The Center is Choking

How the Democratic Party's moderates have failed to meet their own moment.

“I would have a cleaner shot at winning the post-2024 discourse battle if we were talking about the failure of the Elizabeth Warren administration.”

— Matthew Yglesias, February 20th, 2025

For as long as any of us have known, the Democratic Party has been controlled by its moderate wing with a grip that the best efforts of the left have been unable to break. A historic anti-war and anti-establishment effort in 2008 gave us a White House led by Rahm Emanuel. Unprecedented progressive mobilization during Trump 1.0 culminated in the nomination of Joe Biden. To the extent that any of the left-wing organizing and energy of the 21st century has led to anything, it has been entirely on the margins—some lip service here, a few regulatory appointments there, and, at best, an acknowledgement that it is a valued “junior partner” in the coalition.

Such a track record would have been deeply sobering for the left’s effort to expand its influence even if the results in 2024 had fit entirely within its narrative. As for what actually happened last year, the wing may as well have been sentenced to death. Quite unlike his first victory, Trump’s second win didn’t come against a literal Clinton in the aftermath of a populist campaign. It came against a literal San Francisco liberal that he had spent the entire fall branding as a radical leftist lunatic—i.e., a seemingly clear ideological mandate. It didn’t seem to matter that Harris had run hard to the center or that the Democratic Party at large had given the leading evangelists of moderation control over a trillion dollars in ad spending. At the end of the day, it was said, Donald Trump said that Kamala Harris was for “they/them.” Then he won, and the left died.

Voters seemed to be on board with this narrative, if only at the beginning. In the first month of Trump’s second presidency, Gallup found a massive surge in the number of Democrats who said that they wanted the party to become more moderate. But in the time since then, hardly anything has gone according to the center’s plan. An attempted comeback campaign by Andrew Cuomo to win the New York City mayoralty ended in a complete humiliation. Well-funded centrist media efforts have floundered, while even the most by-the-numbers left-dissident content has been met with mass acclaim from liberals. For its part, the Democratic base needed little time before it made their change in sentiment known. Less than two months after they registered deeply moderate sentiments in February, a full half of self-identified Democrats were telling pollsters in April that they wanted their party to become more progressive.

What accounts for this reversal? A lot of it has to do with timely shifts by the left faction of the party, which has finally begun to play to its own strengths. But none of what they have accomplished would have been possible without a generational fumble on the part of the party’s center, which has so far been completely unable to adapt to the current political environment. Without further ado, here is the most encouraging story of the past year.

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