happened in areas like the Bronx, even blue areas; you look what happened in New Jersey, Virginia, even here in Maryland, we were down by 10 points. When trends are moving away from you, the best thing to do is stop them and arrest them before they get completely out of control.”
Democrats had a similar sinking feeling when Reagan was in his pomp in the 1980s and small government, social conservatism and trickle-down economics seemed unassailable. After From set up the DLC in 1985, the New Democrats shifted to the centre by embracing pro-business policies, a tough stance on crime and welfare reform – ruffling the feathers of party leaders.
The party lost its third consecutive election in 1988. But on 6 April 1989, From went to the Arkansas state capitol building in Little Rock and recruited Governor Clinton as messenger for the DLC’s ideas, successfully recapturing the “Reagan Democrats” and styling himself as a leader for the future. Clinton beat George HW Bush to win the presidency in 1992.
America has changed profoundly since then and Clinton – though younger than Trump – has fallen out of political fashion. Still, From contends, there is a lesson to heed about leading from the front with clarity of vision. “I don’t think you can change the definition of a party incrementally or by sitting around the table and trying to negotiate it out.
“Basically what the party needs is some sort of a force – whoever it is – of people who are perceived as future leaders going out and saying: this is what we want this party to stand for. I did it in the 80s and 90s. They can decide what’s appropriate for the 20s and 30s.”
He continues: “You’ve got to define the party as being for things that the American people will support that are consistent with your values. You can’t try to get all the interest groups together and all the constituency groups and say, well, what can we do for you and what can we do for you and put it all together because it comes out mush and you wind up losing people. You can’t put together a new message or even a diverse coalition by mandate.
“You’ve got to have a flag, you’ve got plant it and you’ve got to rally people around that. If you do that, people are much more committed to it and don’t just see it as a way to protect their own interests. You can expand out beyond your core constituencies.”
From remains an unabashed centrist who believes that economic growth, not the economic populism of Sanders or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is the answer. “It’s important the critical mass in the Democratic party show that it’s the party of opportunity, responsibility and community but not the party of the left,” he insists.
He also argues that the party should not be afraid to talk about law enforcement and developing a system of community policing rather than urging “defund the police”. Likewise it should embrace the idea of legal immigration and a border that is under control. From applauds governors who have made jobs available to people without college degrees.
“The Democratic base alone is not enough to win elections, he warns. The party needs to reach moderate voters in the suburbs who “love the compassion” of the Democrats but question whether they have the “toughness to govern” as well. From says the party should welcome them, not chase them away.
“Democrats need to start winning in places where they have not been winning. You do that by planting a flag and having a message and ideas and values that people want to support and then you grow your support and then, if you have good candidates and a good communication system, you can win.
“It’s not impossible to win without a good message but, to me, that’s the most essential thing. If you’ve got a product people want to buy, chances are, eventually they’re going to buy it. If you have a product that people don’t want to buy, you’ve got to stuff it down their throats and that’s a lot harder to do.”
Naturally there is already speculation over who might be the Democratic standard-bearer in 2028. From, now an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, says it is too early but cannot resist name-checking governors including Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Wes Moore of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan as well as Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary and former governor of Rhode Island.
The governors have successfully built coalitions in their home states, From says, and he would love to see them cooperate on setting the party on a new national trajectory.
“The fundamental thing that I would say is – it’s probably the most naive notion of politics – but I think what you stand for matters. You’ve got to have an agenda and set of ideas and set of values that people want to support and I’d love to see the party begin to put that together. A lot of the governors are doing that. If they took six months or a year or 18 months to make that clear to the voters by working together, we’d be better off for it.”
