The Expensive, Seductive Strategy That Doomed the Democratic Party

A few months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a press conference with an almond farmer when reporters asked him about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant living in Maryland whom the Trump administration had accused of being an MS-13 gang member. The Department of Homeland Security had recently deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison because of an administrative error—and was refusing to rectify it, despite multiple court orders.

Given the chance to address Donald Trump’s suspension of due process and defiance of the judiciary, Newsom—a would-be leader of the national opposition—called the case a “distraction” from the president’s tariff policies. Despite growing public outrage, he wanted to stick to prepared remarks about almond exports.

This was the same man who once guaranteed “sanctuary for all who seek it” within California’s borders and who, more recently, had said he wanted to remake what the Democratic Party stands for. He practically oozes the aspiration to become its presidential nominee in 2028.

But that April day, the governor of the country’s largest nominal stronghold of liberalism insinuated that the White House was pleased—in a calculated sort of way—that elected Democrats were drawing attention to Abrego Garcia rather than the losses being suffered by the S&P 500. “They don’t want to be accountable to markets today,” Newsom said. Then, referring to the farmer, Christine Gemperle, with whom he was holding a press conference about a lawsuit he had filed over the tariffs: “They don’t want to have a real conversation with Christine, and what’s going on with the export uncertainty here in the Valley.”

The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t. (Should the Gettysburg Address have been more concerned with kitchen-table issues?) But it provided a candid glimpse into how many of the Democratic Party’s most important figures think. It was an acute case of Strategist Brain, you might call it, and a vivid example of how deep a hole the United States is in. (Newsom was not exactly wrong that the president’s unilateral and possibly illegal imposition of economy-crippling tariffs was also deserving of attention.) Yet while the story of how campaign strategists gained such a hold on the party explains a lot about its present impotence, it could also suggest a path back to both electoral success and actual working governance.

Democratic politicians—including presidents—come and go. But the party’s strategists endure, as does the kind of strategy they typically recommend. In the early 1990s, the most celebrated Democratic minds were Bill Clinton–affiliated operatives and pollsters like James Carville, Mark Penn, and Al From—advocates of pragmatic, fiscally moderate economic positions and bold breaks from progressive orthodoxy on cultural issues. They remain influential: Carville has a regular column in the New York Times; the newspaper recently published an interview with From and three fellow ’92 campaign veterans about what Democrats should do heading into the midterms. The illustration that ran with the article featured a photo of Hillary Clinton, who had hired Penn as her top 2008 campaign strategist.

There are newer gurus in elite party circles too—figures like onetime Barack Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, pollster and onetime Obama campaign staffer David Shor, and blogger Matt Yglesias—who are more proficient with new jargon and technology but give essentially the same advice: Follow the polls, talk about middle-class economic concerns, and occasionally make it clear that you’re not one of those liberals by taking a few contrarian, conservative positions on social or cultural issues.

Why have Democrats been taking advice from the same small circle of people—who were never chosen by voters, are never accountable to them, and haven’t worked in government in decades, if ever—for more than 30 years? Why don’t these people’s ideas ever seem to change? How might this contribute to the party’s national reputation for irrelevance and ineffectiveness, not to mention the state of the American system of government (i.e., on the verge of collapse)?

The answers I’d propose are not as straightforward as you might be guessing. You’re not about to read a case for principled leftism or political courage. Those concepts have their place, but the truth is that talking about middle-class economics while moderating strategically on wedge issues does win votes in biannual congressional elections and presidential races. The problem is that too many people in the party have forgotten that they’re supposed to do anything else. And while some bright Democratic minds have overcome this handicap in the past by virtue of their own keen instincts, might there be a smarter way to run things?

In the decades since the Democratic Party got its clock cleaned in the 1984 presidential election, it has gotten really good at one thing: finding candidates who are skilled fundraisers and using the money they raise to carpet-bomb small slices of undecided voters with poll-tested and focus-grouped ads that appeal to their vaguely moderate views on a handful of nationally resonant issues. In the present day, when losing control of the House can mean “There aren’t going to be vaccines or weather forecasts anymore,” this is high-stakes work. The people who carry it out are campaign strategists, and it makes sense they would feel owed a measure of gratitude and prominence.

But there was a time in the United States, as hard as it might be to imagine, when there were no celebrity political strategists. Candidates decided how to campaign, and people who worked for political parties decided what policies to pursue. Parties gauged voters’ responses thereto in a variety of ways, including interactions between voters and local party organizers. All of these people had their own selfish ambitions, but they had incentives nonetheless to think about the practical, long-term consequences of the decisions they made.

This was the era of strong parties, also known as political machines. And they had downsides: They could be corrupt, and they did not make decisions in a democratic way. In response, reformers pushed to limit the power they possessed, a lengthy effort that began during the Progressive Era of the early 20^th century and culminated after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At that gathering, held during the Vietnam War, party leaders, including infamous machine Mayor Richard Daley, strong-armed through a pro-war platform as protesters were beaten in the streets outside. In its aftermath, Democrats adopted so-called binding primaries, in which voters, rather than party officials, selected candidates.

As party organizations lost their control over the way elections were conducted and funded, their power waned and their size dwindled. They became, in the titular words of a 2024 book by political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, hollow parties.

And although the procedural changes that killed off party machines were supposed to put engaged, informed citizens back in charge of their government, that’s not what happened. The decline of party power coincided with the rise of suburbs and television, which contributed to a broader decline in civic participation. Just as bowling leagues and Kiwanis clubs suffered, so too did local party activity: In Pew’s surveys, the share of Americans who call themselves Democrats has fallen from a high of 51 percent in 1964 to 33 percent today. When Pew started collecting data in 1939, only 18 percent of respondents identified as independents; that number is now 35 percent.

Later, the launches of Craigslist (1995) and the Google search engine (1998) began crushing local and regional newspapers. Geographic and cultural “polarization” hardened Americans’ partisan identities, which meant that fewer and fewer local and state-level elections were competitive—and that less happened in Congress once the elections were over. Democrats, hoping to escape their reputation as “the party of big government,” stopped advocating for New Deal–style big-ticket social programs and embraced so-called submerged state policies—the kinds that are built around little-noticed tax incentives and the outsourcing of government functions to third parties. For elected Democrats, this is a time of both gridlock and caution: There is less actual governing to do than there used to be, and the governing that does get done is less tangible to voters than it once was.

But elections keep happening nevertheless. Sometimes they are largely symbolic competitions between abstract visions of what it means to be American; sometimes they are consequential referendums on whether insurance companies should be able to deny you coverage for brain cancer because you have mild asthma. Feelings about and interest in elections have rarely been higher—and technology has made it possible to conduct public opinion polls, test and target messages, and sort demographic data on a massive scale.

For campaign strategists, in other words, this is a golden age.

“It’s kind of remarkable how much consultants came out of the destruction of parties as a real organizing force in politics,” said Gregory Martin, a professor at Stanford University who studies the role of media and advertising in elections. “And how consultants have substituted for things that parties used to do.” Of the $16 billion spent on political campaigns in 2024, about half a billion went through the party’s national organization. The lion’s share of political spending, Martin has found, flows from campaigns (or super PACs) through their consultants to media firms that book TV advertising.

“The core work of what a party does—determining what the message is, what does the party stand for, what policies does it pursue, what are the public rationales it offers—all those things have been outsourced,” Martin said. There is still a party machine, of sorts, in that Democratic decisionmaking is disproportionately controlled by a certain group of powerful individuals, like the ones who were accused of putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helping cover up Joe Biden’s decline in 2024. But now those figures are part of a “blob” (that’s another Hollow Parties term) of consultants and fundraisers clustered on the coasts who have neither formal obligations to nor channels of communication with the vast majority of Democratic voters.

Consultants, in other words, have different interests than formal parties do. Their incentive is to find work every two years, then to receive and spend as much money as possible while employed. And they have an incentive to work for the campaigns that are most likely to win, because that helps them get their next job. “We showed that the consultants that are the most high reputation, the ones who command the highest rates and had the best track records, work mostly for safe incumbents,” Martin told me. “Which is the opposite of what you would get if the party was trying to allocate a resource and maximize for its own goals. There’s a lot of very safe incumbents spending a lot of money hiring high-profile, prestigious consultants to run their campaigns. And there’s a lot of uncompetitive races where candidates are running TV ads, which are very expensive and which happen to generate profits for consultants.”

This also means that strategy consulting is the best way to build a stable, well-compensated career in government. “If you want to do well in politics, you can make a lot more money in a consulting firm than working on a campaign or on a staff,” Martin said. (In a recent appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast, former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aide Saikat Chakrabarti described arriving in Congress and being invited to a seminar about how to get policy ideas from lobbyists—the implication being that congressional staffs are too small to do the work themselves.)

But reality encompasses long stretches of time between elections, during which conditions are shaped by factors besides reactions to message tests. Public opinion changes; opposing parties do things; “exogenous shocks” like pandemics and wars and market crashes occur. The party and its blob are finely tuned for outputting effective language about working across the aisle and protecting Social Security. They have proved much less adept at weighing competing short-term and long-term interests while responding to real-world events, protecting the party’s reputation and advancing its overall plan for improving the United States. There is no one left, really, whose job is to do that.

In 2002, as The Hollow Parties recounts, party leaders told Democrats at a “messaging retreat” that polling called for enthusiastic support of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. But as Hillary Clinton learned when her vote to authorize the Iraq war cost her the Democratic nomination in 2008, there is no reason to assume a correlation between a policy that tests well and one that works well. And even in an era of siloed information diets, reality does occasionally leak through to the electorate, even if it sometimes takes longer than one news cycle.

Democrats have long cultivated a penny-wise and pound-foolish relationship with public opinion data. For decades, the party’s presidents have gotten “tough” on the southern border by closing this or that loophole and ordering increased deportations—toughness polls well—without addressing the underlying situation: Roughly 700 immigration judges are somehow supposed to handle literally millions of asylum claims each year while the available legal pathways to citizenship remain narrow and convoluted. The border tends to stay chaotic, an issue for which voters blame Democrats.

In 2009 Democrats who wanted to project moderation and responsibility killed off major parts of Obama’s stimulus bill, which then failed to adequately stimulate the economy, leading (in part) to many of those members’ defeats in the 2010 midterms. (Obama’s advisers also counseled him against bailing out the auto industry—it polled poorly in Michigan—but he did it anyway, and it ended up being considered one of the keys to his 2012 reelection.) The same process repeated itself during Biden’s term, when centrist Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin vetoed the portions of the Build Back Better bill that would have benefited voters with young children and seniors who required in-home health care. The party settled instead for long-term investments in semiconductor manufacturing and green tech; those may be worthy initiatives, but polls showed that voters never ended up hearing about them.

Not all of the party’s elected officials act this way. The most important thing about working with a campaign strategist, a political operative I know told me recently, might be figuring out when to ignore your campaign strategist. Jay Inslee, now 74 and still doing climate change activism, served three terms as the governor of Washington and was elected to Congress eight times. During his career, he had a habit of staking out decisive positions that eventually became party consensus. In 1998 he won a swing district by making the risky decision to turn the race into a referendum on the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton. (Inslee argued that it had been a waste of time.) In 2017 he was among the first to protest Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

When I spoke to him, he didn’t seem to think there was much of a trick to it. “I’ve made some decisions just based on my gut,” he said, “feelings about what I believe America is about. When I heard about the Muslim ban, I literally turned the car around and drove to SeaTac Airport. You just can’t resist your impulse to stand up for basic American values, what you think the nation is about.

“I think there is also probably a spectrum of how much people are willing to tolerate risk,” he said. “And I think, on that spectrum, I’m also a person who has been willing to look at the longer term, to be confident in my ability to win the respect of my constituents—maybe not their agreement, but their respect.”

Inslee is not, he told me, against staying abreast of public opinion per se. “I think polling can be of assistance to any public official to say, ‘Look, you said X, but they heard Y, right?’ The language you’re using, making sure that you’re really communicating.” His style of data collection, though, is often more art than science. “I’m out talking to people and listening to them where they live. I’m in schools, listening to teachers and parents, I’m in homeless camps, listening to people. The office is not the place where you’re going to be able to read people’s feelings.”

The strategy guys who work out of fancy offices tend to have staying power, though, no matter how poor their advice on subjects other than campaigns turns out to be. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, ended his tenure as mayor of Chicago with an 18 percent approval rating and is now considering a run for president.

For this, the blame might extend beyond the world of politics. The U.S. is a country that rewards the clever, scalable, levered shortcut. Private equity, hedge funds, venture capital: For ambitious and high-functioning individuals, making morally disinterested, data-driven strategic decisions is the most obvious path to wealth and status.

It’s not uncommon, either, for those with this vocation to switch back and forth between finance and politics. (Consider how absurd it would seem today if a modern president spent his post–White House life, like Jimmy Carter did, helping build houses for poor families by hand—an intrinsically unscalable activity and a disastrously inefficient deployment of Carter’s human capital.) In addition to Emanuel, a part-time investment banker, a list of the most influential Democrats of the 21^st century would also include hedge fund managing partner/economic policy guru Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder, VC investor, and megadonor Reid Hoffman. (Sam Bankman-Fried was on his way too.)

But the shortsightedness of the campaign strategist’s approach to governing parallels the financial industry’s fixation on short-term results—a fixation that often creates long-term problems that end up erasing whatever gains were made in the first place.

In a new book called The Unaccountability Machine, author Dan Davies describes how companies like Wells Fargo and Boeing raised their earnings by, respectively, incentivizing low-level employees to open as many accounts as possible on “behalf” of customers and outsourcing major parts of the manufacturing process. Those decisions led directly to huge scandals and big losses. “It’s really easy for an organization to fool itself, like Wells Fargo, that what it’s doing is really clever, it’s increasing revenue per customer,” said Davies on the Complex Systems podcast to host and tech-world figure Patrick McKenzie, “when what it’s actually doing is building up a huge operational risk liability for itself five or 10 years down the line.” Every individual decision to cut costs is supported by data: This will increase earnings, which will make the stock go up, which is what companies are supposed to do, according to the theory of maximizing shareholder value. But the wrong series of individually justifiable “good” decisions can function as one very big bad decision.

To understand how this happens in politics, consider the kind of research conducted by David Shor, the former Obama staffer whose data research and ideas about “popularism” and (surprise!) breaking from orthodoxy on cultural issues have made him a favorite of Democratic electeds. In 2024, for instance, Shor’s firm Blue Rose Research conducted a survey of more than 9,000 voters who were given a range of rhetoric about the Kamala Harris campaign to evaluate. It found, for example, that saying “You may not always agree with me” and using the words grow, both, economists, and military tested well. The notion of lifting up and fighting for the middle class by working “across party lines” and with “leaders in both parties” also polled favorably. (The messages that tested worst involved former allies of Trump’s describing him as a threat to democracy.)

The survey is not ideologically biased—“taking on price gouging,” for example, is an idea more associated with the Democratic left than with the center. And you can see why it has appeal: It’s science, and it tells you exactly what to do. If you do what it says but still lose, hey, you did your best.

Still, this memo conveys only one type of data: how voters respond to a discrete set of messages after agreeing to take part in a survey for someone putting together a memo. There is a lot that’s not discussed in a document like this. For one, it can’t predict the cumulative effect of everyone in the Democratic Party using the same sanded-down phrases about “fighting for your family.” This, as Stanford’s Martin pointed out to me, is a classic tragedy of the commons, and it has caused a crisis in Democratic fundraising too: The party’s dominant mode of faux-personal email and text outreach might be empirically effective when used by one candidate, but not when used by all candidates, and its donors are getting fed up. Democrats, though they’ve done well to adapt their ’92-era messaging ideas to contemporary technology, still struggle with the “social” part of social media. (No one was making time at the watercooler to talk about Harris’ “opportunity economy.” Trump went viral on TikTok for economic promises he didn’t even make.)

Message testing can’t tell you how to handle contradictory or volatile voter beliefs—the public tends to say it supports both increased government spending and smaller government, for instance, and has shifted its position on whether there should be more or less immigration 10 times in the past 10 years. It can’t tell you, in the event that you enact a useful policy, how to make sure voters notice its effects and associate them with Democrats; conversely, it doesn’t tell you anything about the potential consequences of winning office and failing to follow through on something that you claimed, during your campaign, to support. Shor’s tests regularly find support for unambiguously liberal messages about taking on corporate special interests and raising taxes on the wealthy, but when Democrats actually hold power, this commitment somehow always ends up getting stuck to the bottom of the desk drawer.

And what about the messages that never get tested because no one has the gumption and ambition to propose them? To run on protecting Social Security and Medicare, after all, Democrats initially had to invent Social Security and Medicare—and they had to do it without having yet paid someone to run the numbers on whether voters would approve of protecting these programs. The closest the party has come to creating a new pillar of popular support in the past 30 years was passing the Affordable Care Act’s protection against denying insurance coverage to individuals with preexisting medical issues. At the time, Emanuel reportedly advised Barack Obama to abandon the ACA push in favor of smaller agenda items that would have been easier to build bipartisan consensus around.

Finally, let’s say that for years you’ve ignored subjects, like the confirmation of judges, that are statistically of little interest to low-engagement sections of the electorate. What if a Democratic policy that tests really well is frozen by an injunction issued by one of the right-wing activists that Republican presidents have, as a result, stuffed into the federal judiciary at disproportionate rates? And what happens to your campaign’s chances if you’ve let the opposition change the rules of elections in their favor so often that it’s not out of the question that they might decide to shut down elections for good?

Trying to solve every problem by figuring out the right way to talk about it is an approach with limitations that probably should be obvious. Elected Democrats and the donors that keep the party running are, nonetheless, quite captivated by it. Newly elected Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, for instance, invited Matt Yglesias—the “issue salience” guru whose writing was said to be widely circulated in the Biden administration—to a $5,000-a-head donor retreat he held in March at something called the L’Auberge de Sedona resort. (Yglesias told Rolling Stone he was not accepting a fee to speak at the event.) Sometimes, like in the case of Newsom and the almond farmer, the elected officials appear to have become confused about when they are supposed to be running the country and when they are supposed to be positioning themselves for their next 30-second advertisement. The costs can be significant.

Let’s imagine that Newsom had turned out to be right that the Abrego Garcia case was a loser for Democrats. He wasn’t—and, since then, he seems to have sharpened his thinking on taking a stand against immigration-related executive overreach—but just imagine. What if Democrats had stopped talking about Abrego Garcia and strategically backed away from supporting litigation in his case (and other similar cases)? Perhaps by refocusing the news cycle on the consequences of tariffs, they might have been able to knock 1 or 2 percent off Trump’s approval rating. What else might have happened?

Picture it: In the absence of controversy, voters begin to perceive extrajudicial, permanent deportations as unobjectionable, routine, and effective. (It’s not uncommon for a wide majority of voters to initially agree that a given news event constitutes a major scandal, only to drift toward a 50–50 partisan split on the issue over time. There’s a very big example of this, in fact, that we’ll get to shortly.) Judges take the retreat as a signal that the Democratic Party doesn’t support their independence and authority. So do other civil society institutions that are under attack, like universities and law firms, who cut deals with the administration rather than confronting them in court. It’s a vicious circle of rats abandoning ship. Is it worth 1 or 2 points in the polls 18 months before an election? Particularly when Democrats themselves are on the list of future targets for harassment? There is a famous poem about this that, in its way, is about long-term strategy!

In similar fashion, Yglesias recently suggested that Episcopal Church volunteers should help the Trump administration resettle white South Africans—who are being flown to the U.S. at the behest of the executive branch’s many racial science conspiracy theorists while other refugees are denied entry indefinitely—in order to avoid raising the salience of immigration as a national issue.

But if you play dead for an entire presidential term while everyone in the U.S. who isn’t considered sufficiently white gets thrown into the back of a van, can you simply flip a switch to transform the country back into the world’s model of liberal democracy and cosmopolitan prosperity? Bear in mind, if the past is any guide, Democratic candidates will say in 2026 and 2028 that they need to win legislative majorities in order to defend constitutional government. That’s a goal so important, apparently, that no tactic is off the table in its service—even choosing not to defend constitutional government. What, as they say, are we doing here?

As polling writer G. Elliott Morris recently pointed out, the truly savvy politician stakes out positions that align with public opinion before voters get there, which is what Inslee did with impeachment and what Obama, but not Hillary Clinton, did with Iraq. (Inslee actually also did it with Iraq.) Morris illustrates nicely, with doodle-y hand-drawn arrows, why Democrats interested in pandering to the 2028 presidential electorate should be thinking about the entire potential range of beliefs the public might hold on a given issue then, not the isolated number that describes the belief it holds now.

“The more you think long term, maybe you make some better decisions,” Inslee said. On immigration enforcement in particular, he said, “Trump has found some short-term ways it might be to his benefit, but as more and more soccer coaches and people in churches and people who work in retirement homes are shackled, you know, by masked officials and taken out of their communities, it’s not going to look so good, right?” The Democrats currently in Congress are not so sure.

This extends beyond matters of policy into what you might call the tilt of the playing field: Democrats recently lost voting leverage in the House of Representatives, for instance, because three elderly incumbents ran for reelection after being diagnosed with cancer, then won and died of cancer. Someone probably should have stopped them from doing that. During Biden’s term, the party failed to pass a bill protecting the vote-counting process and forbidding partisan gerrymandering because a decisive number of senators, concerned about their credentials as pragmatic moderates, felt that eliminating the filibuster to do so would be unpopular. Biden reportedly appointed centrist ex–Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland as attorney general because he felt that it would make for an admirable statement about Justice Department neutrality. Garland, in turn, refrained for two entire years from investigating Donald Trump’s role in Jan. 6 because he was allegedly worried about appearances.

Appearances and “optics” come up a lot in reporting about how Biden and Garland approached Jan. 6—much more so than questions about what kind of person should serve as the chief national law enforcement officer in the wake of an insurrection, or what approach to the leader of the insurrection would best serve the interests of national stability. Biden and Garland, in other words, both approached their jobs as if they were strategists rather than public officials. So did Nancy Pelosi, on the night of Jan. 6 itself, when she reportedly shut down an immediate effort to impeach Trump because she thought that a slower, bipartisan effort would appear more responsible. In the end, with no Democrat having been willing to take one for the team to get the job done, the Supreme Court—stocked with partisan right-wing justices because the Republican Party had defied public polling and done some hardheaded realism with its seats—stepped in to issue a ruling about presidential immunity that foreclosed the possibility that Trump, whose favorability had gradually returned to its previous level as Jan. 6 faded from mind, would face trial before the election.

Incredibly, this all led to Vice President Kamala Harris—the second-highest-ranking member of the team that had failed, in four years, to prosecute the person who’d tried to overturn the previous presidential election on live television—making a quote-unquote “closing argument” to voters about protecting democracy, at the site of Trump’s Jan. 6 rally. Vote for Democrats, she said, and they would do a thing or two about standing up for the rule of law. Maybe it tested well?

A number of earnest ideas have been proposed for what Democrats could spend time and money on, besides the usual, to improve their reputation and long-term outlook. Some of those include rebuilding local news, organizing local chapters around service projects or social events, and supporting the growth of labor unions. In Nevada, the late Sen. Harry Reid put time and money into drastically expanding the on-the-ground presence of his state’s Democratic Party organization, creating notable turnout advantages. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has touted “deep canvassing,” which is just a gross way of saying talking to regular people even when there’s not an election coming up. Some political scientists think there’s evidence that it can work to change minds—and the amount of shoe leather that Zohran Mamdani and his volunteers expended seems to have contributed to his surprise victory in the New York City mayoral primary.

A lot of these ideas are, in a way, the same idea: to raise the likelihood that someone encounters a Democrat in real life, while going about their day-to-day business as a human with friends, neighbors, and a family. As Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy put it in a recent interview with the Atlantic, the party needs to address the “spiritual crisis” of social isolation that has driven Americans toward right-wing politicians and influencers, except without the right-wing stuff.

Right now, though, it’s all just talk. Actually doing it would require, well, a Jimmy Carter kind of commitment to building one house at a time. “I think we can all name the politicians who are hungriest and thinking the most about this,” said Daniel Schlozman, one of the co-authors of The Hollow Parties, when I called to ask him about the Democrats’ future. “And what I would say is, to all of them, ‘What are you doing?’ That is: ‘Are you thinking about getting organizations up, or are you doing it?’ My sense of Chris Murphy is he has some sense that people should be making more connections,” he said. “But it’s not that he’s going around Connecticut and saying, ‘We’re having a Murphy Picnic on Sunday.’ It’s that he’s going on podcasts and talking about the idea of the picnic.” (In fairness, Murphy’s staff points out that in addition to working on national organizing efforts, he just spent four days walking across his state meeting people and is helping put together a summer basketball league in Hartford.)

Murphy critiques the center of the party from its left. On the flip side, there is moderate Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who recently sat for a long interview with the New York Times about the urgency of creating a new and presumably centrist Democratic “economic vision” in which she didn’t name a single specific idea for what such a vision would actually entail. It’s positioning-induced paralysis—being very clear on how you want to be perceived but not on what you need to do to get there.

As embarrassing as it sounds, to move forward, Democrats may need to look into their own hearts. “As far as shaping where I was from a policy standpoint, I didn’t find looking at polls terribly effective, because at least when I’ve run for public offices, it’s to try to make a difference, and that’s why I was doing it,” Inslee said. “If you don’t want to make a difference, why are you running? Let some other schmuck do it.” He also, for the record, feels that my take is a bit too cynical. “I think people would actually be surprised there’s more decisions made in Congress on what people believe is in the public interest than in venal self-interest,” he told me. “Many of those decisions are wrong. But!”

In the meantime, money continues to flow to consultants and strategists. The Times reported that a number of donors and operatives are putting together projects, some with anticipated budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, to fund and amplify influencers and podcasters—a belated top-down effort to adjust to the ways the national “narrative” is now created. (One of the people quoted in the article works for a super PAC, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, that Bankman-Fried allegedly used to circumvent campaign-finance laws.) On June 3, Politico reported that a well-connected operative named Adam Jentleson will be launching a “messaging hub” called Searchlight, which will advocate for the adoption of “popular positions.” Noted a perceptive anonymous source: “We already have a bunch of entities who do that.”

Ironically, what the party could probably use most is a version of Trump who works for good rather than evil: someone who is attentive to the public mood but has a permanent and easily communicated agenda, who gets people off their butts at the state and local level, and who uses leverage to enforce the advancement of long-term goals even when it is not in the immediate interest of their personal “optics.” (This could also be a group of people, in the strong-party tradition.)

What it might not need is more public opinion data and advice about how to find the sweet spot in the middle of it. If Democrats took a five-year sabbatical from polling and message testing, how much insight would the world really be deprived of? Everyone knows what polls say: Kitchen-table issues are good for Democrats, surges in crime and undocumented immigration are bad for Democrats, gender/race stuff is in the middle depending on what’s in the news, and it is always important to work across the aisle. One thing that seems to be forgotten by the crusading centrists citing current polls to decry the party’s 2018–20 leftward shift on race, immigration, and sexual identity issues, in fact, is that the polls were also shifting leftward at the time. In 2017 only one-fifth of the country believed that gender transitions constituted a “mental illness,” while the majority of Americans said that the country should do more to protect transgender rights and that they would welcome and support a friend who “came out” as trans. Picking a lane and sticking to it is the kind of thing that can prevent exuberant leftist excess too.

Public opinion can be fluid; a party that wants to succeed in the long term—and especially one that bears the burden, in a two-party system, of maintaining a functional country—needs to have priorities besides winning the next election. With these truths in mind, Democrats have a choice. They could put their heads together to make an educated guess about what the country might look like, think like, and need out of its government in 2028, then conduct themselves accordingly for the next three years. Or they could spend several hundred million dollars to find out again that the middle class likes the phrase “lift up the middle class.” Which do you think they’re more likely to choose?