The Conversation Democrats Need to Have
8 min read
In the weeks since the election, I’ve been thinking about the woman who told me she’d heard that Kamala Harris “let in all the illegals who killed all those cops.”
I met her when a few of us from Pod Save America were knocking doors in Las Vegas the Sunday before the election. She was listed in the voter file as a 72-year-old registered Democrat who hadn’t voted yet, so we rang the doorbell and were greeted by a small Asian woman and a very large dog. Her broken English wasn’t easy to understand, and the barking didn’t help, but her concern about the cop-killing immigrants was clear.
We skipped the fact-check and assured the woman that Vice President Harris promised to crack down on illegal immigration and close the border if it got out of control. She seemed mildly encouraged, but not sold. We told her that Harris also wanted to make prescriptions cheaper for her and cut her taxes. Then she pointed to a photo of the vice president on the campaign literature we were holding: “Is that her?” We nodded. The woman gave us a thumbs-up and a promise that she’d vote for Harris.
This wasn’t the type of exchange we’d expected, but only because the outcome was successful. Most interactions with voters aren’t as satisfying as you hope, and some are just bizarre. When I was conducting focus groups for a podcast I host called The Wilderness,a Latino voter in Vegas told me that his two favorite political leaders were Governor Ron DeSantis and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because they were both “outsiders” who were willing to “take on the establishment.” An older Milwaukee voter said that he had voted for Barack Obama and then Donald Trump because “they both felt like change.” A young Black man in Atlanta said that because of crime and inflation, he regretted his vote for Joe Biden, and that “at least Trump is an honest liar.”
The show would sometimes get harsh reviews from Democrats, whose reactions to these focus groups I’d charitably describe as frustrated disbelief: “Infuriating.” “Depressing.” “Couldn’t listen.” “Why didn’t you correct them?” “How did you not just walk out?”
I understand why people would feel this way. Well, I understand why people like us would feel this way. If you care enough about politics to read The Atlantic or listen to Pod Save America or scroll through an infinite feed of strangers’ opinions, you mostly encounter broadly cohesive political identities. Even if we don’t agree with the views of leftists or liberals or Never Trumpers or MAGA Republicans, we understand them (or at least we think we do). The people whose views we don’t understand tend to be the people who simply don’t follow politics that closely.
And yet, that’s most Americans.
This majority still votes, but not in every election. They typically vote for the same party, but not always. Their political beliefs can be all over the map: left on some issues, right on others; willing compromise on some issues, not on others. They tend to be less partisan (which doesn’t mean they’re centrist), less ideological (which doesn’t mean they’re moderate), and less likely to see politics as a black-and-white, life-and-death struggle with clear heroes and villains (which doesn’t mean they don’t care). They’re also less likely to have a four-year college degree, which is now the best predictor of how Americans vote and the central divide in American politics—a divide that continues to grow.
The Democratic Party is currently on the wrong side of an unforgiving math problem. Fewer than four in 10 Americans have graduated college, and that number is even smaller in the battleground states that decide the presidency and control of Congress. In each of the past three elections, Trump has picked up millions of new votes from Americans without a degree who had previously supported Democrats. And every time, Democrats have taken comfort in explanations that, although plausible, absolve us from the hard work of winning back these voters.
In 2016, we told ourselves that the only reason white, working-class Obama voters could possibly choose Trump over Hillary Clinton was misogyny, racism, or misinformation. In 2020, Trump’s gains with working-class Latinos were blamed on Cubans in Florida and COVID-19 lockdowns. In 2024, Trump won even more support from working-class Latino voters and Asian voters and Black voters. He won new votes from working-class Gen Z and Millennial voters. He made huge gains in working-class border communities and the immigrant neighborhoods of big cities.
Democrats can choose again to take comfort in an explanation that requires very little of us: If the party lost in 2024 because people were fed up with high costs and an old incumbent, maybe we can win in 2028 if people are still fed up with high costs and an old incumbent. Or maybe Democrats can just crank up the economic populism. Or sand down the edges of identity politics. Or create better ads, or hire smarter operatives, or run younger candidates, or find a Joe Rogan but without any of the stuff that makes liberals mad and Rogan popular. Surely, someone on Bluesky has the answer.
The truth is, 2024 should be a clarifying moment for those of us who have spent the past decade trying to keep Trump out of power. Half of the country just took another flier on the guy who attempted a coup—a convicted felon who somehow won 16 million more votes than he did in 2016. Democrats are about to have less power than at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.
Democrats need to get back into the persuasion business. Interactions with voters, frustrating as they often are, are always a good reminder of how different it feels to talk politics with a person you’re genuinely trying to persuade. You don’t speak in phrases from a candidate’s overly polished speech or carefully worded interview answers. You don’t talk like an ad that supposedly tests well but somehow sounds like every other Democratic ad you’ve ever heard. And the conversations certainly don’t sound at all like people talk and argue about politics online. Imagine if the woman we met in Las Vegas had posted her cop-killing-immigrants question on social media. Does anyone think the resulting discourse would’ve won her vote—or any votes? I can’t say I would’ve responded the same way I did in person.
Persuading voters is primarily the job of politicians and political professionals. But we now live in an era when the typical voter’s occasional glimpse at the spectacle of American politics is less likely to be a candidate’s speech or a campaign ad than an algorithmic assortment of takes and arguments from media figures, activists, and anyone with an opinion and a social-media account. This means that, whether we like it or not, the small minority of us who obsessively follow and talk and post about politics play a role in shaping the views of the majority of Americans who don’t: a multiracial, working-class majority that has come to believe politics is largely irrelevant to their lives.
And can we really blame them?
Trump has been the main character of American politics for nearly a decade, so that certainly hasn’t helped, but neither has the exhausting drama he’s pulled us into, over and over again. He acts, we react, and sometimes overreact. Political obsessives see a debate in which the stakes are total and the right side is obvious. But more often than not, the person who’s just checking in sees a fight that sounds both silly and sanctimonious, trivial and hyperbolic, inaccessible and exhausting—all of which feeds into the autocrat’s empty promise that he can liberate us from the messier parts of a system in which everyone gets a say and nothing seems to get done.
Democrats can no longer just assert that this path is wrong; we have to show that a better way exists—yes, in the policies we propose and in the facts we present, but also in how we approach the essential work of politics in a democracy.
When someone expresses a view we find immoral or offensive, it’s not that they never deserve to be scolded or shamed. It’s that making people feel unwelcome or unwanted is self-defeating and antithetical to the project of democratic governance—a radical belief that everyone has equal worth and deserves an equal voice in organizing a society where dissenting views are tolerated, minority rights are protected, and progress happens only when minds are changed.
The last time Democrats suffered a defeat of this year’s magnitude was in 2004, when George W. Bush was elected to a second term and Republicans controlled Congress. Some people have pointed out that, at the time, the smart money was on Democrats nominating a swing-state moderate in 2008. A Black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama who had broken with his party on the Iraq War wasn’t really in the cards. The suggestion is that maybe Democrats should worry less about where our next candidates fall on the political spectrum and more about whether they can rally the party faithful.
But that is based on a misconception about why Obama was the last Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win an electoral majority. For all the attention on his charisma and ability to inspire, an underrated aspect of Obama’s appeal was how hard he tried to empathize with the people he was trying to lead. Even if they weren’t for him, he made it clear that he was for them. Part of that capacity came from navigating so many different worlds as he grew up. But part of it was his background as a community organizer.
Organizers understand better than just about anyone else in politics what it takes to change minds, because they spend their days talking with people who aren’t like them, don’t know them, and don’t think like them. I spend way too much of my life arguing about politics online and on mic, but the disagreements I appreciate the most—the conversations that make me think differently—are almost always with people who have a background in organizing for a cause or campaign. Whether the person’s politics are to the left or the right of my own, their experience tends to make them more patient, understanding, and compelling than 95 percent of social-media interactions. That’s because organizers aren’t looking to perform for the people who already agree with them. They’re looking to persuade the people who don’t. They don’t just want to be right. They want to win.
