Facing Up to Our Face Plant

How Democrats can stay focused amidst Trump's chaos and authoritarianism

Nobody voted for this. Not the Putin pivot, the DOGE chainsaw, the constant lying, grifting, threatening, nor the deep incompetence. Which makes it even more urgent for Democrats to face up to our electoral faceplant. For the first time in decades, more American voters now identify as Republican. In battleground states, Democrats earn a dismal 35% approval rating for economic leadership. Voters see the party that once championed working families as out of touch with their concerns.

As Democrats, our immune system often confuses a wake-up call with a political attack. We defend the status quo rather than acknowledge mistakes. We blame Republican chaos instead of recognizing our own failed policies. We lean on familiar institutions instead of admitting they are broken and fixing them.

Dems must acknowledge our failures, refocus our priorities, and post tangible results. A glance at the current scorecard illustrates why.

• We passed $42 billion in broadband funding—and have yet to connect anyone.

• We passed infrastructure projects that remain stuck in endless delays due to administrative and environmental processes that we created.

• Our housing initiatives are routinely scaled back or gutted by progressive bureaucratic vetoes.

• Clean energy projects now move faster in red states than blue ones.

This is a failure of execution, not of ambition. It reflects our obsession with process over progress. It illustrates our willingness to let the mechanics of governance destroy our momentum and blur our focus. These failures have made our biggest cities unaffordable and sometimes unlivable. Voters can’t trust us to get things done.

Republicans aren’t winning because their policies are popular. Nobody voted for casual DOGE vandalism or Trump’s embrace of venomous oligarchs. He never campaigned on these ideas. Republicans are winning because Democrats aren’t delivering on issues voters care most about: stable prices, cracking down on illegal immigration, and ending mindless DEI. So many voters without a college degree and nonwhite voters backed Trump that Kamala Harris received 6 million fewer votes in 2024 than Joe Biden did in 2020. This 7.5% drop cost us the election.

The Lessons of 1991

We’ve seen this before. In 1991, Democrats were deeply depressed. George Bush had attacked Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait, and his quick military victory sent his approval ratings to 90% – the highest in modern history. Political observers agreed that Saddam Hussein had handed Bush four more years. In 1992, he would be untouchable.

Democrats were in a foul mood because we had lost the past three presidential elections. But Bush seemed so unbeatable that leading Democrats like Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, and Al Gore declined to run. Three second-stringers entered the primary: a backbench ex-Massachusetts Senator named Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, the New Age governor of California, and Bill Clinton, the brilliant but inexperienced Arkansas governor who was best known for his alleged marital infidelity and draft dodging.

It looked terrible — then Clinton made it look worse. He declared his intention to reshape the party’s electoral strategy and approach to governance. His “Third Way” politics tossed out liberal orthodoxy to appeal to a broader coalition of voters. Clinton embraced market-friendly policies, free trade, more police, and fiscal conservatism. Progressives hated every single bit of it. Nonetheless, Clinton insisted that elections are won between the forty-five yard lines and refused to be dragged from mid-field. The economy got worse, his campaign got better, and in November 1992, voters elected him to the presidency.

In office, Clinton continued to defy his progressive critics but was brilliant at appealing to their shared values. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over the fierce objection of labor unions. 1993 he spoke to my Bay Area labor brethren at the AFL-CIO convention. Thousands protested NAFTA and brought downtown San Francisco to a standstill. Newly appointed to Clinton’s team, I was onstage as he spoke to a very hostile crowd. Soon enough, he silenced the heckling protesters who carried signs denouncing him. After five minutes, a few in the crowd began to applaud. After ten minutes, they started cheering, often shaking their heads at Clinton’s raw political talent. By the end of his talk, the convention was on its feet, thunderously pounding the floor with the sticks that held their protest signs. (I loved it in part because I had drafted Clinton’s speech. Then I realized he wasn’t using much of it.)

Clinton demonstrated that a Democrat could win the White House by appealing to moderates, suburban voters, and even some conservatives. Barack Obama and Joe Biden both took note. Like Clinton, they eventually learned to defy progressives who denounced their centrist policies as a betrayal of core Democratic values.¹

Spark Joy: Clear Out the Junk

Democrats need to get in touch with our inner Marie Kondo. We need to clear out the junk that’s not helping. The first thing to toss is our knee-jerk opposition to every single thing Trump does. A strict “resistance” approach will lead Democrats to spend four years reacting to every outrageous thing the orange autocrat says. He will control us — and we will exhaust ourselves and everyone around us. Voters know exactly what kind of slimeball Trump is, and their frustration was high enough that they voted for him anyway. Rehashing this will not change minds.

We must acknowledge that many progressive policies have failed, especially in big cities. If we want to reclaim the House in 2026, we must admit this and demonstrate that we’re the party of the middle class and can get things done. We need to do this now, not next year.

Democrats have always supported causes that most voters do not share. That’s fine. We should not marginalize trans, refugee, or homeless citizens. However, we must lead with issues that help us build a bigger tent while developing a sharp contrast with Trump. Here are the top five:

1. Stop illegal immigration. By downplaying the immigration crisis and asylum scamming at the southern border, Democrats opened the door for GOP leaders to weaponize it. With the important exception of Denmark, most EU leaders made the same mistake.² This has allowed Trump to try to revoke birthright citizenship, offer oligarchs $5 million “gold cards”, build mass deportation centers in Texas, and use Elon’s unauthorized access to IRS records to target anyone with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).³ None of this has widespread support.

Democrats need to fight mass deportations by supporting border security and selective deportations. Deport those convicted of theft, assault, and related serious crimes. Deport failed asylum-seekers and expedited removal cases as Obama, Biden, and every other president does. At the same time, Dems need to press for a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants and Dreamers. These are positions that most Americans support. Democrat Senators Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman backed the Laken Riley Act, which requires the detention of undocumented immigrants convicted of theft-related crimes. It’s not perfect legislation but solid majoritarian policy and smart politics.

2. Economy, Stupid. Democrats botched our 2024 messaging by telling people struggling to buy groceries that our economic indicators look good. We need to protect them from the financial chaos that Trump’s policies will bring.

• Oppose broad tariffs. Democrats like tariffs because we have many well-intentioned but badly formed ideas about protecting midwestern manufacturing workers from a China shock. However, Trump’s massive tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will drive up American prices and penalize exporters by making the dollar more expensive. While broad tariffs are a terrible idea, targeted ones can be effective and are necessary for items related to national security.

• Oppose Trump’s tax cuts. Trump wants to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent and add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. Democrats must emphasize that bigger deficits mean higher costs now, to say nothing of massive debt for future generations. And that he is sneaking deep cuts to Medicaid into his budget.

• Cut overhead and ineffective programs. Cutting government waste is a progressive project! Bill Clinton should have created DOGE to eliminate the least effective programs and reduce administrative overhead by two percent yearly. Every large organization can profitably do this, partly because there is otherwise no reason to replace marginally effective programs or staff. Our goal should be effectiveness and efficiency: we need to force every public organization to continually simplify programs and streamline work.

• Support cheap energy. Democrats should advocate for lower energy costs. Cheaper energy increases living standards. It is green, because renewables are almost always cheaper. I argued previously that Democrats should end EV subsidies for upper-middle-class households, drill if it yields cheap oil, frack if it yields cheap gas, and build solar or wind if they are cheaper, as they usually are. Restart Three Mile Island if it produces cheap power.

3. Build Blue Housing. In 2027, Democrats should nominate for president any governor who builds 200,000 new housing units. Housing is a big, partially hidden barrier to economic opportunity.

We need to build enough housing in blue cities to let Americans move again. In his breakthrough book, Stuck, Yoni Applebaum documents the horrible cost of strict zoning and environmental rules in high-productivity blue cities. His research concludes “The drastic decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half-century, and perhaps the least remarked.” Families notice this. More people have left California than have moved here every year for twenty-five years.

He shows that Americans once moved every three years. By the 1950s, it was every five years. Now it is every thirteen – and even lower among low-income families. These differences are not explainable by greater wealth, an older population, or more two-earner families.

The housing crisis shows up in worsened quality of life. We spend more time commuting – almost thirty minutes each way; one in ten of us spends more than an hour. The lack of housing has jacked up home prices by more than 60 percent over the past decade to an average of about half a million dollars. The crisis shows up in rents that are too damned high; half of renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing and a quarter spend more than 50 percent. And it shows up as homelessness. In Germany, East Germans are especially stuck and unable to move. So they vote fascist in very large numbers.

4. Healthcare and Reproductive Rights. Despite his bluster and BS about “replacing” the Affordable Care Act, Trump knows that Obamacare is too popular to wipe out. More than 60% of Americans approve of it. Democrats should defend it and advocate an important addition: catastrophe insurance that protects every family from medical bankruptcy. There are many ways to structure this, but national insurance (probably Medicare) would pick up all health care costs above some share of an individual’s annual income. It is not especially expensive because it protects against low-probability, high-severity economic losses, as good insurance is meant to do. It is also popular with insurance companies because it caps their risk and lets them profitably reduce premiums.

On reproductive rights, Democrats should stay on offense. The majority of Americans support abortion rights in the first trimester. We should propose a federal law to guarantee abortion access nationwide up to 15 weeks and allow states to expand rights beyond that if they choose. This bill would force moderate Republicans to choose between abortion extremists and the American majority.

5. From DEI to IEB. Trump is daring Democrats to challenge him as he aggressively dismantles DEI initiatives. This is a trap, of course. DEI training that seeks to harden racial differences with hiring preferences, scolding, language policing, and anti-white ideologies is incredibly unpopular. There is little here for Democrats to defend.

In his essential book “Class Matters”, Richard Kahlenberg argues that instead of defending racial preferences, Democrats should advocate “integration, equal opportunity, and belonging”. This approach aligns with civil rights principles by promoting merit-based assessments, fostering racial commonality, and upholding free speech. It supports public opinion, which strongly favors racial integration without racial preferences. It provides a platform for attacking Trump’s threat to defund schools using race-neutral diversity policies. For colleges, it supports financial aid based on need, ending legacy admissions, and giving teeth to equal opportunity. By championing integration and class-based instead of racial preferences, Democrats can neutralize right-wing attacks while restoring the civil rights movement’s original ideals.

Focus and Measure

What about climate? Or rebuilding labor unions? Or standing up to China and Russia? Or rebuilding democracy? Voters don’t hate these ideas, but they are more focused on a secure border, stable prices, health care, and tangible economic opportunities for themselves and their kids. To win elections, Democrats need to speak to these priorities first.

Fortunately, Democrats who embrace pragmatic politics are already winning. Governors like Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Jared Polis get it. Senator John Fetterman gets it. To rebuild a broad coalition, we need to follow their lead.

How will Democrats measure progress? Pick a handful of counties as benchmarks. I nominate Starr County, Texas. Starr is a historically Democratic stronghold along the Texas-Mexico border. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump almost as badly in Starr County, Texas as she beat him in Brooklyn, New York — 79% to 19%. By 2020, things were changing. Joe Biden won Starr County by just 5 points, down from Obama’s 86-13 landslide in 2012.

Starr County had not voted for a Republican president in over a century, but Trump carried the county in 2024 by 58% to 42%. This was a seismic realignment and part of a broader Republican surge along the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of South Texas turned red as Latino and working-class voters went MAGA. Democrats used to ask how a policy “would play in Peoria,” the small town in Illinois that reflected median voter sentiment. Now we should ask how our plans will “sit in Starr.”

Musical coda:

Dire Straits Alchemy tour at London Hammersmith in 1983. The legendary Knofpler brothers on guitar and Terry Williams unhinged on drums. One of the finest live performances in rock history.

1. In 2020, Biden began to lose this skill and much else. It cost him his presidency.

2. At the NY Times, David Leonhardt does an excellent job explaining how Denmark reacted more quickly to restrict immigration and suffered far less right-wing backlash as a result. I have no quarrel with his political analysis, but he overstates the economic impact of immigration on unskilled wages. Unskilled immigrants do not compete with native born Americans for jobs in slaughterhouses, vegetable fields, or canneries — even if we raise wages and improve safety — as we emphatically should.

3. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) is a 9-digit number that the IRS issues to people filing a tax return who are not U.S. citizens. The IRS has frequently pledged not to use ITINs to support immigration enforcement. Trump is ignoring these promises.