"Some people will quibble that describing oneself as liberal doesn’t actually mean that voters necessarily hold left-wing views on the issues."
Well yes... And it also bothers me to use the word liberal this way. There is a Left movement that is not particularly liberal.
Our political system is quite poorly suited to the current situation where there are roughly three significant groups in play - Socialists, MAGA, and Neoliberals (for lack of better group names)
Yeah, sure, but the fact remains that people who call themselves “liberal” do have more left wing views. The idea that 2/3 of Democrats calling themselves “liberal” doesn’t mean they have more left-wing preferences doesn’t hold water.
It's a big mistake to talk about issues traditionally coded as "liberal" without disaggregating social and economic issues, though. Progressive victories that can be understood as the triumph of quasi-libertarian "live and let live" impulses, like support for gay or interracial marriage or drug legalization, can and do coexist quite nicely with centrist or, nowadays, even conservative views on economics. Leftist programs that aim to interfere with private economic or social relations with the aim of benefitting favored groups, or just achieving justice in general, are an entirely different sort of argument and don't necessarily appeal to people who favor gay marriage and pot dispensaries. Lots of self-identified liberals, especially outside the coasts, loathe the ultra-interventionist left represented by Mamdani or AOC.
There's a bunch of issues on which you start to get a prog/maga horseshoe: censorship, antisemitism, anti-bank, "natural" medicine, state control of enterprise. There are others that basically do match "a liberal is a median voter partway to being a leftist" as the article describes, but conflating them with the ones where more moderate voters moderate away from liberalism and towards Mamdani is unhelpful.
"especially outside the coasts", this is like saying outside of the oceans, which contain most of earths liquid water, the water is fresh! most liberals live in coastal states, ergo, most liberals hold coastal liberal views.
even then, I'm highly skeptical of the idea that self-identified liberals in interior states are less liberal than their coastal counterparts. most data shows that urban centers (where liberals tend to live) are quite leftwing compared to the rest of the state in most states with some small exceptions. Even in states like Florida or Texas there are democratic mayors with leftwing views on things closer to a coastal liberal than some imagined heartland classical liberal.
additionally, most data suggests the average voter is more leftwing on economic views, and more rightwing on cultural views. wants immigration restriction, but also a more generous welfare state. there is a reason why moderate or even rightwing candidates in the rust belt are anti-nafta and were anti-tpp!
as far as I can tell, purely on the numbers. Economically conservative but socially liberal is the smallest class of voters amongst the greater populace compared to all other groups.
Do you have data showing what specific "more left-wing preferences" Democrats who self id as "liberal" have when compared to those who self id as "moderate"? Self-id'd moderate Democrats are generally pro-choice/pro-immigration/pro-marriage-equality. Your shift data only shows labels, not issue positions (beyond those issue positions where moderate Democrats have the same views as other Ds).
The Shor tweet linked in this piece. Also, other piece I wrote a few years ago, arguing that ideological self-ID basically "works" as a proxy for issue positions: https://www.slowboring.com/p/most-americans-are-moderates. See also this piece I did with Matt documenting the Democratic Party's leftward shift since 2012: https://www.slowboring.com/p/shifting-left; for a somewhat more updated version, see Simon Bazelon's Deciding to Win report (https://decidingtowin.org/). I think this leftward shift is downstream of changing views among Democratic voters.
Centrists have more left-wing preferences than conservatives; that doesn't mean we should collapse centrists into being progressives. Liberals probably are more left-wing than centrists but I think it is, at best, non-obvious that this means they will, more or less as a block, prefer presidential candidates more like the squad to those like Gretchen Whitmer.
Would prefer they call themselves a favor of liberal, do progressives self ID as that now? Do wonder if polling choice (and past choices by political actors having linguistic momentum) kind of fixes the liberal means left wing liberal.
This is a really useful look at changes to society and the Democratic party over the last few decades, but it's incredibly confusing to use "liberal" to mean "leftist" or "progressive".
I'm not just nerding out about "classical liberalism". Left-leaning figures have always used "liberal" as a slur, and that's only been increasing, especially when you consider how little the average person will credit the "neo" part of "neoliberalism".
Usage has been slippery my whole lifetime, but when you're discussing opinion polling and ideological affinity, it becomes especially important to use higher-consensus terms.
Liberal is the higher consensus term here. Splitting hairs between “leftist” vs “progressive” vs “liberal” is something messenger class types do. Most people use all three terms interchangeably.
But I am talking about the makeup of the party rank and file. Among the non-messenger class voters who make up the primary electorate these terms are mostly interchangeable. My point is that the party rank and file has actually moved left and using share self-ID’ing as liberal is a good proxy for this.
I agree that using self-ID is a good proxy in that context. But using "liberal" when you mean "progressive ", "socialist", or "social justice advocate" makes your analysis harder to read.
Anyway, it was a good article, I'd just prefer more analytic clarity.
(My objections wrt to polling are more complicated and I probably should have just left that out).
The Argument should start the change by removing "liberal" by itself as an option from its polls for the time being. Let people choose between 'leftist or socialist' and "centrist or classical liberal".
When the party moves right, they will pick up a non-trivial number of Republican voters (see Clinton, Bill). This actually counts as two votes (in a two-party system): +1 for the Democrats and -1 for the Republicans. Even if every R pickup is offset by a left-wing departure for the Green Party or just staying home, it is still a net win.
The math works the same way when moving left -- it is a net negative if Democrats defect to the Republicans even if it picks up a disaffected and disengaged left.
Ideology may be pulling left, but a desire to win will pull back to the center.
I want this to be true, but I worry the logic works for the GOP too and yet they seem stuck in the MAGA "majority of Republicans" primary trap. Seems like the same risk for the Dems.
There are localized exceptions -- Republicans in California, Democrats in WV -- where the minority party just stops trying to compete and recedes into purity politics. But I think this is unlikely to happen on the national level due to the stakes involved.
I think MAGA politics are very bad but they are close enough to the center on a few issues (immigration, DEI policies) to appeal to more conservative Democrats. Or at least they were prior to this second Trump Administration.
"Some people will quibble that describing oneself as liberal doesn’t actually mean that voters necessarily hold left-wing views on the issues. Frankly, I think that’s a cope; there’s robust evidence that self-identified liberals have more left-wing policy positions."
Sure. But "more" left-wing than what? I would never self-identify as anything but Liberal -- I've been doing that since the early 1960s -- but more Democratic Socialist politics have come to be denoted as "Progressive," and, largely for practical reasons of electability, I would not identify as Progressive. (Sometimes when I talk with young progressives they are explicit in rejecting my views as "liberal," as in, "I'm so done with Liberals!"). And I think Boomer generation "Liberals," like me, would rarely be willing to self-identify as "Moderate" too: "Liberal" has been a life-long commitment.
Mr. Singh is of a very different generation, and may not appreciate how foundational the term "Liberal" is to older generations of Democratic voters. If there were polling that showed the plurality of those likely to vote in a Democratic primary identified as "progressive" on a Progressive/Liberal/Moderate scale -- or at least disaggregated "Liberal" and "Very Liberal" -- I'd be more convinced that the Bernie/AOC wing of the Party was now its largest, as opposed to its loudest.
Agree. I'm gen x. I identify as liberal, but I do not identify as progressive. The people in my life who call themselves liberal are not necessarily sold queer theory or critical race theory. They would be considered moderate or centrist by younger progressives. But they still identify as very liberal because they hate Trump and what the conservative movement has devolved into. Also, for better or worse, "centrist" has become a bad word that denotes someone who doesn't have the spine to take a position.
To put it another way, a reagan republican is far left of the current republican party.
That said, the harris campaign tried to tread water and be neither fish nor fowl and that backfired. Trump is hugely unpopular yet won and has total power. Maybe we are better off with someone with strong opinions able to motivate disgruntled voters over someone appealing to business as usual.
What doesn’t show up in these numbers is the fact that moderates have simply left the party (both parties, in fact) and so a large majority of Americans end up with candidates they don’t like.
As Matt Y. has pointed out, it only took one foreign-policy position to win Obama credibility from the left, the rest was earnest centrism. Health care reform was a left-wing goal in the sense that Dems have credibility here and Republicans are apathetic at best, but the ACA ended up being a masterpiece of centrism (though one vote shy of something bigger). If anyone, left or center, wants to win, they should chuck Shor's whole orientation (a granular measurement of a vague thing) and plant a few carefully-chosen issue stakes. Start with something for which the left still has broad appeal, then sandwich in a co-opted issue from the right, then end with something truly novel. Stop with the slider-bar tinkering and try to make graspable commitments you can trace back to basic values the left shares with everyone. Be sure to add an aspirational element that connects it to America's enduring exceptionalism because people will say they hate jingoism on a survey but even a DSA member is a sucker for it if they feel like they're otherwise winning.
The terms are always going to be “mongrel concepts” open to redefinition at every cycle, whether applied to voters or issue sets. The terms aren’t quite the floating signifiers that “left-right-center” or “Democratic-Republican” are but I say at a time of increased ideological incoherence the party actually has many ways to anchor itself with its base while aiming for 60% of the electorate over a greater variety of landscapes.
So you may need something more salient than “I was against a now-unpopular war back when I didn’t have to vote on it” but there’s no reason the same overall formula can’t work. The Iowa Caucases have always been activist-freindly territory! We should remember the issues themselves migrate among moderate/liberal/conservative just as personal self-reports do. The moderate Bill Clinton ran on 1) universal healthcare, 2) the most pro-choice stance yet seen and 3) a frontal assault on Reaganomics at every turn. Obama used nativist working-class populism against Romney in 2012. Sanders blasted “open borders” in 2016 (to the bewilderment of centrists like Ezra Klein and to the horror of “One Billion Americans” super-centrist, Matt Y.). With margins this tight, this is all up for negotiation.
3. which means the left wing is the majority of the party.
But does liberal mean progressive activist that does not want to moderate in order to win elections? does it even mean that liberal actually holds the same views as a progressive activist?
And what exactly happened to the median democratic voter in this analysis? they are more conservative relative to progressives. They pragmatically care about winning elections even if it means moderating. progressives don’t because ideologues never want to admit that moderation is one of the most effective ways to win elections.
So what is the progressive theory for winning the presidency and Senate? Usually it sounds like this: adopt our whole agenda, then put a white guy in front of it so swing voters do not notice.
I want things to work out well for NYC, but I find there are real Mamdani fans who give him credit for things without looking deeper into the source... City budget improvements that are actually state aid from Hochul. Crime drops (hurray!) that follow a record hiring year for the NYPD - more police, not some socialist magic.
I guess if he does sensible things and people give him a pass because he says "socialism" then that is fine? Sewer socialism is the socialism I can respect, I suppose. But it is a weird situation.
All of the direst predictions of those opposed to Mamdani have not come to pass. He didn't defund the police, he didn't oppose Tisch continuing harsh on crime policies, he has pursued fixing the budget instead of ignoring the problem, and he certainly hasn't attempted to drive jewish people out of the city.
I feel as if a lot of people have tricked themselves into thinking american anarchism, which is anti-police, and just anti-authority in general, is the same thing as socialism, which anyone who knows anything about either will tell you is very much not the case.
Sure, I guess. At the mayoral level, is "socialism" much more than an attitude, a positioning?
He doesn't control taxes or anything that would actually restructure society. If socialism in this position means "deliver effective government services for all citizens" then sure I am on board, but that's not the only definition I've heard from people...
Municipalities are actually the places the very first socialist governments got off the ground because they have the concentrated capital to allow for it, as well as the critical mass of people.
There is socialism as policy, and then there is socialism as a political project. Mamdani is clearly trying to advance the political project, by his own words "Prove that the government is capable of delivering for average people. If people cannot trust the government, why would they support new taxes or government programs?"
Mandami has, so far, been pragmatic on every issue except Israel (which doesn't actually affect NYC). Yes, it does seem like he's someone centrists can work with rather than just opposing, at the level of NYC local government. However, I would not be able to vote for him myself until he clearly denounces the phrase "globalize the intifada" and anyone who uses it. If he becomes a Democratic general-election presidential candidate I'm likely to cast a protest vote for the Libertarian or leave the top of the ballot blank. (Same goes for Platner.)
Mamdani isn’t eligible for the presidential ballot due to being an immigrant so you don’t have to worry about that. It’s also strange that Republicans that aren’t even from NY spend so much time talking about him given that he can’t be president.
Sewer socialism is the best socialism. I do think it’s mostly a branding issue. Republicans have worked hard over the past few decades trying to associate anything government does to make life better for people with socialism, so may as well lean into it.
As a New Yorker, Milan, I endorse your take! Mamdani isn’t doing really any of the things he campaigned on (which is great! Because they were bad ideas!) and somehow is delivering moderate policy while keeping the left very very happy. There is for sure something to learn but I'm not sure what it is …
Sometimes parties have to learn by losing. If liberals are now dominant then maybe they should get their turn to nominate one of their own. I think nominating AOC would be a mistake but if that’s what it takes to get it out of their system so be it. Parties sometimes get over their skies and go too far out ideologically. It happened with Goldwater and McGovern. You can even say it happened during the Obama years when Republicans embraced Ryanism.
Democrats may be liberal now but they will get over it because they’ll have to. It’s a minority view and has some very unpopular positions on issues like energy and immigration.
Normally I’d be patient from looking at history but given that nominating AOC probably gives us President Vance I’m a lot more concerned.
Yes, if the Republican party hadn't taken an authoritarian turn, I'd be fine with saying "let the socialists have the Democratic Party for now, they'll come back to us after losing 3-4 Presidential elections in a row." The problem is that with the Republican party as it is now, if they win 3-4 Presidential elections in a row, they'll rig the system so that they can't lose.
I think you're right on who owns the whip hand within the party. But I think this matters hardly at all given that 1) a moderate registered Democrat may vote for a moderate Republican over a progressive (I know I do that all the time). The progressives don't have a symmetrical threat. Who are the progressives going to defect towards? Let's be serious and 2). Independents! Like you said. Progressives are a firm minority so they need to moderate to win enough votes to actually hold power.
So it really doesn't matter who has the whip hand in the party. The choices are to moderate or allow America to orbanize, and that's due to structural factors outside the party.
To put it another way: while the progressives are structurally dominant within the party, centrists are still structurally dominant over the party when it comes to actually winning power. So the centrists are still calling the shots (assuming progressives actually want to win power, a big if!)
The specific prediction here seems to hinge significantly on whether or not you consider Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom moderates. They're certainly not Sanders-AOC factionalists.
Right. Arguably, most prominent Democratic politicians (including, e.g., Newsom and Harris) are some sort of "normal" Democrat where they're broadly "liberal" (the way Milan is using the word) but not squad-left. The big problem is that they're neither accepted as genuine leftists nor are they good at getting swing votes. The reason a lot of people are hyping Ossoff is that he's currently seen as successfully avoiding the dreaded "moderate" label while still getting crossover votes. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Maybe he can thread the needle, but I wouldn't call Ossoff a "leftist." He's part of the tradition of liberal democrats going back to FDR (who was not a "leftist" either in modern terms).
Ironically, it's the last section about the national outnumbering of liberals by conservatives (to say nothing of the EC and Senate advantages the GOP also enjoys) that puts the real burden of action on "liberals" (though I would contend that "progressive" is the more accurate identifier).
I think the big takeaway here is that it's the progressives who have moved the Democratic Party in such a strategically feeble leftward direction (as Yglesias has gone hoarse shouting at Brian Beutler about), and given their interfactional numbers, it is they who are chiefly responsible for rectifying that shift should we ever hope to emerge from this horrible electoral cycle whereby we alternate losses with one of the most odious and despised men in American history. If they choose not to then the party will just continue to bleed moderates, Democrats will remain historically unpopular, and progressive goals will continue to get stymied - and even regress in key social issues.
"Some people will quibble that describing oneself as liberal doesn’t actually mean that voters necessarily hold left-wing views on the issues."
Well yes... And it also bothers me to use the word liberal this way. There is a Left movement that is not particularly liberal.
Our political system is quite poorly suited to the current situation where there are roughly three significant groups in play - Socialists, MAGA, and Neoliberals (for lack of better group names)
Yeah, sure, but the fact remains that people who call themselves “liberal” do have more left wing views. The idea that 2/3 of Democrats calling themselves “liberal” doesn’t mean they have more left-wing preferences doesn’t hold water.
It's a big mistake to talk about issues traditionally coded as "liberal" without disaggregating social and economic issues, though. Progressive victories that can be understood as the triumph of quasi-libertarian "live and let live" impulses, like support for gay or interracial marriage or drug legalization, can and do coexist quite nicely with centrist or, nowadays, even conservative views on economics. Leftist programs that aim to interfere with private economic or social relations with the aim of benefitting favored groups, or just achieving justice in general, are an entirely different sort of argument and don't necessarily appeal to people who favor gay marriage and pot dispensaries. Lots of self-identified liberals, especially outside the coasts, loathe the ultra-interventionist left represented by Mamdani or AOC.
There's a bunch of issues on which you start to get a prog/maga horseshoe: censorship, antisemitism, anti-bank, "natural" medicine, state control of enterprise. There are others that basically do match "a liberal is a median voter partway to being a leftist" as the article describes, but conflating them with the ones where more moderate voters moderate away from liberalism and towards Mamdani is unhelpful.
"especially outside the coasts", this is like saying outside of the oceans, which contain most of earths liquid water, the water is fresh! most liberals live in coastal states, ergo, most liberals hold coastal liberal views.
even then, I'm highly skeptical of the idea that self-identified liberals in interior states are less liberal than their coastal counterparts. most data shows that urban centers (where liberals tend to live) are quite leftwing compared to the rest of the state in most states with some small exceptions. Even in states like Florida or Texas there are democratic mayors with leftwing views on things closer to a coastal liberal than some imagined heartland classical liberal.
additionally, most data suggests the average voter is more leftwing on economic views, and more rightwing on cultural views. wants immigration restriction, but also a more generous welfare state. there is a reason why moderate or even rightwing candidates in the rust belt are anti-nafta and were anti-tpp!
as far as I can tell, purely on the numbers. Economically conservative but socially liberal is the smallest class of voters amongst the greater populace compared to all other groups.
Do you have data showing what specific "more left-wing preferences" Democrats who self id as "liberal" have when compared to those who self id as "moderate"? Self-id'd moderate Democrats are generally pro-choice/pro-immigration/pro-marriage-equality. Your shift data only shows labels, not issue positions (beyond those issue positions where moderate Democrats have the same views as other Ds).
The Shor tweet linked in this piece. Also, other piece I wrote a few years ago, arguing that ideological self-ID basically "works" as a proxy for issue positions: https://www.slowboring.com/p/most-americans-are-moderates. See also this piece I did with Matt documenting the Democratic Party's leftward shift since 2012: https://www.slowboring.com/p/shifting-left; for a somewhat more updated version, see Simon Bazelon's Deciding to Win report (https://decidingtowin.org/). I think this leftward shift is downstream of changing views among Democratic voters.
I see the Shor tweet, but that data is five years old, and I'm not seeing which specific issues he used to show correlation with moderate or liberal self-id. As best I can tell, the "Democrats Have Changed a Lot" piece is focused on party platform language with the Gallup self-id chart at the end. I don't see where Deciding to Win makes the case that Democratic voters are moving left; it talks about college-educated elite Democrats being out of step with regular voters. And you have others making different cases, e.g., https://www.welcomestack.org/p/the-four-types-of-democratic-primary, https://www.thirdway.org/memo/the-truth-about-democratic-primary-voters, https://manhattan.institute/article/do-democrats-want-to-be-normal-survey-analysis-of-todays-democratic-coalition
Centrists have more left-wing preferences than conservatives; that doesn't mean we should collapse centrists into being progressives. Liberals probably are more left-wing than centrists but I think it is, at best, non-obvious that this means they will, more or less as a block, prefer presidential candidates more like the squad to those like Gretchen Whitmer.
Would prefer they call themselves a favor of liberal, do progressives self ID as that now? Do wonder if polling choice (and past choices by political actors having linguistic momentum) kind of fixes the liberal means left wing liberal.
This is a really useful look at changes to society and the Democratic party over the last few decades, but it's incredibly confusing to use "liberal" to mean "leftist" or "progressive".
I'm not just nerding out about "classical liberalism". Left-leaning figures have always used "liberal" as a slur, and that's only been increasing, especially when you consider how little the average person will credit the "neo" part of "neoliberalism".
Usage has been slippery my whole lifetime, but when you're discussing opinion polling and ideological affinity, it becomes especially important to use higher-consensus terms.
So why "liberal"?
Liberal is the higher consensus term here. Splitting hairs between “leftist” vs “progressive” vs “liberal” is something messenger class types do. Most people use all three terms interchangeably.
Except you're talking to the messenger class, about factional battles inside the Democratic party, which is ~95% messenger class by weight!
But I am talking about the makeup of the party rank and file. Among the non-messenger class voters who make up the primary electorate these terms are mostly interchangeable. My point is that the party rank and file has actually moved left and using share self-ID’ing as liberal is a good proxy for this.
I agree that using self-ID is a good proxy in that context. But using "liberal" when you mean "progressive ", "socialist", or "social justice advocate" makes your analysis harder to read.
Anyway, it was a good article, I'd just prefer more analytic clarity.
(My objections wrt to polling are more complicated and I probably should have just left that out).
Came here to say just this. Especially when being "progressive ", "socialist", or "social justice advocate" are frequently quite illberal
The Argument should start the change by removing "liberal" by itself as an option from its polls for the time being. Let people choose between 'leftist or socialist' and "centrist or classical liberal".
When the party moves right, they will pick up a non-trivial number of Republican voters (see Clinton, Bill). This actually counts as two votes (in a two-party system): +1 for the Democrats and -1 for the Republicans. Even if every R pickup is offset by a left-wing departure for the Green Party or just staying home, it is still a net win.
The math works the same way when moving left -- it is a net negative if Democrats defect to the Republicans even if it picks up a disaffected and disengaged left.
Ideology may be pulling left, but a desire to win will pull back to the center.
I want this to be true, but I worry the logic works for the GOP too and yet they seem stuck in the MAGA "majority of Republicans" primary trap. Seems like the same risk for the Dems.
There are localized exceptions -- Republicans in California, Democrats in WV -- where the minority party just stops trying to compete and recedes into purity politics. But I think this is unlikely to happen on the national level due to the stakes involved.
I think MAGA politics are very bad but they are close enough to the center on a few issues (immigration, DEI policies) to appeal to more conservative Democrats. Or at least they were prior to this second Trump Administration.
Fair point - I forget the ways in which Trump did moderate the party away from some of the Paul Ryan agenda that was wildly unpopular.
"Some people will quibble that describing oneself as liberal doesn’t actually mean that voters necessarily hold left-wing views on the issues. Frankly, I think that’s a cope; there’s robust evidence that self-identified liberals have more left-wing policy positions."
Sure. But "more" left-wing than what? I would never self-identify as anything but Liberal -- I've been doing that since the early 1960s -- but more Democratic Socialist politics have come to be denoted as "Progressive," and, largely for practical reasons of electability, I would not identify as Progressive. (Sometimes when I talk with young progressives they are explicit in rejecting my views as "liberal," as in, "I'm so done with Liberals!"). And I think Boomer generation "Liberals," like me, would rarely be willing to self-identify as "Moderate" too: "Liberal" has been a life-long commitment.
Mr. Singh is of a very different generation, and may not appreciate how foundational the term "Liberal" is to older generations of Democratic voters. If there were polling that showed the plurality of those likely to vote in a Democratic primary identified as "progressive" on a Progressive/Liberal/Moderate scale -- or at least disaggregated "Liberal" and "Very Liberal" -- I'd be more convinced that the Bernie/AOC wing of the Party was now its largest, as opposed to its loudest.
Agree. I'm gen x. I identify as liberal, but I do not identify as progressive. The people in my life who call themselves liberal are not necessarily sold queer theory or critical race theory. They would be considered moderate or centrist by younger progressives. But they still identify as very liberal because they hate Trump and what the conservative movement has devolved into. Also, for better or worse, "centrist" has become a bad word that denotes someone who doesn't have the spine to take a position.
To put it another way, a reagan republican is far left of the current republican party.
That said, the harris campaign tried to tread water and be neither fish nor fowl and that backfired. Trump is hugely unpopular yet won and has total power. Maybe we are better off with someone with strong opinions able to motivate disgruntled voters over someone appealing to business as usual.
What doesn’t show up in these numbers is the fact that moderates have simply left the party (both parties, in fact) and so a large majority of Americans end up with candidates they don’t like.
As Matt Y. has pointed out, it only took one foreign-policy position to win Obama credibility from the left, the rest was earnest centrism. Health care reform was a left-wing goal in the sense that Dems have credibility here and Republicans are apathetic at best, but the ACA ended up being a masterpiece of centrism (though one vote shy of something bigger). If anyone, left or center, wants to win, they should chuck Shor's whole orientation (a granular measurement of a vague thing) and plant a few carefully-chosen issue stakes. Start with something for which the left still has broad appeal, then sandwich in a co-opted issue from the right, then end with something truly novel. Stop with the slider-bar tinkering and try to make graspable commitments you can trace back to basic values the left shares with everyone. Be sure to add an aspirational element that connects it to America's enduring exceptionalism because people will say they hate jingoism on a survey but even a DSA member is a sucker for it if they feel like they're otherwise winning.
Per Milan’s main point, the breakdown of liberals and moderates in the party was different in 2008 than it is in 2026, especially in primaries. Iowa!
But there's nothing here showing what voters mean when they self id as "liberal" or "moderate."
The terms are always going to be “mongrel concepts” open to redefinition at every cycle, whether applied to voters or issue sets. The terms aren’t quite the floating signifiers that “left-right-center” or “Democratic-Republican” are but I say at a time of increased ideological incoherence the party actually has many ways to anchor itself with its base while aiming for 60% of the electorate over a greater variety of landscapes.
So you may need something more salient than “I was against a now-unpopular war back when I didn’t have to vote on it” but there’s no reason the same overall formula can’t work. The Iowa Caucases have always been activist-freindly territory! We should remember the issues themselves migrate among moderate/liberal/conservative just as personal self-reports do. The moderate Bill Clinton ran on 1) universal healthcare, 2) the most pro-choice stance yet seen and 3) a frontal assault on Reaganomics at every turn. Obama used nativist working-class populism against Romney in 2012. Sanders blasted “open borders” in 2016 (to the bewilderment of centrists like Ezra Klein and to the horror of “One Billion Americans” super-centrist, Matt Y.). With margins this tight, this is all up for negotiation.
So the logic goes like this:
1. more democrats identify as liberal
2. therefore democratic party is left wing
3. which means the left wing is the majority of the party.
But does liberal mean progressive activist that does not want to moderate in order to win elections? does it even mean that liberal actually holds the same views as a progressive activist?
And what exactly happened to the median democratic voter in this analysis? they are more conservative relative to progressives. They pragmatically care about winning elections even if it means moderating. progressives don’t because ideologues never want to admit that moderation is one of the most effective ways to win elections.
So what is the progressive theory for winning the presidency and Senate? Usually it sounds like this: adopt our whole agenda, then put a white guy in front of it so swing voters do not notice.
Mamdani is doing a good job so far. Maybe try to learn from him instead of trying to oppose him.
I want things to work out well for NYC, but I find there are real Mamdani fans who give him credit for things without looking deeper into the source... City budget improvements that are actually state aid from Hochul. Crime drops (hurray!) that follow a record hiring year for the NYPD - more police, not some socialist magic.
I guess if he does sensible things and people give him a pass because he says "socialism" then that is fine? Sewer socialism is the socialism I can respect, I suppose. But it is a weird situation.
All of the direst predictions of those opposed to Mamdani have not come to pass. He didn't defund the police, he didn't oppose Tisch continuing harsh on crime policies, he has pursued fixing the budget instead of ignoring the problem, and he certainly hasn't attempted to drive jewish people out of the city.
I feel as if a lot of people have tricked themselves into thinking american anarchism, which is anti-police, and just anti-authority in general, is the same thing as socialism, which anyone who knows anything about either will tell you is very much not the case.
Sure, I guess. At the mayoral level, is "socialism" much more than an attitude, a positioning?
He doesn't control taxes or anything that would actually restructure society. If socialism in this position means "deliver effective government services for all citizens" then sure I am on board, but that's not the only definition I've heard from people...
Municipalities are actually the places the very first socialist governments got off the ground because they have the concentrated capital to allow for it, as well as the critical mass of people.
There is socialism as policy, and then there is socialism as a political project. Mamdani is clearly trying to advance the political project, by his own words "Prove that the government is capable of delivering for average people. If people cannot trust the government, why would they support new taxes or government programs?"
Mandami has, so far, been pragmatic on every issue except Israel (which doesn't actually affect NYC). Yes, it does seem like he's someone centrists can work with rather than just opposing, at the level of NYC local government. However, I would not be able to vote for him myself until he clearly denounces the phrase "globalize the intifada" and anyone who uses it. If he becomes a Democratic general-election presidential candidate I'm likely to cast a protest vote for the Libertarian or leave the top of the ballot blank. (Same goes for Platner.)
Mamdani isn’t eligible for the presidential ballot due to being an immigrant so you don’t have to worry about that. It’s also strange that Republicans that aren’t even from NY spend so much time talking about him given that he can’t be president.
I’d forgotten that he was naturalized rather than being born in the US to immigrant parent(s) like Obama.
Sewer socialism is the best socialism. I do think it’s mostly a branding issue. Republicans have worked hard over the past few decades trying to associate anything government does to make life better for people with socialism, so may as well lean into it.
As a New Yorker, Milan, I endorse your take! Mamdani isn’t doing really any of the things he campaigned on (which is great! Because they were bad ideas!) and somehow is delivering moderate policy while keeping the left very very happy. There is for sure something to learn but I'm not sure what it is …
Sometimes parties have to learn by losing. If liberals are now dominant then maybe they should get their turn to nominate one of their own. I think nominating AOC would be a mistake but if that’s what it takes to get it out of their system so be it. Parties sometimes get over their skies and go too far out ideologically. It happened with Goldwater and McGovern. You can even say it happened during the Obama years when Republicans embraced Ryanism.
Democrats may be liberal now but they will get over it because they’ll have to. It’s a minority view and has some very unpopular positions on issues like energy and immigration.
Normally I’d be patient from looking at history but given that nominating AOC probably gives us President Vance I’m a lot more concerned.
Yes, if the Republican party hadn't taken an authoritarian turn, I'd be fine with saying "let the socialists have the Democratic Party for now, they'll come back to us after losing 3-4 Presidential elections in a row." The problem is that with the Republican party as it is now, if they win 3-4 Presidential elections in a row, they'll rig the system so that they can't lose.
I think you're right on who owns the whip hand within the party. But I think this matters hardly at all given that 1) a moderate registered Democrat may vote for a moderate Republican over a progressive (I know I do that all the time). The progressives don't have a symmetrical threat. Who are the progressives going to defect towards? Let's be serious and 2). Independents! Like you said. Progressives are a firm minority so they need to moderate to win enough votes to actually hold power.
So it really doesn't matter who has the whip hand in the party. The choices are to moderate or allow America to orbanize, and that's due to structural factors outside the party.
To put it another way: while the progressives are structurally dominant within the party, centrists are still structurally dominant over the party when it comes to actually winning power. So the centrists are still calling the shots (assuming progressives actually want to win power, a big if!)
The specific prediction here seems to hinge significantly on whether or not you consider Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom moderates. They're certainly not Sanders-AOC factionalists.
Right. Arguably, most prominent Democratic politicians (including, e.g., Newsom and Harris) are some sort of "normal" Democrat where they're broadly "liberal" (the way Milan is using the word) but not squad-left. The big problem is that they're neither accepted as genuine leftists nor are they good at getting swing votes. The reason a lot of people are hyping Ossoff is that he's currently seen as successfully avoiding the dreaded "moderate" label while still getting crossover votes. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Maybe he can thread the needle, but I wouldn't call Ossoff a "leftist." He's part of the tradition of liberal democrats going back to FDR (who was not a "leftist" either in modern terms).
I’m definitely not calling him a leftist
Official motion to stop using liberal to refer to leftists/progressives
Ironically, it's the last section about the national outnumbering of liberals by conservatives (to say nothing of the EC and Senate advantages the GOP also enjoys) that puts the real burden of action on "liberals" (though I would contend that "progressive" is the more accurate identifier).
I think the big takeaway here is that it's the progressives who have moved the Democratic Party in such a strategically feeble leftward direction (as Yglesias has gone hoarse shouting at Brian Beutler about), and given their interfactional numbers, it is they who are chiefly responsible for rectifying that shift should we ever hope to emerge from this horrible electoral cycle whereby we alternate losses with one of the most odious and despised men in American history. If they choose not to then the party will just continue to bleed moderates, Democrats will remain historically unpopular, and progressive goals will continue to get stymied - and even regress in key social issues.
This was great, Milan.
Referring to leftists within the Democratic Party as “liberal” is misleading. There is nothing liberal about them.
Fantastic column, because it *does work*: the information is actionable for moderate Dems who read The Argument. Thank you Milan.