How Should Democrats Moderate in 2026?

As Democrats struggle to rehabilitate their party, there has been an immense focus on which policies and stances alienated working-class voters of all backgrounds. Several post-election autopsies have concluded the party needs to “moderate,” or at the very least allow individual candidates to depart from the stances urged by “the Groups,” i.e., the party’s most influential lobbies and advocacy organizations. These stances, which are primarily but not solely sociocultural in nature, are increasingly recognized as having calcified a new orthodoxy inhospitable to voters who either disapprove of the current order of Democratic priorities or disagree with the priorities themselves.

What it means to moderate ahead of 2026, however, remains highly contentious and open to interpretation. There is also pushback to the notion that any form of moderation should happen at all. The prevailing tendency in this debate argues that the Democratic Party moved “too far to the left” in response to Trump and Trumpism. In this reading of the electorate, Democrats’ shrunken regional base, among other dire trends, has debunked the electoral merits of “check all the boxes” progressivism. Another perspective argues that, on the contrary, Biden-era Democrats failed to govern in a way that fully resonated with the voting blocs they depend on. Despite Biden’s legislative victories and various executive orders, the party remained too incrementalist in the policy realm and too deferential to Wall Street. To moderate, in turn, would simply mean compromising on core values and betraying the progressive base.

Still a third view offers that the party effectively did both of these things—move to the left and prop up the status quo—and that this is not so paradoxical once one differentiates between a pre-2015 left and the “woke” left, which penetrated the party’s upper ranks and coursed through party-adjacent organizations, philanthropies, and other culturally liberal institutions. This viewpoint further cautions that how “the left,” “populism,” “progressivism,” and “moderation” are defined in the present context, and how these concepts relate to and diverge from historical precedent, are of central importance to how the party moves forward. Rather than prescribe a one-size-fits-all comeback strategy, it recommends that Democrats field candidates who are a better match for their districts, can buck both party insiders and influential lobbies on a range of issues, and still advance (and perhaps even author) reforms that help working families and struggling communities.

A year from Kamala Harris’s defeat, some voices within the broader liberal-progressive ecosystem may think that debating what went wrong is flogging a dead horse. At its worst, skeptics of the protracted autopsy warn, this process encourages a circular firing squad when the focus should be squarely on resisting Trump’s abuse of power. But such debates are vital to stepping outside of the party’s still-potent echo chambers and understanding why millions of voters have either drifted into Trump’s orbit since 2020 or exited electoral politics and grassroots organizing altogether. Indeed, although historically high levels of polarization would seem to imply “stasis,” the party system has continued to evolve, all in ways that look to disadvantage Democrats unless there is a profound and fearless effort to build a more ideologically heterogeneous and regionally diverse coalition.

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The top goal of a vigorous, party-wide debate should be to produce more winning candidates who address voters’ pessimism head-on. Still, party reformers will run into trouble if the main takeaways are too sweeping or simplistic. Let’s start with the case that the Democratic Party moved too far to the left, which for many is now synonymous with “wokeness.” The argument that “the left” is responsible for the party’s current orthodoxy and its concomitant loss of working-class voters is typically presented as an open-and-shut story of a hyper-online activist class dethroning moderate liberals and torpedoing the party’s odds outside major coastal metros and university hubs. Recent demographic trends in favor of Trump’s GOP, in some cases dramatically shrinking long-presumed Democratic advantages, confirm what many believe to be self-evident. Yet this is also a story of one left superseding, or at least subordinating, another.

It is true, for instance, that “social justice” activists and professional advocates (meaning those employed by nonprofits, NGOs, and the like) put enormous pressure on the party establishment to “resist” Trump by taking stances diametrically opposed to his. There was also a significant effort between roughly 2015 and 2023 to expand existing party commitments on the sociocultural front and innovate policy demands that were supposed to play to the Democrats’ advantage by engaging “underrepresented” constituencies. The premise was that Democrats had not sufficiently mobilized the constituencies that composed their modern, post-1960s base, and that they weren’t attending urgently to the concerns of millennials and Gen Z, who were widely reported to be the most culturally liberal and climate-conscious voting bloc ever.

In practice, these two approaches meant taking stances on immigration, gender identity, DEI, criminal justice, and climate change that were not the Democratic Party’s main focus prior to this period. With the partial exception of climate policy, these issues did not greatly reflect the goals of the party’s traditional left flank either, which were oriented to reducing inequality and financial predation, reviving the labor movement, providing all Americans with genuinely good and affordable health care, curbing money in politics, and ending foreign wars and military adventurism.

Nevertheless, this more “populist” left assumed it was in common cause with the identity-based “neo-progressive” left. MAGA, the congressional GOP’s dominant “starve the beast” small-government wing, and a complacent Democratic elite all stood in the way of overdue reform. With activist-influencers calling for total #Resistance and Trump courting white nationalists, it seemed only just and necessary to amplify the party’s ascendant activist wing, whose demands were framed as a direct continuation of the civil rights struggle and the new social movements of the 1970s. Notwithstanding some accusations that the “Bernie Bros” didn’t get it, this claim was largely taken at face value, even as the new orthodoxy increasingly appeared to open up new electoral cleavages that frayed, rather than grew, the Democratic coalition.

One might think that Trump’s 2024 victory viscerally negated the theory that a “woke”-ified left would realign the Democratic Party in a productive manner and actually capitalize on a “rising American electorate” long forecast as naturally pro-Democratic. Yet Trump’s first year back in office—by some measures much more jarring, transgressive, and extrajudicial than his first term—has compelled many on the party’s left flank to close ranks rather than admit error. As such, progressives still harbor the fantasy that it was Biden’s frail condition, his scaled-back domestic agenda, and Harris’s insipid and “centrist” general election campaign, not the real-life policy impacts of neo-progressivism, that contributed to Trump’s return.

The problem with this narrow “blame the party elites” approach, however, is that by the 2022 midterms, the public was well aware of what the neo-progressives stood for—and wasn’t responding in the way the neo-progressives had hoped. After years of moving in a more liberal direction on cultural and social issues, the broader electorate demurred when it came to the priorities the Democratic leadership had been pressed to put front and center. And it would be fallacious to say the majority of Democrats in office didn’t, in fact, oblige the advocacy groups who had merged with and partly overtaken the old establishment. Indeed, far from staying mum or ruthlessly “triangulating” to win the average voter who had been pummeled by inflation and felt Democrats were off-track culturally, Democrats leaned hard on the message that democracy, diversity, and the climate were all at stake—to no avail.

A more grounded variant of the “Democrats didn’t do enough” or were “too compromising” argument is that Democrats in the 2021-2022 period pursued a reformist economic agenda that was, rather maddeningly, lackluster considering the amount of legislation and federal spending involved. Left-populist critics of the Biden record note, for instance, that Covid-related anti-poverty measures like the expanded Child Tax Credit were temporary; that the party was slow to address the cost-of-living crisis; that, aside from a couple of targeted corporate levies, the Biden administration didn’t raise taxes on the wealthy (as Presidents Clinton and Obama had done); that the rollout of several industrial policies and infrastructure investments was excruciatingly slow; and that, amid a phenomenal surge in wealth at the top, efforts to improve wages, collective bargaining, and consumer protection were checkered at best.

These and other shortcomings have since been acknowledged by several Biden appointees and advisors, including in a new report by the Roosevelt Institute. As that report aptly notes, “democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent.” Still, the argument that Democrats simply fell short in delivering bold, lasting reform dodges the negative consequences of the party’s cultural leftism. It assumes that economic interventions of a more populist nature are all that it will take to reverse the party’s Trump-era losses (and perhaps convert some of those millions of eligible voters who have essentially said no to “all of the above” throughout these unprecedented times). That outlook—which may soon be bolstered by praise of the “Mamdani model”—simply disregards that Trump’s 2024 victory improved over his 2020 performance in nearly 2,800 counties, including in normally deep-blue regions.

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This leaves the third theory of party decline and renewal, which argues that Democrats need to finally reckon with their cultural baggage and delineate more convincingly which fights they will pick on behalf of workers, consumers, and small businesses. At the risk of being called heretics, proponents are nudging forth the verdict that the distinctions between pre-woke liberal populism and pious neo-progressivism need to be reclaimed if the party is to have more than a prayer in swing districts and red states such as Ohio, Iowa, Montana, and North Carolina that were once receptive to populist-leaning Democrats. Otherwise, they warn, Democrats are doomed to watch the Trump White House and a MAGA-fied GOP ride roughshod over democratic norms and violate the country’s separation of powers.

There are signs this perspective is getting a hearing across the Democratic coalition. In “Deciding to Win,” a new report from the Welcome Party organization, its authors observe:

Being moderate means taking popular positions on issues that are important to voters and being willing to break with one’s party on issues where the party orthodoxy is unpopular.

Being moderate does not mean running on a defense of the political establishment, elites, corporate interests, or the status quo. It also does not mean having a mild-mannered temperament or taking the centrist position on every issue.

These are important points, but pragmatic left-populists would argue there are additional distinctions to be made if moderation in 2026 is to not convey wimpiness and incrementalism. One is that moderation today should not be conflated with the technocratic “centrism” of the 1990s and 2000s, which connoted a very fixed set of establishment-friendly opinions on taxes, the deficit, social programs, trade, industrial policy, and antitrust that, while perhaps initially appealing to suburban swing voters, was impervious to changing economic conditions and shifts in public opinion, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis. A return to this centrism, which reigned for a time as the Democratic Party’s post-Reagan orthodoxy, would be ill-equipped to deal with the causes of Trump’s rise and comeback. Moderation heading into the 2026 midterms would mean something different: recalibrating or breaking from the post-2015 orthodoxy, while drilling down on the measures that would most immediately improve the economic well-being of burdened Americans and offer a positive contrast to the GOP’s record.

The other distinction left-populists are trying to work out, which needs to be refined further, is that moderation in a sociocultural sense is not inherently a cowardly surrender to the MAGA worldview. It is not a recommendation to wind back the clock to some fictional standard of public morality, social conformity, and monoculturalism, as dreamt up by right-wing nostalgists. Rather, it is an admonition to recognize what has been hiding in plain sight but which most progressive commentators find so hard to accept. Trump’s electoral success has been powered in part by converting voters who, by the standards of pre-2015 progressivism, were moderate to fairly liberal. In other words, they weren’t (and aren’t) vehement nativists, hostile to gay rights, militantly anti-abortion, indifferent to environmental protection, or dismissive of concerns about police brutality. They grew averse to the Democrats, however, the more the new orthodoxy (with its insinuations about how backward the average, non-college-educated American is) gained currency within the party’s highest echelons.

This phenomenon might seem distasteful or incomprehensible. Democrats groan, “How could these so-called moderate voters possibly give the amoral, white-supremacist-coddling, and self-aggrandizing Trump the benefit of the doubt?” It would nevertheless be futile to refute the ways in which it has transformed our politics. The breadth of Trump’s 2024 coalition, the increasing scale of the Democrats’ regional polarization penalty, and the association of progressivism with a “woke” left-establishment axis (rather than with the common good and safeguarding the American dream)—these challenges all suggest the rise of the “moderate” Trump voter is one Democrats must first accept if they are to arrest the MAGA realignment.

How insurgents and reform-minded leaders court such voters will probably determine Democratic fortunes in 2026 and 2028 more than anything else. Indeed, barring a Covid-style crisis or a dramatic downturn equal to the Great Recession, the Democrats’ political reinvention will hinge on whether they demonstrate an unflinching drive to treat disaffected independents, partisan defectors, and yes, even unrepentant working-class Trump voters as normal people with legitimate concerns.

Still, Democrats must be careful not to replace one orthodoxy with another—nor act as if there is only one script to reach what remains a fairly vast, if dejected, political middle. As Democrats contemplate what it means to be “populist,” “progressive,” or “moderate” at this anxious juncture, they will do best by remembering their greatest triumphs have always reflected the dreams and aspirations of ordinary Americans.