Early last year, polls and media commentary suggested that crime would be the defining issue of the New York City mayoral race. Then, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign started to take off. By the end of the race, the news organizations that conduct exit polls asked voters to choose the top issue animating their votes among these five choices: crime, cost of living, health care, immigration, and transportation. Mamdani had literally changed the language of the election, with pollsters asking about his framing (“cost of living”) instead of the usual terms, “jobs” and “the economy.” He had also changed voters’ priorities: A whopping 55 percent said cost of living was the most important issue, compared to only 22 percent who said crime.
And on Election Day in the Big Apple last November, nearly 40 percent of the city’s registered voters between ages 18 and 29 cast ballots, a massive increase from the 11 percent in 2021, according to Gothamist.
Mamdani didn’t win by looking at polls and then campaigning according to them. A 34-year-old socialist who had previously tweeted “#DefundTheNYPD” probably could not have won an election about who is toughest on crime against incumbent ex-cop Eric Adams and a pro-police Democrat like Andrew Cuomo. Instead, Mamdani, through his relentless focus on the costs of rent, groceries, and childcare, primed regular voters to judge the candidates on their affordability policies instead of their anti-crime ones and energized young, liberal voters who might have otherwise stayed home.
New York is a unique place, but Democrats across the country need to do what Mamdani did: create a more liberal electorate. American politics today is driven by ideology in a way that wasn’t true in the past. There used to be self-described conservative Democrats in Congress, particularly from the South, sent to Capitol Hill by constituents who were stalwart Democrats but wary of greater civil rights for Black Americans and other more liberal values. On the flip side, there were Republican politicians in the Northeast who were more liberal on some issues than their Southern Democratic counterparts.
But over the last few decades, American politics has become more ideologically polarized. Democratic politicians and voters are to the left of Republicans on nearly every issue. People of color with conservative policy views are increasingly backing Republicans, while white college graduates are trending Democratic because of their more liberal social values.
A more ideological electorate doesn’t doom Democrats. Only about a third of Americans or a little more describe themselves as conservatives, so Republicans can’t dominate politics just with those voters. At the same time, even fewer (about 25 percent) call themselves liberals. And while Americans have more left-leaning stands on many issues, such as raising the minimum wage, they often also agree with conservative concerns about bloated and inefficient government.
Democrats can win in this environment, particularly when Republicans take power and push the GOP’s unpopular agenda. But often, voters quickly turn on Democrats when they’re in charge. For Democrats to consistently win elections and prevent the continued rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the United States, ultimately they must get more Americans to consider themselves liberal, hold liberal stands on issues, prioritize liberal values like equality over conservative ones like self-reliance, and make sure those with liberal mindsets vote in every election at every level of government.
Today’s Democrats, more than past iterations of the party, are defending an ideology and worldview—multicultural social democracy. Equal rights and economic opportunity for all; power in the hands of the people, not billionaires and corporations. So they need to spread that gospel to more Americans. And yes, it can be done. Here are five ways how.
1. Use Their Bully Pulpits
Most people have loosely held, fickle views on policy issues. That gives politicians two superpowers. First, when elected officials take positions, voters often mindlessly adopt them, particularly if the official is from their political party. And second, even when politicians aren’t moving people to their exact stances, they can redirect the attention of voters, media, and members of the opposite party to their preferred topics. For example, Republicans are focused more on affordability now because of how Mamdani’s campaign made that issue top of mind for voters and journalists.
The new mayor aside, Democrats are vastly underutilizing their ability to direct Americans toward liberal values, positions, and topics. This must change.
I don’t know whether Republicans have read the social science on the malleability of the electorate, but they sure act as if they have. Donald Trump has moved GOP voters to be more skeptical of immigration and efforts to address the effects of racism. And changing the Republican Party inevitably changes the country overall. Trumpist ideas have been widely adopted in the 23 states dominated by Republicans. I never imagined 10 years ago that pollsters would be asking Americans about critical race theory—never mind finding that a big bloc of Americans oppose teaching it. But Trump and his allies have made diversity, equity, and inclusion, concepts widely supported a few years ago, so controversial that numerous institutions have backed away from them. “Republicans make it their business to reshape voters’ realities,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal political strategist.
In contrast, many Democratic Party strategists and politicians seem to think that voters have firm, largely unchanging views. So the party’s main strategy is conducting polls to see what voters like—and, as noted above, often doing so reactively and unimaginatively—and then positioning itself as close as possible to a hypothetical “median voter.”
“Pollingism,” as Shenker-Osorio has critically dubbed this approach, has some advantages. It’s low-risk. It appeals to moderate voters. It’s partly why Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections. But Democratic poll-chasing, combined with Trumpian radicalism, has not resulted in GOP defeats. Instead, elections have remained close while Trump pushes public opinion and discourse rightward on many issues.
Democratic politicians urgently need to adopt the GOP view of public opinion—that it’s movable, and it’s their job to move it.
They can learn from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of the party’s progressive economics bloc. Billionaires and big tech companies used to be venerated. Then, that bloc started pointing out the damage they were doing to the country. Their leadership has totally reshaped American economic discourse. Voters are increasingly skeptical of big businesses and concerned about income inequality. Pollsters, including those at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, now ask if billionaires are good for society, and only a tiny fraction of Americans say they are. Centrist politicians have been pushed leftward, with Joe Biden warning of oligarchy in one of his final speeches as president. Trump at times has hinted that he supports greater taxes on the rich. He never follows through, but his rhetoric suggests the president also sees rising antipathy for the super-wealthy.
One lesson from all of that is Democrats should be more populist on economic issues. Yes, sure. But the bigger lesson is that there are liberal arguments on every issue that will resonate with voters if Democrats make them repeatedly, forcefully, and compellingly. Diverting some police funding to social services, letting in more immigrants for humanitarian and economic reasons, and allowing transgender students to play sports are much easier to defend than opposing diversity and equity, as Trump has successfully done.
Democrats spent much of last year ignoring Trump’s lawless deportations on the theory that voters like his immigration’s positions more than theirs. But when Democrats started contesting him on that issue—most notably Senator Chris Van Hollen going to El Salvador to demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—polls showed a huge dip in support for Trump’s immigration policies. Lauren Goldstein, a pollster at Change Research, said Democratic politicians need to “embrace the power that you have to make the things you think should matter matter, because you have the ability to do that.”
I am not calling for Democrats in purple states to take unpopular positions on the eve of elections. But the average Democratic member of Congress is in a safe seat. They have the freedom to take strong stances and try to move the public toward them.
Just as critically, Democratic politicians must stop publicly stating that the party is out of touch with average Americans and using Republican-lite messages, such as when Pete Buttigieg late last year claimed (falsely) that the party had in recent years “defined everything by identity.” Those tactics might help individual politicians woo centrist voters. But the cumulative effect of so many Democratic pols bashing the party is further spreading anti-Democratic talking points, helping Republicans.
2. Align With Movements
Democratic officials alone probably can’t move the public left as much as we need. After all, they have a bunch of other tasks: providing services to constituents; voting on current legislation; campaigning for reelection; and of course raising money. That’s why left-leaning movements and groups are so essential. They can operate on a longer time horizon than politicians, advancing goals that take years or even decades. They can also push ideas that may not be popular now but tilt the national conversation in a more progressive direction. A Democratic Party that moves the electorate leftward will be one that smartly leverages activism.
There are countless recent examples of movements’ value to the party. It was easier for Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012 after LGBTQ activists had spent years convincing Americans to view same-sex unions much more favorably. The Movement for Black Lives created a deeper understanding of racial inequality in America, allowing Biden to adopt a more racially conscious agenda than prior Democratic presidents had. In both 2017 and 2025, the mass protests led by Indivisible and other groups played a critical role in driving down Trump’s approval ratings. “Democrats win by being who they are and believing in something. Movements help anchor that belief,” said Deva Woodly, a Brown University political scientist and author of two books on social movements.
Considering the obvious usefulness of movements, it’s unfortunate that they face so much resistance from center-left voices in the party these days. Immediately after the 2024 election, strategists were blasting progressive groups for allegedly forcing Kamala Harris to adopt positions that doomed her. Last year saw the creation of more center-left organizations that constantly attack liberal groups.
That’s bad analysis. The 2024 results had much more to do with Joe Biden’s age and worldwide anti-incumbent sentiment than any stance Democrats took in response to groups. More importantly, it’s terrible long-term strategy. You’ll almost never hear Republican leaders attacking right-wing groups. They realize that a strong conservative movement ultimately helps them.
Instead of distancing themselves from liberal groups, Democrats should affirm the value of the left-leaning groups and movements publicly. Democratic politicians are constantly praising one another, as if liberal goals are achieved by elected officials alone. In reality, Indivisible has opposed Trump far more effectively than the 47 Senate Democrats. When party officials acknowledge that help, it makes the groups stronger, which ultimately redounds to the party’s benefit. The party must also collaborate more with left-leaning groups. Ideally, groups and movements would be intertwined with Democratic politicians in the legislative process. Groups that play a real role behind the scenes will be more enthusiastic in backing the final product, even if it doesn’t reflect all of their goals.
“Having them [groups] inside of the tent, feeling like they are listened to, and helping to shape things ends up being a real service to the party,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs who has written extensively about progressive groups. He added that if groups feel included, “They’re going to spend more time saying, ‘We need to win [upcoming elections] because our priorities become law when we win.’”
Democrats do some of this already. But what I’m calling for is a partywide understanding that movements, groups, and elected officials are in a collective project to build support for liberal policies and values. That’s how the right operates. Christian conservatives, anti-tax groups, congressional Republicans, GOP governors, the Trump administration, and Fox News are embedded in a broader movement (Make America Great Again) that is led by Trump but still carried on when he was out of office from 2021 to 2024.
What about when groups take stands that might hurt Democrats politically? The evidence that “defund the police” and other left-wing rhetoric damaged the party is weak, considering that many progressive ideas emerged from 2017 to 2020, when Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress. That said, it’s true that groups sometimes push ideas that aren’t popular in swing districts. Managing this tension actually isn’t complicated though. Candidates, particularly during election time, should run on their own proposals and carefully distance themselves from more controversial ideas of groups, without undermining broader movements. Mamdani and, yes, Trump, have figured this out. During the presidential election, Trump repeatedly stated that Project 2025 was not his own campaign platform, while at the same time not attacking the ideas in that document or not pledging that he wouldn’t implement them as president. Last year, Mamdani remained aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America while stating he would not push its most left-wing ideas as mayor.
3. Work the Refs—and Seed New Ones
Even if Democratic politicians and left-leaning groups actively try to shape public opinion, they will fail if their ideas are presented to voters in super-negative ways. The Democratic Party has to actively change the media environment if it wants liberal values and ideas to thrive.
How? First, Democratic officials need to critique the mainstream media more. The decades-long Republican attack on news organizations as being biased against the GOP has worked. In my stints at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and NBC News, I saw constant efforts to rebut this accusation. The result was biased coverage—against Democrats. The radical, anti-democratic tendencies of the Republican Party are under-covered, while mistakes by Democratic politicians are exaggerated. Yes, a growing number of Americans don’t get their news from traditional organizations. But the political narratives and stories you see on social media often originate in mainstream media, so their fear of offending Republicans really matters.
“Unless the left is able to ... convince those folks within elite journalism to not only look over their rightward shoulder but to look over their leftward shoulder as well, then I think we’re in trouble, because it’s mainstream legacy media that sets the overall agenda for politics,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama journalism professor and author of a recent book on conservative criticism of the media.
Some Democratic politicians criticize individual stories, but there is not a partywide critique. That’s a missed opportunity. Democratic officials should use the phrases “false equivalence” and “both sides-ing” often, so that Americans remember that mainstream news is being framed to make Democrats seem as bad as Trump. They should also remind voters that pro-Trump bias often comes from outlets’ owners, who want to curry favor with the president for their financial benefit. “Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post” and “David Ellison’s CBS News” should be regularly coming from the mouths of Democratic politicians. The media should be as worried about annoying the left as it is the right.
Pointing out the flaws of the mainstream media will help with another critical project for Democrats: getting more Americans to consume progressive news outlets (in addition to mainstream ones). The right has spent decades not only attacking the mainstream media but creating alternative outlets and encouraging conservatives to get their news from them. The result is a huge partisan imbalance in media viewership. About the same number of Democrats say they regularly get news from outlets like NPR and The New York Times as say they get news from left-leaning MS NOW, while Fox is far and away the leading political news source for Republicans. So Republican voters are receiving and then sharing anti-liberal talking points every day—as are the Democrats who only get their news from places like the Times.
Democratic voters have likely heard the narrative that the media is biased toward the left. But in reality, outlets such as The Guardian, Zeteo, The American Prospect, Democracy Now!, and The New Republic are very distinct from the Times and CNN. While still grounded in facts and evidence, these news organizations openly promote liberal values and cover the Republican Party frankly. Prominent Democratic politicians should publicly announce the liberal outlets they like and tweet their articles, helping to expand their audiences. Even if swing voters and Republicans aren’t directly reading news from these progressive outlets, their coverage will reach them if more liberals are sharing it.
“Rather than position the voices of people in power as central figures in our reporting, we take a deeper look at the experiences of marginalized people, center them in our reporting and hold power to account,” said Lara Witt, editor in chief of Prism.
Finally, there are “news deserts” across the country, particularly in rural areas, lacking news outlets and full-time journalists. The Democratic Party should fill them. There’s a precedent here: Newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often founded by and associated with political parties. The various committees and super PACs run by Democrats raise hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle, so the party can afford this. And it would have much greater value than more TV ads.
You might argue that no one in rural Kentucky will read a newspaper owned by the Democratic Party. Wrong. I’m very liberal but read the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, papers controlled by the conservative Murdoch family, because the articles are interesting. Similarly, these Democratic Party–owned papers should not be running House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s speeches on their home pages (no one would read them), but instead breaking news in local communities that conservatives wouldn’t want to miss.
These outlets would almost certainly help the Democrats in rural areas, because straightforward coverage of even school board meetings would show the radicalism of today’s Republicans. And papers funded by the Democratic Party can and should have left-leaning op-eds and editorials that espouse liberal values, although the main emphasis should be on news gathering.
4. Become a More Civic Party
Political psychology research shows that many people first align with a group and then adjust their political views accordingly. So they don’t join a conservative church because they are against abortion and LGBTQ rights, but rather they join the church and then adopt those stands to fit into their new social environment. The troubling version of this for Democrats is that perhaps the party has lost ground among white voters without college degrees and Black voters of all education levels not because of some ideological shift among those groups, but because of declining membership in unions and Black churches, two parts of American society that have long been tied to the Democratic Party.
Democrats can’t ignore this social part of politics. They should instead build a more civic-minded, community-rooted party where liberal values are spread in people’s day-to-day lives. The decline in bowling leagues and other group-based activities and organizations that political scientist Robert Putnam chronicled in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, is much more pronounced now. The pews are empty, and so are the union halls. There is growing evidence of a loneliness crisis. Modern American society promotes (largely unintentionally) individualism, hypercompetitiveness, a scarcity mindset—essentially, that you are not your brother’s keeper nor he yours, and that the companies you work for shouldn’t care about you. Those are conservative values and more in line with today’s Republican Party. The Democratic worldview requires citizens to have a strong sense of the common good, that they should enthusiastically pay taxes for public schools and libraries even if they use neither.
To combat this individualistic mindset, Democrats ultimately need more Americans in groups, connecting with one another, ideally in person. I don’t care which kinds of groups: churches, alumni associations, pickleball leagues, DSA chapters, Rotary Clubs, unions. (Yes, even the local Republican Party, if its members are so inclined.) We need to (re)build a real collective society, where people belong to and feel beholden to causes beyond themselves.
“The Democratic Party … where it succeeds is in a place where there is a public, Trump works in a place where there’s no public,” said Pete Davis, a left-leaning writer and civic activist and co-founder of the Democracy Policy Network, which works on pro-democracy policies at the state level.
Some of those groups will overtly push people toward more progressive worldviews. Labor unions are skeptical of big business and billionaires. Unitarian Universalist congregations are very much in favor of immigration and LGBTQ rights. I’m particularly optimistic about the increased organizing on the left to create debtors and tenants’ unions. That develops new identities (debtor, tenant) among working-class people that point them to progressive beliefs and voting on those beliefs.
Democratic politicians should be actively promoting the idea that a good Democrat isn’t watching MS NOW all day but instead engaged in groups and civic life in their community. Obama releases his favorite books, movies, and songs each year. But people often read, watch TV, and listen to music alone. I wish he instead listed his favorite community groups.
In addition, the party itself can become a civic organization. Political parties in the nineteenth century used to host, well, parties. (Really festivals and barbecues.) Even in the twentieth century, local parties often operated as clubs where people hung out. But today, most Democrats have almost no connection to the party beyond voting and maybe giving money.
Imagine if the local Democratic parties in all 435 congressional districts were regularly hosting barbecues, concerts, book clubs, soccer games, and other activities that were drawing in people of all ages. That would build stronger ties among existing Democrats. More importantly, it’s easy to imagine that some independents would participate in Democratic Party events for the social aspect. They’d gradually learn that most Democrats aren’t overeducated scolds, and eventually many would adopt liberal positions and become Democratic voters in part to fit in with their new friends.
“Building local party infrastructure … can put Democrats back on the map in a lot of places where they haven’t really been a serious force,” said Samuel Bagg, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina.
5. Get More Young People Voting
Another crucial step for Democrats in creating a more liberal electorate is getting more Americans under age 45 to consistently vote. The young don’t need to be moved left; they need to be moved from the political sidelines.
As the surprising shift right by Latinos over the last decade has shown, we should not assume that demographic characteristics alone dictate how people vote. But millennial and Gen Z Americans are a huge opportunity for Democrats. They are more likely to describe themselves as liberal than their older counterparts. They hate Trump. They hold more liberal views on immigration, abortion, race, and transgender rights than their elders. They are more supportive of Medicare for All and universal childcare. They are much less religious than older Americans, a factor that pulls many people of color to the political right. “Young voters remain the most progressive segment of the electorate,” said Adam Bonica, a Stanford University professor and elections expert.
The problem for Democrats is that voter turnout among younger people consistently lags way behind older ones. In 2024, 60 percent of voting-eligible Americans ages 25 to 44 cast ballots. Among those 65 and older, 75 percent voted.
How can Democrats get more young people voting? Three ways. First and most importantly, they need policies that excite young people. Polls and interviews show younger people are deeply worried about achieving the American dream of a steady job and owning their home, as well as the potential disruption to their careers because of artificial intelligence. Democrats need to have credible ideas to address these challenges.
Mamdani showed the way. His proposals, such as universal, publicly funded childcare for kids from six weeks up to age five, were much more aggressive than the Democrats’ usual barrage of complicated tax credits and incremental programs. Democrats nationally need to do the same, pushing Medicare for All and other transformative proposals that might strike financially secure boomers as too disruptive but would make younger people take notice.
Second, the party must embrace politicians whom younger people like. Many Democratic politicians treat Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders as people that the party should be ashamed of. They certainly don’t want any member of that trio to define the party to voters. But a party synonymous with Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is never going to juice turnout among younger Americans. A party tightly associated with Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and others with passionate followings among younger Americans might.
The Democrats’ 2028 ticket must include a person who really excites younger voters. Yes, a few swing voters might be turned off by having a young progressive on the ticket. But the bigger risk is having an uninspiring ticket that results in low youth turnout. “If the Democratic Party both nominates a compelling presidential candidate that young people trust, and builds the party around their vision in a way that is credibly populist and against an establishment-dominated status quo, I could see a new Democratic Party brand arise that young people would attach themselves to,” said Jake Grumbach, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s public policy school who writes often about voting patterns among young voters.
Third, Democrats must get better at short-form video. Democratic politicians are experimenting with new ways to reach voters, from interviews with recently created outlets like MeidasTouch to hosting their own podcasts. Good. But much of that content is boring, super-partisan, and long. Younger people in particular get their news via clips on TikTok.
The way that many in New York (and nationally) first learned of Mamdani was when he released a video right after the 2024 election in which he interviewed people on the street who had either voted for Trump or not voted at all. That video went viral because of how unusual it was. A politician was not talking but listening. It was not partisan; Mamdani was letting people point out the shortcomings of his own party. It was less than three minutes long. From there, Mamdani kept putting out memorable content about himself. Younger people I talked to who lived far from New York could recall some of his videos in striking detail.
Viral video alone isn’t going to save the Democratic Party. But Democrats aren’t going to get their ideas in front of younger Americans, never mind connect with them, if they don’t realize that in 2026 Instagram and TikTok are equal in importance to MS NOW and the Times as political platforms.
Against Fatalism
Based on the large number and broad scale of the ideas I’ve offered here, you might think that I see the Democratic Party in dire straits. I don’t. As the Democrats’ very strong results in the 2025 elections showed, American voters are perpetually dissatisfied and seem to punish whichever party is in power. With Trump in the Oval Office and deeply unpopular, the Democrats in my view would be the favorites to win the House, presidency, and perhaps even the Senate in the next three years even if the party didn’t change a single tactic.
But because today’s Republican Party is so radical, we can’t afford to have the pendulum shift back against Democrats in the near future. Democrats need to win several elections in a row, to either force the Republican Party to normalize or to ensure that a pro-democracy party remains in charge. And for that to happen, ultimately, we need a new American electorate, one that affirmatively votes against authoritarian white identity politics and votes for multicultural social democracy. And creating that kind of electorate requires trying a multitude of tactics and strategies, both in the short and long-term.
What I’m calling for most is a rejection of fatalism. Any time they lose a presidential election, party leaders and strategists conclude the American electorate is irreparably center-right, and Democrats must take heed. Senate Democrats didn’t unify to strongly oppose most of Trump’s Cabinet nominees early last year. It felt as if the party was trying to apologize to voters for being too liberal and anti-Trump in the past. But when Democrats and liberals have tried to lead the electorate toward more progressive ideas, they’ve often succeeded. That’s how we got the New Deal, the civil rights victories of the 1960s, numerous advances for women and LGBTQ Americans in the next few decades after that, the election of a Black president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and a return to populist economic policies in the Biden years.
America’s voters have accepted a much fuller, deeper democracy than the Founders initially designed. And while the Republican Party was the one that ended slavery, in the last several decades, it’s been the Democrats who have been remaking the American electorate into one that demands equality, justice, and freedom. The Democrats must stop vacillating between pollingism and conviction and accept that the best version of their party is one that leads people toward more liberal views.
