U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reacts during a House Oversight Committee hearing with U.S. governors about state policies regarding undocumented migrants, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
I recall participating in heated debates in late 1968 and early 1969 about why Democrats lost the presidency to “tricky Dick” Nixon. And another set of debates in the early 1980s about why Democrats lost to smooth-talking right-winger Ronald Reagan.
And then, after the disastrous midterm elections of 1994, why they lost both houses of Congress. And then in 2000 and again in 2004, why they lost to the insipid George W. Bush. And, worst of all, in 2016 and then again in 2024, to the monstrous Trump.
These debates usually occur within the rarified precincts of Democratic think tanks located in well-appointed offices in Washington, D.C.
They feature people called “political consultants” and “political operatives,” whose sole distinction is to have participated in one or more Democratic campaigns. Few have ever run for office. Fewer have ever served in office. Almost none live in the hinterlands; they live in or around Washington. They all make their money consulting and operating.
And for more than 50 years, they’ve almost always said exactly the same thing: Democrats must move to the “center” in order to “recapture” the “suburban swing” voters who are up for grabs.
May I say, based on my experience in and around politics over the last 60 years, including a run for office and stints in two Democratic administrations, that this is utter horse----?
Democrats have been moving to the putative “center” for over five decades. This has never helped them. It has only hurt.
The conventional lore among the Democratic consultant class is that Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 and saved the party by tacking to the “center.”
Wrong. Clinton won only a plurality of voters in 1992 because Ross Perot grabbed Republican voters from George H.W. Bush.
Moreover, Clinton didn’t run on a centrist message. He ran on a message Franklin D. Roosevelt would have been proud of.
I should know. I advised him during the campaign and then joined his Cabinet. Clinton ran on raising taxes on the wealthy, cutting them for the middle class, and establishing universal health care.
I was in Little Rock when, in announcing his run for president, Clinton “refuse[d] to be part of a generation that commits hardworking Americans to a lifetime of struggle without reward or security” and condemned a system in which “middle-class people spend more time on the job, less time with their children, bringing home less money to pay more for health care and housing and education.” He said it was “wrong” that “while the incomes of our wealthiest citizens went up, their taxes went down.”
Since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party’s biggest problem hasn’t been the “left” but its dependence on wealthy donors and corporate PACs, which have consistently argued for moving the party to the “center” and away from the working class. The moneyed interests in the party also back much of the Democratic consultant class.
So it’s no surprise that another Democratic think tank is now being formed, financed by billionaire donors, to push the party to the “center.”
This one is called the Searchlight Institute, and its head is Adam Jentleson, who The New York Times describes as “a veteran Democratic operative” who wants to “minimize the sway that left-leaning groups have over candidates before what is expected to be a crowded 2028 presidential primary.”
Jentleson says “the folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions” (i.e., the left).
Searchlight starts with an annual budget of $10 million and a staff of seven in its Capitol Hill offices. According to the Times, the organization is subsidized by “a roster of billionaire donors” including Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.
What?
If Democrats have learned anything from their losses over the years, especially their two horrific losses to Trump, it should be that they need a charismatic messenger with a clear and convincing message about how to lower the costs of living for average working families — especially housing, health care, and child care. And raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.
At least since Richard Nixon, Republicans have been honing a cultural populist message telling working-class Americans that their problems are due to Black people, brown people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, government bureaucrats, “coastal elites,” socialists, and high taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats could have been honing an economic populist message that told working Americans that their problems are largely due to monopolistic corporations, greedy CEOs, rapacious billionaires, and Wall Street gamblers. And therefore what the nation needs are high taxes on the wealthy and big corporations, including a wealth tax, that allow the nation to meet the minimum needs of average working families for housing, health care, child care, and the rest.
This economic populist message is a winner. The most prominent candidate to capture the Democratic Party’s imagination this year, Zohran Mamdani, won the primary for mayor of New York by focusing on working families’ needs for affordable housing, groceries, and child care, to be financed by a tax hike on the wealthy.
This message also has the virtue of being accurate.
It accounts for the nation’s near-record inequalities of income and wealth, the tsunami of money flowing into American politics, the steady decline in tax rates paid by the ultra-wealthy, the near impossibility of forming unions, the near-monopolization of industries such as food and fossil-based energy, and the seeming inability of the richest nation in the world to respond to the needs of its working people.
But, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, and a few other brave elected Democrats and young candidates, Democrats have eschewed economic populism because they haven’t wanted to bite the hands that feed them.
As a result, working Americans understandably concerned about stagnant incomes, decreasing job security, and soaring costs of housing, health care, child care, and much else are hearing only one story — Republican cultural populism — and not the other, truthful populism.
It is a political truism that if one party gives you an explanation for your problems and a set of solutions for overcoming them, while the other party does neither, you’re apt to go along with the party that gives you the explanation and prescriptions, even if they’re rubbish.
Not surprisingly, the “rosters of billionaire donors” to Democratic think tanks like the new Searchlight Institute are not interested in offering the real explanation or real solutions. But because they don’t want to sell the Republicans’ cultural populism, they’re left opting for the so-called “center. ”
And what’s at their center? Lists of insipid policy proposals that don’t require raising taxes on the wealthy or on big corporations, or getting big money out of politics, or empowering average Americans. In other words, proposals that maintain the status quo.
Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.