It would be funny if they weren’t so serious about it. The Democratic Party is spending $20 million on a two-year study to find out why young men have been abandoning the party. Well, it actually is funny, because what they’re hearing is that young men feel that the party doesn’t care about them and has other priorities. The $20 million joke is that people have been saying that for years, but it took the party’s drubbing in the 2024 election for its leaders to sit up and say, “Maybe complaining about ‘toxic masculinity’ isn’t the best way to get male voters.”
But seriously, the party is making an effort, so slow clap for them. A juicier question is, where or how will the party have a come-to-Jesus moment and realize it’s not just the window dressing that needs to be changed, but much of what’s for sale in the window, too?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to recognize that, and has been making some pronouncements and taking some actions that are out of step with his party’s progressives. He drew howls when he said transgender athletes shouldn’t be playing in girls’ or women’s sports. His statement on restricting public health care for migrants further separated him from his party’s left wing.
Newsom told HBO’s Bill Maher that the Democratic Party brand is “toxic.” But can he do anything about it? Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist, told CBS that Newsom has earned enough street cred with the left that “he is uniquely positioned to . . . recalibrate the center of the Democratic Party on these issues.” Maybe, but probably not in time for him to become president. Putting aside the very debatable proposition that Newsom’s brand of California politician will sell well across the country — I’m skeptical — his immediate challenge is to try to rebrand the Democrats as moderates. But he has also to rebrand himself as a moderate, and there is an army of GOP and MAGA opposition researchers who will make that difficult to impossible.
Newsom told Bill Maher the Democratic Party brand is “toxic.” But can he do anything about it?
The problem is that Newsom doesn’t have a movement behind him. Think of leaders who successfully led their parties and countries after waging intellectual and ideological battles to make their party more acceptable to voters: Germany’s Gerhard Schröder ended the nearly two-decade reign of conservative Helmut Kohl; the U.K.’s Margaret Thatcher gave the Tories an agenda and profile that catapulted her into the prime minister’s office for more than a decade; later, Tony Blair battled the hard left of Labour to refashion his party as one more likely to attract middle class voters and less likely to quote Trotsky.
When Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he did so as the former chair of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an organization founded in 1985 to drag the Democratic Party back toward the center after the debacle of the 1984 presidential race and the hard-left turn some of the party took in the 1970s. For years, the DLC movement had waged a struggle for the party’s soul, challenging party orthodoxy on a range of issues, including education, welfare, and national defense. Members of the DLC coalition weren’t afraid of getting into the arguments needed to reshape opinions within and outside of the party, and despite lasting animus from the left, they succeeded, most notably with Clinton’s election and reelection as president, but also with Barack Obama’s election and reelection; as much as Obama presented himself as a candidate of the progressive left, he governed as a Clintonite center-left president.
The left wing of the party hasn’t been silent; for decades, warmly ensconced in many a college faculty, it has licked its wounds and organized as it reformulated its policies and strategies for regaining power and influence. When the George Floyd protests erupted amid the social disruption of the pandemic, the left wing stepped forward and said it knew what the country needed to do and it had a set of policies to make it happen. Far too much of the Democrats’ centrist wing said “O.K., come on in!” And then spent the next four years trying to memory-hole “defund the police” and pronoun battles.
Another governor who transformed his party is a tale closer to home. When Ronald Reagan left the California governorship, he set about on a long march to the White House by engaging in an extended battle for the heart of his party. He wanted to move Republicans from the center to the right. Drawing on the new popularity of economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and social conservatives associated with the Religious Right, Reagan gave speeches and wrote newspaper columns and argued his position endlessly. In the process, he changed from being an agitator on the party’s right flank to being its leading figure who defined the party, until Donald Trump finally redefined it in his image.
Newsom isn’t Reagan or Clinton, who were both extraordinarily talented communicators. But he is smart, and still relatively young, an ambitious member of Generation X. If he wants to pursue the golden ring of the presidency, he could try to paper over the Democrats’ problems and see if the old Democratic Party can squeeze one more big victory out of the status quo Democratic brand.
Or he could try to build a movement that could change the party for a generation or more.
In part 2, we’ll examine why the party is off-track and out of sync with voters.
