The Big Tent is Overrated

It depends on who’s running the tent.

Democrats are famously in very poor shape these days. Despite the unpopularity of many of Donald Trump’s specific moves, Democrats’ popularity has not been rising. Indeed, in many polls it is mired at historic lows. Democrats’ lead in the generic congressional ballot for 2026 is alarmingly modest and the situation in the Senate is dire. And no, the Democrats’ strong showing in the idiosyncratic 2025 elections, boosted by favorable terrain, disapproval of the incumbent Trump administration, and their now-traditional advantage in lower turnout elections where their educated, engaged supporters flock to the polls, does not change these fundamental problems.

The Democrats’ current woes come on top of their decisive defeat in the 2024 election and the restoration of their nemesis, Trump, to power. Democrats as a result are at their wits’ end. They know they need to do something…but what? Many in the party want to fight, fight, fight. Hence the government shutdown and the unending stream of denunciations of each and every move Trump makes. But logically such truculence will do—and has done—nothing to change the party’s toxic image among wide sectors of working class and red-state voters the party desperately needs to turn around their electoral fortunes.

For such voters, the Democrats are out-of-step with their preferences on everything from crime and immigration to trans issues to patriotism and even the economy. They neither like nor trust the Democrats and, not without reason, feel Democrats view anyone who doesn’t share their priorities and blanket opposition to Trump as a hopeless reactionary if not an enabler of fascism. In short, they believe Democrats look down on them as the “deplorables” who must be “educated” by their betters to see the world correctly.

This doesn’t play well with these voters and why should it? Even if they are dissatisfied with Trump in some ways, they will naturally be reluctant to sign up with a party they perceive as denigrating them and their values. This reality has not escaped the notice of all Democrats; electorally realistic centrists and even some liberals have realized that the Democrats’ cause is fatally undermined in many areas of the country by this perception. The solution they seem to be gravitating toward is “the big tent.”

The theory here is that the Democrats’ problems stem not from the overall or dominant views within the party but rather from a lack of tolerance for those who dissent from party orthodoxy. To run successfully in more conservative districts and states, Democratic candidates must be able to adopt positions that fit these areas better without being read the riot act by their fellow Democrats.

At the margin, that would certainly be helpful. But would that really solve the fundamental image problem that bedevils the Democrats? We live in an era where politics is highly nationalized and voters’ views of local candidates are heavily influenced by these voters’ views of the party those candidates are affiliated with. Hence the decline of split ticket voting and the very high correlation between the partisan vote for president in a state/district and that for every other federal office. Candidates have a very hard time escaping the gravitational pull of their own national party.

This dramatically undercuts the payoff from a “big tent” approach. A Democrat in a conservative area can deviate from the party orthodoxy on, say, trans issues but—even if local Democratic activists and progressive commentators grit their teeth and don’t attack that candidate (difficult!)—voters in that area still see the D by the candidate’s name. They know the candidate’s party still thinks that transwomen are women, that biological boys should be able to play girls sports, that “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children are a great idea and should be easily available and that to question these ideas is to be on the wrong side of history itself.

In other words, voters will still know who’s running the tent even if Democrats let a few of the heterodox inside. This is especially the case since the welcoming mat for dissenters in the party has been mostly rolled out for progressive left heroes like Zohran Mamdani, the newly-elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, whose unorthodox positions on economic issues are forgiven, even as his profile on social and cultural issues simply deepens the problems with the party’s national image. The tent opens on the left, much less so on the right.

There’s a nice illustration of this in the recent Ezra Klein interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Klein has been beating the drums for the big tent approach. He ventures the following to Coates, in the process of trying to desperately convince him of the political necessity of Democratic big tent politics:

[A] huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong…what politically…should our relationship with those people be?

Unsurprisingly, Coates doesn’t take this and the many other hints dropped by Klein about reaching those who dissent from liberal orthodoxy. As far as Coates is concerned all these people are on the other side of a line that must be drawn between those with the correct views and those who lack them: “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible,” he remarks.

But even more interesting is how Klein frames the question: those who don’t share his (and Coates’ and the general Democratic) view on trans issues are “fundamentally and morally wrong”. This language by Klein makes it clear that his idea of the big tent is that some Democrats, especially candidates running in more conservative areas, should be permitted to have wrong, immoral positions on various issues so as to entice the benighted voters in those areas to vote for Democrats—or, as Matt Yglesias has put it, to allow “bigots in the tent.” But the positions of the party on those issues will and should remain the same. You can come into the tent but the left will still be running the show.

This won’t work and, no, talking about the affordability crisis and the cost-of-living will not induce these voters to forget what the party actually stands for. Instead, advocates for a big tent need to face the facts: the party’s many unpopular and unworkable positions have to genuinely change to reach the voters they want to reach. Otherwise, holding their nose and letting a few candidates deviate from party orthodoxy will have little effect.

Another example: immigration. Democrats have had little to say about Trump’s successful efforts to close the southern border but much to say about his deportation efforts which are viewed as, well, wrong and immoral. That doesn’t add up to a change in party position, as Josh Barro points out:

To start to win back voters’ trust, the party must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure, and commit credibly to better enforcement—not only by preventing illegal border crossings and closing the loopholes in the asylum system, but also by enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country, by deporting people who weren’t supposed to come here during Biden’s term…If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.

And of course that’s exactly what’s happening. The Democrats do indeed seem like the anti-enforcement party that doesn’t want to deport anybody. That image means that a Democrat running in a conservative area can try to carve out a tough-on-illegal-immigration profile but—even assuming the activists leave him or her alone—the party’s overall stance on immigration enforcement will mostly negate any benefit from the candidate’s heterodox position.

One more example: climate. Trump has blown up the Democrats’ climate program by canceling or cutting back much of the IRA with remarkably little public protest. Democrats are starting to realize their net-zero, Green New Deal-type plans are out of step with both the physical realities of America’s thirst for energy in the age of AI and what American voters actually want from their energy system—chiefly low costs and high reliability. Their grand plans just didn’t and don’t have much support, outside of professional class liberals and climate NGOs. A recent Politico article reported on the vibe shift:

“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”

It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power—an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration—finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support.

But if a Democratic candidate running in a conservative area responded to this vibe shift by saying that climate change is a problem, not an immediate crisis, that net zero is not practical as a near-term goal, and that fossil fuels will be in the energy mix for a very long time that would run smack dab into the overarching Democratic commitment to large-scale action on climate change. So even if the climate NGOs and activists left such a candidate alone, the candidate would still be linked to a party that sees his or her views as fundamentally wrong and immoral, fit only to be retailed among the rubes in flyover country.

There’s no way around it. The big tent is less important than who’s running the tent. Until and unless overall Democratic positions change and voters are convinced sensible people are in charge of the tent, a few more heterodox Democrats running in conservative areas will do little to change the party’s trajectory.

Editor’s note: This is a longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is a contributing writer.