Lessons in Victory

An immigrant Muslim socialist. A moderate former CIA wine mom. A moderate former Navy wine mom. A new House map in California. What can Democrats learn from their latest election wins?

It’s been quite a night for Democrats.

In a huge rebuke of the Trump administration, Democrats have won key races across the nation, taking the governor’s mansion in Virginia and New Jersey. Californians voted to redraw their House districts to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. And Zohran Mamdani, a previously largely-unknown state assemblymember, won the race for New York City mayor against former governor Andrew Cuomo. He will be the youngest person to ever hold the position, and the first Muslim.

This is all good news. But what these wins don’t offer is any single policy playbook for how Democrats win. The governors-elect of New Jersey and Virginia are moderate women, one (New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill) a former Navy helicopter pilot and the other (Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger) a former CIA officer. Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist with politics far to the left of the average Democrat. Anyone telling you that the takeaway here is that socialism is the winning formula or that moderation is the only way isn’t looking at the whole picture.

What all three of these candidates do have in common, though, are a few things:

1. They ran aggressively against Trump and his policies.

2. They ran according to the politics of their place, not the whole nation.

3. They talked like normal people.

And what national Democrats can focus on is also pretty straightforward:

1. Fairness. Democrats lose in part because many voters think we given unfair advantages to groups we deem vulnerable. But Republicans really do exert extreme cruelty toward these same groups. If Dems respond by demanding fair and decent treatment, we have the advantage.

2. Opportunity. Americans are working dogs. We don’t just want the ability to pay for our groceries; we want to work dignified jobs that allow us to earn the money to pay for our groceries. Democrats too often center their rhetoric on safety net programs, and while most Americans are of course extremely glad the net is there when they need it, they actually want a ladder to climb.

None of this is particularly revelatory, and yet.

I do think that the Spanberger / Sherrill wins are more relevant for the national Democratic Party than the Mamdani win, but that doesn’t make the Mamdani win meaningless. If the Democratic Party is going to be a big tent, it can’t be a tent that only opens to the middle. There are many, many American cities and counties where voters are far to the left of the rest of the country, and it would behoove Democrats to offer up a slate of progressive young talent in places where those folks can win. Cities trend younger and bluer, but older voters still tend to outnumber young ones. Getting young voters to run out means getting them invested and excited — and that means ending the Democratic gerontocracy and taking a gamble on some more youthful faces, even if they have unorthodox ideas or embarrassing social media histories (note here that “embarrassing” is not a synonym for “unabashedly racist” or “dangerously unhinged”).

And there are a lot of American states and municipalities that are more moderate, and many that are pretty conservative but not served particularly well by Trumpism and the GOP. Democrats should compete in those places too — but what they shouldn’t do is assume that in order to compete in the more moderate areas, you must moderate in the very liberal ones.

This does get complicated, because thanks to social media and the decline of local news outlets, many local elections — like that for mayor of NYC — become national ones, and the outcome blows back on the Democratic Party as a whole. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a single member of Congress representing part of the Bronx and Queens, and yet she is often treated as though she embodies the Democratic Party writ large; we can see the same dynamic taking shape with Mamdani (no one, on the other hand, ever claimed that Joe Manchin was the average Democrat). The Democrats’ biggest problem right now isn’t their actual policies, which tend to be fairly popular when polled individually; it’s their brand. If Democrats want to win national elections in 2026, the party needs to radically improve its reputation, and stat. And a lot of pundits have concluded that the problem with the brand is that it’s simply too far left.

I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.

There is no evidence that I can find, for example, that moderating on abortion rights — long the chief social issue Dems were told to moderate on — helps Democrats win elections. If anything, abortion is now a much bigger problem for Republicans, as banning the procedure is wildly unpopular. I have heard a few (male) pundits argue that there should be more anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, because 15 years ago there were more anti-abortion Democrats in Congress and back then, Dems were able to do things like pass the Affordable Care Act. And listen, I am open to seeing literally any data at all on this, but I cannot find one lick of evidence suggesting that Democrats are losing elections in conservative districts because of abortion rights. What I’ve seen instead is Republicans facing problems because of their extreme anti-abortion positions, and I’ve seen abortion rights themselves win as stand-alone issues even in pretty conservative places.

Other issues, including immigration, policing, and trans rights, are less clear-cut, but one thing that is clear to me is that most voters want stances on these issues that feel fair but not cruel, and that are not merely reactive to Republican cruelty but considered in their own right — and voters get really, really turned off if they feel like discussing their views or concerns will get them shouted down as bigots. Voters want to feel like politicians see the reality in front of them. Joe Biden really did oversee a massive influx of migrants coming through the southern border, and it really was destabilizing for social services, and as totally understandable as much of that migration was a whole lot of it really did not qualify as asylum and that system really was abused. Trans identification really has significantly increased in the last decade as trans rights and representation have expanded — both very good things! — and that really has challenged ideas about sex and gender that have been foundational across thousands of societies for thousands of years, and I personally find that cool and exciting, but I can also understand how, like feminism itself, it’s really really destabilizing and demands a whole lot of hand-holding and patience and dialogue alongside wholly reasonable demands to live free of discrimination and abuse. Simply asserting, for example, that trans women are women and it is therefore impermissibly bigoted to have questions about potential biological advantages for trans women in sports doesn’t just shut down conversation, it makes voters feel like you are not living in a shared reality. This is the same for women’s rights more broadly: Simply asserting “women are human” does not actually work as a position on abortion rights, for example.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that national Democrats need to, as a extremely tired cliche goes, throw immigrants or trans people or women under the bus. It does mean that they need to actually hear voters out and make clear that they’re living in the same (sane) world.

America is a fairness culture. It’s why the Civil Rights movement remains such a storied one but the Black Power movement was less successful. It’s why a liberal feminism that sought to tear down discriminatory laws largely succeeded while more radical efforts did not. It’s why same-sex marriage became the law of the land. And it’s why some of the stickiest issues in American politics are what they are, from affirmative action to abortion to trans athletes in women’s sports to policing to immigration to social welfare programs. These are all issues where the question of what’s fair is significantly more complicated than “should people of different skin tones be able to drink from the same water fountain.” It’s why even terms like “women’s rights” or “trans rights” are too broad: A lot of Americans find it intolerably unfair for women or trans people to face discrimination in housing, for example, but would draw different lines when it comes to the military draft or sports competitions. It’s why even among immigrants immigration is such a salient issue: outside of the white supremacist Stephen Miller minority, Americans really do believe that you become American simply by virtue of becoming American, but that also means that Americans of most stripes resent it when they feel like people are cutting in the line to a desirable American life.

Democrats could have an advantage here. Conservatism is not about fairness; it has long been about preserving entitlements for men, conservative Christians, and white people, and when that is made obvious, conservatives tend to lose. And Trumpism doesn’t even pretend to be about fairness. The president is throwing glitzy parties while cutting SNAP benefits. He’s pardoning his rich cronies and making bank on his personal cryptocoin. His administration is not one of the most qualified, but of the most pantingly loyal. His policies are not about restoring fairness, but about exacting cruelty against the weak and vengeance against perceived enemies. Republicans are literally stealing congressional seats in Texas because the president said to do it. This is not the party of fairness, it’s the party of cheating to win and then using its power for unadulterated self-enrichment. This should be an easy party to beat.

Liberalism has long been about fairness, but the more progressive part of today’s liberal cohort has also pushed to use government power to right long-standing wrongs — arguing essentially that simply evening the playing field with neutral laws is not sufficient when one group has been given such an extreme advantage for so long, and what is actually fair is to try a bit of a corrective and give long-disadvantaged groups a tiny leg up. This is the now-familiar equity vs. equality thing, and to be clear, I am a part of the progressive equity wing and I still think it is right and righteous. But it has also been one of many reasons Democrats lose in more moderate areas. My version of fairness, which requires not just facially neutral and equal laws and policies but redress and redistribution, is seen by many (most?) people as vastly unfair.

Progressives have tried to change that, and there were about 25 minutes in 2020 when it seemed like we were succeeding. You know what happens next.

America is also a working culture. I wish we were a softer place that took better care of each other, and it is absolutely the job of our liberal party to perpetually push to expand the social safety net. But Americans are eternal optimists; we are very very sure in our own potential for success (I love this about us). Voters generally support social safety net programs and they do not actually want to take food from the mouths of hungry children or healthcare from the elderly and infirm. But they also aspire to be able to easily feed their children without government cheese; most (accurately) do not put themselves in the category of American whose most urgent concern is welfare benefits. Voters want to know how politicians are going to create opportunities for them: Job opportunities, economic opportunities, how they are going to not just be employed but thrive and do well and maybe even make it big. Republicans talk to them like this, as if putting the GOP in power will mean millionaire status is right around the corner. Democrats tend to talk like the poor house is.

The irony here is that many Democratic policies are actually great for workers, for innovation, and for economic growth. But what voters hear — because it’s what Democrats say — is that Democrats will take on the wealthy and make them pay more in taxes and then maybe average people will get a little more healthcare. And fine, people like healthcare and want more of it, but a lot of American voters have also deluded themselves into believing that they are the future wealthy — and Democrats tend to have an advantage on healthcare specifically because Americans feel like we’ve earned out healthcare. Democrats should absolutely push for expanded healthcare and more worker protections and a more robust social safety net including much more generous welfare policies for poor families. But they need to talk much more about creating opportunities: For starting small businesses, for expanding those businesses, for getting good jobs.

Right now, we live in Trump’s America, not my ideal America. Democrats’ job is to salvage what’s left. To do that, they have to win. In liberal cities, that means running young, progressive, exciting candidates, because exit polls are clear that young people (and young women especially) are among the most enthusiastic Democratic voters but they’re a minority and you have to get them out to the polls by thrilling and inspiring them, not lecturing them. In swing states, it means running politicians who speak the language of real people, not the language of consultants and definitely not the language of recent liberal arts grads who tend to staff up Democratic campaigns (as much as I personally adore the recent liberal arts grads). It probably means that those politicians have more moderate politics. But wherever they sit on policy, voters are going to want them to stand up against Trump and Trumpism — to not chase Trump voters by emulating Trump, but to win over Trump voters by showing just how badly Trump misled them, how much he’s damaging the nation, and how strongly they will fight back.

xx Jill