Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary has reignited a perennial debate within the party: Does electoral success lie in moving to the left to pick up otherwise unengaged voters or moving to the center to pick up engaged moderates?
To the Democratic Party establishment the choice seems obvious — move to the center. But the historical record suggests otherwise. The eras in which the Democrats moved to the right have rarely resulted in significant electoral success while the eras in which they have moved to the left have seen their greatest electoral victories.
The conventional wisdom that appealing to moderates is the key to winning is particularly tied to the presidential victory of Bill Clinton. A creature of the Democratic Leadership Council, created in 1985 to steer the party to a middle course, Clinton’s election in 1992 stopped the string of Republican presidential victories (five of the previous six). His explicit renunciation of progressive initiatives (e.g., “an end to welfare as we know it”) may have helped his election, but the turn to the center was hardly healthy for the party’s electoral fortunes as a whole.
On the contrary: between the 1992 and 2000 elections, Democrats lost control of the Senate and the House. This bears repeating: In precisely the years moderates point to as illustrating the electoral wisdom of moving to the middle, Democrats lost control of both houses. Democrats never officially captured a majority of seats in the Senate until Barack Obama’s election in 2008 if you don’t count independent Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Joe Lieberman (Conn.).
On the other hand, the great electoral gains of the Democratic Party for the last 100 years have invariably come when the party foregrounded progressive politics and championed social movements. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in Democratic majorities in the House and Senate throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The shift was due not only to Roosevelt’s popularity but also to the dramatically progressive turn of the Democrats toward the labor movement and the creation of a progressive safety net — which were roundly criticized by opponents at the time of creeping socialism.
During Harry Truman’s presidency in the late 1940s, the Democratic Party turned toward the middle and lost many of the electoral gains of the previous decade. When Democrats moved to the left again, during the election of 1958, they saw another wave of electoral success, and this broadened through the 1960s as the party aligned itself with the Civil Rights Movement. The Vietnam War’s association with the moderate wing of the party led to another downturn in Democratic seats through the late 1960s and 1970s.
The third wave of progressive electoral success arrived with Obama in 2008. Obama was in many ways a hybrid moderate/progressive in policies, but his advocacy of some progressive positions, coupled with his being the first African American president — the exhilarating culmination of the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s and flowered in the ’60s and ’70s — overwhelmingly fixed him in the public mind as a progressive. Democrats once more seemed intertwined with a social movement, on the right side of history. The party held the Senate in three of the four elections in his two terms.
Two key questions arise from this history: How much will a turn to more progressive policies galvanize unengaged voters today? And secondly, how much will a turn to the left attract engaged voters who previously were moderates or conservatives?
A recent FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll suggests that while a quarter of eligible voters never vote or have voted only once, almost half (44 percent) sometimes vote. Those voters — episodically engaged and unengaged — are a key group for electoral victory. Some among them have withheld their votes from Democrats for progressive reasons, particularly in recent years as a protest against uncritical support of Israel’s Gaza incursion. But most nonvoters aren’t ideologically motivated protesters.
Numerous studies show that compared to voters, nonvoters tend to be younger, less educated, lower income and less likely to identify with either political party. Attracting these voters requires real validation of their concerns and promotion of programs that visibly improve their daily economic lives. As Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) recently noted, the turn toward centrism that began with Bill Clinton actually alienated many traditional Democratic voters: “What they promoted turned out to be quite corrosive to the middle class. The Clinton people saw a need to moderate with centrist candidates. I don’t think that’s our issue. We need a compelling vision for the middle class of this country.”
It’s conventional political wisdom that motivation, not persuasion, wins elections. The reason Kamala Harris lost in 2024, in this view, is that Democrats failed to turn out “their” people. But recent work by the Pew Research Center strongly calls that into question, arguing, based on extensive polling and interviewing, that if all voters had turned out, Donald Trump’s margin of victory would have been even slightly larger.
Winning isn’t simply a matter of turning out more nonvoters who are already leaning toward the Democrats, though that is crucial. Voter discontent can be channeled in opposing directions, as shown by the 12 percent of those who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 primary and then voted for Trump in the general election.
The policy initiatives that would do this, polling strongly demonstrates, are not moderate but progressive. When a recent poll asked U.S. adults whether they supported the policies Mamdani advocates (without knowing they were associated with Mamdani) — free child care, freezing rent for lower-income tenants, raising the minimum wage to $30 in the next five years, raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy to pay for these kinds of programs — twice as many said they’d vote for a candidate with that platform as said they would not.
Old ideas die hard. The dominant faction of the Democratic Party has believed for so long that victory lies in moving to the middle that it’s hard to shake that belief. But that’s what’s necessary for the party to climb out of the deep hole of mistrust — and electoral failure — it’s dug itself. Both the historical record and the most up-to-date polling agree: moving to the left is the path to victory.
Rob Rosenthal, the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, and former provost at Wesleyan, has written extensively about the interaction between social movements and electoral politics.
