Have the past 10 years of Democratic politics been a disaster?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory last November, Matthew Yglesias published a manifesto imploring the Democratic Party to reembrace “common sense.” Specifically, in his Slow Boring newsletter, Yglesias called on Democrats to redouble their party’s commitment to economic growth, honor the electorate’s moral values, reject identity politics, abandon language policing, and moderate on a wide assortment of issues.

Many moderates have since rallied behind Yglesias’s vision for remaking the Democratic Party. Progressives, meanwhile, have made a priority of trying to discredit his critiques of Democratic governance and electioneering. To both factions, the debate over where the Democratic Party goes from here is, in no small part, a debate over whether Yglesias is right. 

Earlier this week, I spoke with Yglesias, who co-founded Vox, about his indictment of Democratic policymaking, whether moderation actually works, the tensions between increasing economic growth and pandering to voters, and why he’s pessimistic about moderates’ prospects for winning the battle for the soul of blue America, among other things. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

In your view, what are the biggest political mistakes that the Democratic Party has made since the Obama era?

The big picture thing is: Starting in the 2016 campaign and continuing afterwards, Democrats talked a lot about the idea of Donald Trump as an outlier threat to the country — but in practice, they treated his flaws as an opportunity to be more boldly and aggressively progressive across a whole bunch of fronts. And they got some mileage out of that. They almost won in 2016 at a time when the thermostatic public opinion had been against them. They did win in 2020. They lost, but it was narrow in 2024. But what we’ve seen with Trump getting steadily more popular over this time is that you’ve run out of string on that play, and I think need to come back to the reality that Obama-era Democratic party politics was where a robust national political party can be.

Where specifically do you think that Democrats got too left-wing during the Biden years?

I think that the Green New Deal concept made a lot of sense as an effort to square reducing climate change with addressing people’s material economic needs. But it was designed for a specific moment in time. The premise of a Green New Deal is that you have a depression and so you’re going to address people’s depression-induced material problems with a “new deal.” And then you’re going to make that new deal green. So it all makes perfect sense — except there wasn’t a depression. 

And that then requires new thinking. But instead, we wound up pursuing energy-efficiency rules for dishwashers and blocking offshore drilling in different places and blocking pipelines, which was all out of line with the official idea that we wanted to address climate in a way that was good for jobs.

A lot of thinking around criminal justice and immigration enforcement issues has proven to be pretty much a total dead end. The desire to bring more humanity to these systems is understandable and correct. And for a while, progress was being made: We had less crime and incarceration rates were falling in the United States. But starting in 2014 and accelerating in 2020, you just had a move to say, “Well, we should care less about crime outcomes.” And people notice that and don’t like it. Crime came back on the table as an issue. It’s good that the homicide rate has fallen again from its 2021 peak, but there’s all these other concerns that people have about shoplifting and public disorder and people breaking immigration laws, etc.

And it’s just going to be tough, I think, for Democrats to rebuild trust on those kinds of issues once it’s lost. “You should be lenient to criminals” isn’t really part of the core suite of ideas that gets people invested in progressive politics. And the criminal justice system is probably the single biggest thing because it impacts both actual state governance and political perceptions very, very heavily.

I think some on the left (and perhaps, the right) would argue that leniency toward criminal offenders and undocumented immigrants does follow logically from the core ideas of progressive politics. Many progressives see themselves as fighting for the most marginalized and disadvantaged in society. And arguably, few populations in the US are more vulnerable and dehumanized than the incarcerated or undocumented. 

Look, there’s a reason why these kinds of concerns attach themselves to a broader progressive project. On crime, I think there is a clear dichotomy: Fighting racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is a core Democratic value. It relates to the civil rights movement, etc. That’s always something that is worth looking into and being vigilant about. But there really was a turn to the idea that being tough on crime is per se unprogressive. And I think a big part of the message of the movement of nonwhite voters toward Trump in the last election is the actual communities that we are talking about don’t see it that way. These are the people who are most exposed to public disorder and to crime problems. 

Left-wing people expressed a lot of concern in recent years that Democrats were going to abandon the working class substantively, as a result of attracting this more upscale voting base.

And I think on economic policy, that really hasn’t happened. Democrats continue to be the party that cares about progressive taxation, Social Security, and Medicaid. To the extent that the party has abandoned the working class as it’s grown more affluent, it’s done so on climate — by not caring that much about people’s energy costs — and it’s really been on public order: It’s not affluent suburbanites who bear the consequences, if shoplifting explodes out of control in urban neighborhoods.

Immigration is a tough one. I feel the pull of totally cosmopolitan values that say the life of a person seeking asylum in the United States is every bit as much a human life as that of anybody else, and we need to care about all of the people of the world. I feel the pull of that.

It’s also just true that in democratic politics, you have to govern in the interests of the citizens who you are dealing with, and you need to be willing to say that that’s what you’re going to do. Not that I think we should be hardcore anti-immigration because I think immigration is mostly beneficial to the country. But a totally uncontrolled system — or people pretty clearly exploiting loopholes in the law — it’s a burden on people. 

I think Democrats broadly agree with you that their party’s political trajectory since 2016 is concerning. They’ve lost a lot of ground with working-class voters in general and nonwhite ones in particular. But some question whether substantially shifting the party’s policy positions is necessary — or even, especially helpful — for winning back these defectors. 

One argument against the utility of moderation goes like this: The fine details of Democratic and Republican policy positions are not salient with most swing voters, who are largely ignorant of them. Indeed, according to the Democratic consultant David Shor, Democrats did well with voters who read the news in 2024, but suffered massive losses among those who pay little attention to politics.

So, what matters then isn’t policy details but broad partisan stereotypes — Democrats are the party that’s more supportive of immigration, Republicans are the party more supportive of business, etc. And with the rise of cable news and then the internet, voters have grown more conscious of the fact that the Democrats are the socially liberal, cosmopolitan party. This has led culturally conservative voters to defect to the GOP. But Democrats can’t actually reverse that exodus merely by moving a little to the right. So long as they are liberal on immigration relative to the GOP, they are going to be stereotyped as “soft on the border.” So, when the public is in a nativist mood, they are going to lose votes on that issue no matter what they do. 

Given this, the thinking goes, there’s little point in moving right substantively. Instead, the party should just strive to increase the salience of topics that work well for it and exploit cycle-specific issues, such as the pandemic in 2020 or financial crisis in 2008.

I think that there’s definitely some truth to that worldview.

But the Bill Clinton experience is instructive here. He did certain things in the 1992 campaign that I think progressive intellectuals found distasteful at the time and continue to find distasteful today, but he was trying to drive salient shifts in how the Democratic Party was perceived and it worked. I think that when people try, they can shift things.

Donald Trump in the very recent past meaningfully altered how the Republican Party is perceived in both positive and negative ways. These perceptions are changeable, and I think that they’re grounded in real things that happen. Somebody like Jon Tester really frustrated me in 2010 by voting against the DREAM Act. But it was really important to that iteration of Jon Tester that he not be seen as part of a cosmopolitan “soft on immigration enforcement” kind of coalition.

He changed on that after winning a couple of reelection bids, and I sympathize substantively with that evolution. But I think it would be better for Democrats to be electorally competitive in Montana even if that meant Montana Democrats having terrible immigration ideas because they could be with you on taxes and many other things that also matter in the world. 

For a political party to have a coherent vision and identity, it needs to have some non-negotiable ideological principles and policy positions though, right? Are there any ideological litmus tests that you do support?

I thought that Kamala Harris had a good line, when she was asked about flip-flopping: She said that her values hadn’t changed. And the values of the Democratic Party are that Democrats care about poor people, about inclusiveness on identity topics, about pollution. And we worry about unbridled corporate power. That was true of Bill Clinton in 1996, just as it was true of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The leftward movement isn’t really that. I think the anchor values of the coalition have been with us for a long time and are compatible with being much more moderate across the board, depending on: What’s the terrain that you’re running in? What’s the actual issue landscape? What’s the empirical truth about these kinds of things?

And the trajectory has been to say, “Well, if you really care about X, you have to sign your name on the dots of 80 bajillion different things.” And that’s just not a great way to think about politics. There’s such a wide range between total indifference to climate change issues and “we need a crash program of decarbonization by 2035.” And that’s true across issues. People can operate within that, picking their exact position on the basis of what they think is most important, what they think their constituents want, etc.

As you’ve already suggested, you don’t merely believe that Democratic policymaking over the past decade has been politically damaging — you also think much of it has been bad on the merits. What’s the short version of your indictment of Democratic governance?

If you look at the most progressive states — the states where the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is most entrenched and empowered — the population of those places is generally declining. A lot of that is housing policy. But it’s also not the case that the K-12 schooling outcomes are systematically better in the states that are spending more money. The commutes aren’t necessarily shorter, things like that. I think it calls into question what the purpose of the post-2012 project of building up progressive institutions and clout inside the Democratic Party is, right? What is the paradise that we are pointing to that — if we cast off the constraints of a Mary Landrieu or a Joe Manchin — we’re going to be able to deliver?

Why can’t you show me in New Jersey or Washington state that we’re doing this, and it’s working great? Wouldn’t that be a more reasonable way to build long-term political power: to show you’re doing something and it’s working really well and people like it, and then it spreads to more places and it entices people in the purple states? You have maybe a few things like that. But on the biggest-picture policy issues of our time, we just don’t really see those kinds of successes in the places where it’s easier for Democrats to win elections.

Are there tensions between your vision for how Democrats can better deliver prosperity and how they can best win elections? Two of your signature policy causes — liberalizing zoning laws to abet housing construction and massively increasing legal immigration — don’t seem like surefire political winners. There’s a lot of backlash at the local level to new housing construction. And at the national level, voters evince little enthusiasm for increasing immigration.

I think that’s true on immigration. You have to tread carefully. But it’s interesting that we had Elon Musk and Donald Trump seemingly endorsing higher levels of employment visas for skilled workers recently. So maybe you just do that on a bipartisan basis if you can. It doesn’t need to be the central piece of partisan campaigns.

In housing, I mean, people will talk about this all day and all night, but if you look at the states where housing growth is very rapid, I do not see there being massive political backlash against the Republican governors of those states. I also don’t see the Democratic governors of very housing-constraining states being hailed as heroes by anybody. They’re not progressive heroes, they’re not moderate heroes. They just mostly look like failures who are presiding over high taxes, strained public services, and lots of disputes about legacy pension obligations because running a low-growth state is a bummer.

It would be much easier to do the things that progressives want to do if you had more construction and more growth in those states. Fundamentally, what are we doing here as a movement or as a political party if the idea is, “nobody’s going to come to the states that we govern and everybody will leave, and the cost of living will be super high. But don’t worry, people aren’t leaving because of our high taxes, they’re leaving because of our zoning policies.” 

A thing that’s in the discourse constantly is “Democrats should do populism on economics and help working class people with their material interests.”

And I think that’s great. I agree with that 5,000 percent. But the people who use those words often tend to espouse public policy ideas that are very bad for economic growth. And I just want to remind people that the state of the economy is really important over and above the social safety net and transfer payments. A lot of people earn a living by working. A lot of working-class people benefit from rapid economic growth. And rapid economic growth makes the welfare state more sustainable.

So, when you’re making energy policy — or if you’re thinking about Davis-Bacon rules or about antitrust or whatever it is — then, “Well, is this going to be good for growth or not?” is an important question for populists to ask. The people want a robust, growing economy that provides them with a lot of opportunities.

That makes sense. But I still feel like there may be some tensions between the projects of improving Democratic performance in red areas and implementing your vision for a pro-growth agenda. 

You’ve argued that there are “deep complementaries” between these two endeavors. And you’ve cited Democratic Congressman Jared Golden — who won a Trump district in Maine — as one model for a brand of liberalism that can do both. 

Yet Golden recently introduced legislation that would establish a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods (including commodities that cannot be produced in America at scale, such as coffee beans) and then increase that tariff by 5 percent a year, every year, until the United States eliminates its trade deficit. That’s a policy that would increase costs for consumers and reduce economic growth. So, should that give us a pause about how complementary your political and substantive goals are?

I will defer to Representative Golden on what he thinks his constituents want to hear. His idea doesn’t make any sense on the merits. If you actually did it, I think that consequences would be quite dire, and people would not be happy with them. And I think that that is always an important tension in politics. There’s a difference between what people want to hear and what outcomes people will actually enjoy. 

I think a big problem that Democrats have is that they’ve decided that there’s certain moral and cultural issues on which it is unacceptable to pander to public opinion. So they want to do their pandering on economic policy instead. Which is fine if you’re Jared Golden, and you’re introducing bills that have no chance of passing because, what difference does it make? But it’s challenging in terms of governance. I mean, Trump is facing this problem, right?

He and his advisers seem to be going back and forth every day between, “Should we do the thing we campaigned on in terms of across the board tariffs” or “Should we worry that that will immediately crash the stock market?” And I think Trump rightly feels that if he crashes the stock market, people aren’t going to say, “Oh, I forgive you Mr. President. After all, I answered ‘yes’ to that in the polls.” People want good outcomes. But this is obviously just a tension that elected officials need to navigate all the time. I just think the most reasonable way to approach these things is to try to pander to people on largely symbolic cultural-type issues and then make empirically grounded policy decisions on complicated economic issues.

What makes you most optimistic about your faction’s prospects for bending the Democratic Party in your direction between now and 2028? And what makes you most pessimistic?

I think the Iraq War was just a millstone around the necks of moderate Democrats for a long, long time. That was a very serious substantive error that angered lots and lots of people. And I think it is good that the clock has turned and we’re now looking at generations of people — unlike Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — who were not personally associated with that thing. What makes me pessimistic is that I hear positive things from a lot of people — I have a lot of good conversations — but I do not yet see any meaningful institutionalization of a more pragmatic approach to politics. And so it’s easy for elected officials to in the abstract say, “Okay, we need to stop listening to these groups. We need to get real. We need to be in touch with the voters.” But when push comes to shove, these fights get nasty and politics happens. And if nobody has your back, the tendency is always going to be to find reasons to slide further left.