Democrats Versus Democrats: The Battle for the Soul of the Party

A quick note on terms. I'm using "left," "right," and "center" by the American Overton window. Our "left" would read as moderate in Sweden, and plenty of center-right parties abroad would sit on our left. The only shared definition runs to broad ideas of more or less government, so for this piece, American frame.

Every time the Democratic Party loses, the blame game starts. The left says the ticket ran too cautiously. The center says the left scared off the independent swing voters who decide elections. Both sides can make a convincing case, and both would rather blame the candidate, the policy, or the voters than concede that the other has a point.

Democrats argue with other Democrats almost as much as they argue with Republicans. This struggle for the soul of the party has run for more than fifty years, ever since primaries became the way we pick candidates. Heading into this year's midterms, to say nothing of 2028, the fight between the center and the left has reached its highest stakes yet.

It's a story told time and again around the world: the right falls in line while the left fights amongst itself. Across Europe, that splintering spread the left across a long list of parties, each one breaking off from the last because the people leaving judged it too moderate. The UK's Your Party is the latest example. It formed off Labour a couple of years ago, and it has already had a faction splinter away to start yet another left party, "Socialist Federation," just last week.

So the old Monty Python bit about the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea worked as comedy because it mirrored real life. It has been happening forever.

A two-party system like ours keeps the left locked inside one party. So the party fights itself instead. And when either side fights itself, it tends to hand the other side the win.

One big blue tent

Picture the coalition. The dense, diverse, heavily urban electorate of New York County, New York sits in the same party as rural, sparsely populated, majority-minority Calhoun County, Georgia, population 5,500, about the same as a single block in Manhattan.

The Democratic Party stretches from the political center all the way to the democratic socialist left. In almost any other country, that span would be three or four separate parties: social democratic, green, socialist. Here, it's one big blue tent. So of course you get competing views on where the party should go after a loss. The tension lives in the coalition itself, rather than in whoever happens to be leading at the time.

Centrist Democrats are moderate: socially liberal, but fiscally pragmatic, even conservative, on the economy, leaning toward market-driven solutions and bipartisanship. You can read that as "capitalist." Think Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris, Virginia Governor Spanberger, Roy Cooper, Gavin Newsom in California. This establishment has held the party's power base since the early '90s. Their voters skew older, over forty-five, and prize electability. (And yes, the party arrived at social liberalism later, see my Party Flip video for that.)

The left-wing, democratic socialist wing is Bernie Sanders (when he's actually a Democrat), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad, New York's new mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the groups around them like the Democratic Socialists of America. Progressive Democrats pair socially progressive values with a redistributive, interventionist economics that's skeptical of corporate power. They want bold structural reform and expansive public programs, and they favor grassroots energy over bipartisan compromise. This is your younger voter: activist, issue-driven, moved by inequality, climate, healthcare, and student debt, and willing to trade some electability for ambition. It's a very utopian vision of how politics should be.

Here's the thing. Both wings mostly want the same outcome, a more equitable society with protections for those who need it. They just fight about speed, and about how far to push. Centrists go for what's achievable, regardless of what they want; they fear the pendulum swinging back to the right if too much change scares too many voters. Progressives go for what they want, regardless of what's achievable, hoping to build that utopia in a matter of a couple of years.

And that's exactly where the party sits in the Trump 2.0 era. The center blames the left for depressing turnout, pointing to voters who sat out 2024 over Harris's caution on Gaza. The left blames the establishment for timidity, and points to Mamdani's win in New York last year as proof that real left-wing policy can win. Both are right. And both are wrong.

What modern history actually shows

1972 was the first cycle decided under the new primary system, and Democrats nominated Senator George McGovern, the furthest-left, most antiwar option on the board. Nixon took 49 states. McGovern won just Massachusetts and DC.

After a rocky single term from moderate Jimmy Carter, who lost in a 1980 landslide, Democrats ran Walter Mondale on a classic liberal platform, complete with a promise to raise taxes, which you rarely advertise in an American campaign. Reagan took 49 states, while Mondale barely won his home state of Minnesota, by under 4,000 votes, plus DC.

Every Democrat who actually reached the White House in the primary era ran from the center. Carter, a Southern moderate. Clinton, a self-branded New Democrat. Obama and Biden, both center-left and pragmatic in office. Left-wing Democrats have struggled to win the nomination, and on the rare occasions they did, they still lost the country. FDR is the exception, but that ran under a different nominating system, against the backdrop of the Depression and later a world war, so it might as well be a different country.

The pattern holds: left-wing Democratic nominees get beaten badly on election night, while the more moderate ones have won.

It's the same story in Congress. The left holds firmer against compromise, so its biggest proposals tend to die in committee or on the floor. In 2009 and 2010, the public option, the government-run plan progressives wanted inside the Affordable Care Act, fell to a handful of conservative Democrats. A decade later, Build Back Better, the roughly $2 trillion climate and social package, collapsed when Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (Democrats, technically) walked.

Here's the primary driver under all of it, the piece I broke down in the third-party video. Primaries reward the voters who actually turn out, and that's the committed, ideological base. So candidates run toward the edges to win the nomination, then scramble back toward the middle for the general. The same machinery that boxes out third parties pulls the two we have toward their poles.

And Republicans get the exact same primaries and get the opposite result. Once they pick a nominee, they close ranks behind him, grievances and all. Trump is the best proof of this. The Republican Party of 2026 has been rebuilt entirely around Trump, and it looks like a different party than the one from ten years ago.

Meanwhile, Democrats keep fighting the last battle, from the primaries straight through the general and into the next campaign. The right embraces whatever lets them win, while the left fights over its direction regardless of the results.

The left's real argument

Before this sounds one-sided, the left has a real case. Caution can backfire. A safe, uninspiring ticket can flatten turnout among the very voters a Democrat needs most. I'd argue 2000 and 2016 were evidence of that.

And left economic ideas often outrun the left's candidates. Minimum-wage hikes and Medicaid expansion have passed at the ballot box even in deep-red states, where the same voters who reject the Democratic label still vote for the policy. In poll after poll, people love every aspect of the Affordable Care Act, right up until you brand it as "Obamacare," and then you lose half the country.

The centrist's motto runs "we win, and we govern carefully." The left's response runs "you win small, and our ideas are more popular."

How the center took over the Democrats

It took losing to teach the lesson. After Reagan's 1984 landslide, a group of moderates built the Democratic Leadership Council to drag the party back toward the middle. But it took a third straight Republican win in 1988, the first time either party had pulled that off since 1948, to shake the party up enough to actually change.

Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, chaired the DLC and ran as a New Democrat in 1992, putting a Democrat back in the White House after twelve years in the wilderness. Obama and Biden ran the same play after eight years of George W. Bush: govern center-left, keep the suburbs calm, win the voters you need instead of the voters you want.

It took Trump's first term to unite the party. Through those four years, each shock, the travel ban, the breaking of norms, the chaotic COVID response, January 6th, pulled Democrats together. Opposition organized them better than any shared vision ever had.

After Biden won, the party held power, and it split right back into the old fight. The left said Biden, and later Harris, ran too cautiously, defended an incumbency instead of making room for the next generation, and stayed quiet on Gaza in the face of protests. After Harris lost in 2024, the center said the left's positions on immigration and culture cost them the Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.

Almost word for word, the 1972 fight, just swap out Southeast Asia for Southwest Asia.

Where it stands now

Even today, with Trump painting everything in DC gold, at least the parts still standing, Democrats remain as divided as ever. The progressives and the centrist liberals still blame each other for 2024, and the DNC's much-debated post-2024 autopsy left the divide right where it found it.

Meanwhile, left-wing candidates are winning, mostly in big, blue cities like New York and Seattle. And moderates are winning too, like the new governors of Virginia and New Jersey. Naturally, each side reads its own wins as proof that everyone should copy its candidates everywhere.

That's the wrong lesson.

The correct lesson is this: let voters pick the candidates who fit their seats. A democratic socialist can win New York City, while Mamdani or AOC would lose Omaha. The United States is massive, thousands of miles coast to coast, with around 150 million voters in a high-turnout presidential election. We're a country far too big for "one size fits all" politics.

Democrats from Boston and Baton Rouge will split on plenty of nuance inside some complicated policy. But a moderate is the safer bet in a swing district, and in deep-blue places, let progressive voters nominate the most progressive candidate who can actually win.

Whether a progressive runs, though, stays entirely with the candidate. The DNC leaves nominations to the voters, because that's how it works here. Voters choose, through primaries, which is exactly what we're watching play out as voters across the spectrum lock in their nominees for November.

As for 2028, the field stays officially empty, though it's safe to say Bernie sits this one out; he'd be eighty-seven at the next inauguration. The names most people float are moderates: Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg. The left's bench is newer, smaller, and less tested on the national stage. AOC is reportedly weighing a run, though the grassroots organizations that fueled her rise a decade ago keep their distance for now, thanks largely to her stance on Israel.

My take

My take, and if you've made it this far I assume you want it: sweeping change arrives slowly, and a campaign that preaches revolution tends to scare off the median voters who decide majorities at the margin. The Red Scare baked a reflexive distrust of anything labeled "redistribution" deep into the American electorate, and it sits there still.

So that's where Democrats stand heading into Trump's second midterm. The polling gives them a real head start, and they're still running the same blame loop they've run for decades. Look at the California primary, where the center and the left each blamed the other for letting a Republican take the most votes, even though November will likely still break Democratic. Gaza remains right where it was. The same fault lines Trump exploited are all still there.

Yet change does happen. It has happened, again and again, though it arrives across years rather than in a single night, and, except for FDR, it builds across more than one election. It comes after years, sometimes decades, of advocacy. And if you use FDR as your example, a bold Democrat riding a landslide against a failed Republican president who watched the economy collapse, then maybe the conditions for a reset really can line up. They mostly need more than the ballot box alone, and actual revolutions usually end up with a lot of bodies.