Could Obama Win a Democratic Primary Today?

On the future of centrist heterodoxy in the party.

Picture a candidate running for elected office who fits this description:

• He believes marriage should be between one man and one woman;

• He criticizes the incumbent president for being too soft on illegal immigration;

• He proudly touts America’s relationship with Israel in a speech to AIPAC, the country’s top pro-Israel lobbying group;

• He supports limits on abortion, calling it a “moral” issue, and inserts language into his party’s platform expressing support for reducing the frequency of abortion;

• He expresses support for the death penalty;

• He believes that black Americans should take more responsibility in their families and their own lives;

• He also appears to favor class-based affirmative action over race-based affirmative action;

• Many of his supporters take a “colorblind” view of race, which he affirms.

Many people likely read that description and concluded the candidate in question was a conservative Republican. However, as the title of this piece likely gave away, every one of these items describes Barack Obama in his first campaign for the presidency.¹

In fact, Obama was far from the only Democrat who had such views at the time. Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage as well and was widely considered a hawk on immigration and foreign policy issues. Democrats also represented several conservative-leaning House districts and Senate seats around this time, and those elected officials often shared the cultural attitudes of their voters.

This may surprise some people in both parties, but it’s a sign of just how much things have changed in American politics since 2008. Over the course of our project, TLP has spent considerable time analyzing Democrats’ evolution, both demographically and ideologically. Since that presidential election, they have lost much of their long-faithful working-class base, which was more culturally moderate-to-conservative, and replaced it with affluent, college-educated, knowledge-economy workers who are far more culturally left-wing. According to Gallup’s latest polling, fully 59 percent of Democrats now call themselves “liberal,”² a historic high in their data that is up from just 35 percent 20 years ago.

We have also documented how the Democrats’ evolution from a center-left party to a decidedly “left” one has influenced candidates as well. For example, there is evidence that voters have become increasingly less keen on centrist candidates with more “heterodox” views, even sometimes those running in harder-to-win places. Instead, a large majority now says that a candidate must be a “true progressive” for them to get excited.

Some Democrats might object: “The world has evolved, and we expect our politicians to keep up. Even Obama and Clinton are both now pro-gay marriage and more race-conscious than they were in 2008. The party also must adapt to the shifting attitudes of their voters, who have become more diverse and subsequently more liberal.”

This is of course (somewhat) true.³ It’s reasonable to expect that Democratic leaders would move with their base as the world evolves—especially in their direction on issues like gay marriage and abortion—and, perhaps most importantly, as Donald Trump has come into the picture and shattered both parties’ longstanding coalitions. But these demographic and ideological changes have also created real, potentially long-term vulnerabilities for Democrats at the national level.

The reality, as we have long warned, is that the U.S. is a center-right country. As the Democratic base has shifted left and become more reliant on college-educated voters, it has moved further away from the median American on multiple fronts. This, combined with a growing skepticism toward candidates who take more measured approaches or occasionally buck party orthodoxy, risks jeopardizing the Democrats’ ability to build a coalition capable of consistently competing for the Senate and Electoral College, specifically, where they will need some support from voters who may be to their right on contentious issues.

In 2008, Democratic voters were clearly willing to give their candidates breathing room on such issues. This was likely due in part to the fact that a majority of primary voters back then identified either as moderate or conservative. On some hotly debated topics, such as gay marriage, even those voters were not yet on board. Aside from the Iraq War, there were very few litmus tests placed on the party’s candidates. Democrats that year not only won a robust Electoral College victory but huge majorities in Congress, too.

It seems less likely, though, that today’s Democratic primary electorate is prepared to be as ideologically flexible as the one that helped elect Obama two decades ago. And this begs an interesting question: could a candidate like Obama or Clinton, who spurns some party shibboleths on thorny topics or even picks occasional fights with the base, win the Democratic nomination for president today?

One prospective candidate likely to test this question in 2028 is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has started leaning into his support for Israel. Being pro-Israel has long been a safe bet for candidates of both parties. However, following the country’s war with Hamas and a new one with Iran, its image has cratered among Democrats.

In light of this, many Democratic pols have come to see ties to or support for Israel as a liability, as evidenced by the growing number eschewing campaign contributions from AIPAC. Can Shapiro can cross the party’s base on Israel in today’s environment and still have a chance to win its nomination?

One candidate to watch this cycle is Congressman Seth Moulton, who has launched a primary challenge to Senator Ed Markey this year in deep-blue Massachusetts. Shortly after the 2024 election, Moulton argued that his party should rethink its commitment to certain positions that had proven unpopular with the broader public—specifically, allowing individuals who were born male but identify as female to participate in women’s sports. Not only is this an unpopular policy with the broader public (79 percent oppose), but even two-thirds of Democrats (67 percent) oppose it.

Yet, the response to Moulton’s contention among local Democratic and progressive organizations wasn’t curiosity or even debate—it was to immediately threaten a primary challenge. And although he is not seeking re-election to the House, his past expressed position could prove to be a liability in his Senate campaign. This is notable because, this issue notwithstanding, Moulton is mostly a standard Democrat. He is near the ideological center of the House Democratic caucus, and he only votes with Trump 11.3 percent of the time in Congress.⁴ He has spoken elsewhere very strongly in support of LGBT Americans.

The harsh reality for Moulton is that Democratic voters don’t appear willing to let their candidates step out of line in any way on the subject—even when doing so would align them with broader public opinion. This represents a stark contrast with 2008 when Obama received overwhelming support from Democratic base voters, even as the latter overwhelmingly supported gay marriage, the hot-button issue of the day. Of course, Massachusetts voters are not representative of the national electorate, but the animus toward Moulton may be a sign of how much things have changed.

Perhaps the ultimate test of whether centrist heterodoxy is a liability for Democrats will come from another potential 2028 candidate: Gavin Newsom. Last year, he made a point of engaging with high-profile conservatives on his podcast, including figures like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and Ben Shapiro, which irked some Democrats. During his conversation with Kirk, he also remarked that he opposed using public funds for gender transition surgeries for inmates (the subject of an infamous 2024 attack ad against Kamala Harris) and called ending sex-segregated sports “deeply unfair.”

Despite adopting positions that some Democrats might find offensive, Newsom is currently running in second place behind only Harris. However, it’s entirely possible that these past positions will come back to bite him in an actual primary campaign.⁵

It’s worth noting that some Democrats running in more conservative-leaning places are still granted a little latitude to stray from the party. For instance, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, congressmen representing South Texas House districts, were the only two Democrats to vote for the GOP’s bill to keep school athletic programs segregated by sex. Both won their primary elections earlier this month in districts where voters are overwhelmingly working-class and Hispanic—and thus more likely to be more socially moderate or even conservative themselves.

TLP’s friends at The Welcome Party and The Bench have also worked to identify and support candidates running in redder districts who break the mold of a contemporary Democrat. In his campaign launch for Texas’s 15th District, Bobby Pulido endorsed tougher restrictions on illegal immigration. He also proudly touts the fact that he is a gun enthusiast. Pulido hopes his “Blue Dog” positions can help him win a district that Trump carried by 18 points.

These are great opportunities for the party to try to expand its coalition. At the presidential level, though, it’s just not clear that Democratic candidates have this flexibility the way they once did.

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Our crew sometimes jokes that candidates who fit the TLP mold would win one percent in a Democratic primary but 51 percent in a general election. I think this short-changes us, but it does offer an important critique of how the party has changed. We consider figures like Obama to be liberal patriots: people who have an optimistic vision for the country and who want to help everyone find their place in it, while also being willing to meet people where they are, embrace ideological pluralism, find room for compromise, and sometimes even call out the excesses of their own side.

Candidates like this are likely to find fans across the political spectrum and command majority support, as Obama did. Whether they can succeed in today’s Democratic Party, however, is less clear.⁶ Can the base tolerate someone who is with them on 90 to 95 percent of the issues but splits from them on a handful of contentious ones? A more ideologically homogenous coalition may well believe it can demand that candidates toe the line, down the line, which could present unnecessary risks with a national electorate.

It’s our hope that Obama-like candidates can begin rising to the top again and remind Democrats of the wisdom of his approach to politics, especially the necessity of compromise. As the former president once told a group of graduating college students, “Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.”

Wise words. Will his party heed his advice?

1. To be clear, several of his positions were more nuanced. For example, he did support same-sex civil unions, and he was broadly pro-choice.

2. I put quotations around “liberal” because there is considerable disagreement over what the term even means today. TLP has our own clear definition that overlaps with—but is also meaningfully distinct from—more contemporary definitions.

3. It is actually the case that the party’s leftward shift has been driven not by racial minorities but college-educated white voters.

4. Fully 90 of his fellow Democrats vote with the president more frequently, including, notably, his transgender colleague Sarah McBride.

5. And, of course, Newsom has plenty of other vulnerabilities that could hurt him beyond just some of these positions.

6. To be fair, it’s also unclear whether candidates like this can succeed in the Republican Party either.