After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, she famously retreated to the woods — less Thoreau’s Walden Pond spiritual cleansing, more yoga retreat curated by Pod Save America. And the entire Democratic Party seemed to follow her to Chappaqua after its bruising defeat in 2024, vanishing on some mystical retreat to meditate on how it became a party that large swaths of the country love to hate.
For months after Kamala Harris’s loss, you could practically hear the wind whistling through the think tanks. Lately, however, the factions have begun to re-emerge from the woods; each clutching its own plan for reinvention. The result is a flurry of competing visions for the party’s future: the “Welcome” moderates, the “Persuasion” progressives, the “Abundance” techno-optimists, the Kamala Harris loyalists (whose approach seems to be waiting for the GOP to self-destruct), and now a new entry — an institutionalist wing led by the Roosevelt Institute and former Biden officials, who insist that the party should ditch the incrementalism of old for a leaner, meaner, government.
It’s proof of a party wrestling with itself — or, considering the dreadful state of the party, trying to fuse pieces of dead flesh for the sake of a Frankenstein-like revival. But there’s a problem: talk is cheap and almost none of it answers the harder question. How do you change a party whose 21st-century structure and ecosystem — donors, NGOs, media, universities, consultants — thrives on staying exactly the same? That’s something none of the Democrats’ blueprints sufficiently address.
First, the good news. There are some clever ideas here, especially in a new report titled “Deciding to Win.” It was produced by the center-Left organization Welcome, which began as a political action committee in 2022 and has since developed a broader research arm. The report argues bluntly that since 2012, Democrats have become the party of donors, activist groups, and media pundits — “the affluent and highly educated” — while losing contact with voters without college degrees and working-class communities of all races, which isn’t exactly new information.
But what is novel is that its cure is — for lack of a better term — populist moderates: candidates who are both economically populist and moderate on culture-war issues, and ideally have a legitimate working-class background. These Democrats will tax Wall Street, but still own a pair of work boots that have actually touched dirt. Historically, moderate has become shorthand for a kind of weak, mealy-mouthed neoliberal or technocrat. But Welcome says it means a bold leader who takes popular but often heterodox positions and who doesn’t reflexively defend the establishment or corporate interests. A dream populist moderate candidate, for instance, might look like Dan Osborn, the independent union leader in Nebraska who talked like Bernie Sanders about economic issues but more like MAGA on other matters: “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” Osborn says in an October campaign ad.
This approach is surfacing elsewhere. Arizona senator Ruben Gallego is a progressive who has doubled his overall favorability with Republican voters after talking like a border hawk. In an interview with Ezra Klein last week, Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, also cited Nathan Sage in Iowa, Graham Platner in Maine, and Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District’s Rebecca Cooke as economic populists “taking pragmatic positions” on some cultural issues.
“Not everyone in the party agrees that Democrats need to sound more like gruff Midwestern union bros.”
For all of its wisdom, the Deciding to Win report still has blind spots, however. Welcome blasts the “timid and risk-averse culture” that pervades much of the institutional Democratic Party, but then treats Medicare for All as a boutique issue. America’s health-care system is decaying fast — costs soaring, hospitals closing, insurers consolidating — and pretending otherwise won’t make Democrats seem “moderate.” Likewise, the report suggests that Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, and Andy Beshear should be top candidates in 2028, which to me sounds like the world’s most polite LinkedIn webinar.
Not everyone in the party agrees that Democrats need to sound more like gruff Midwestern union bros. A rival vision, calling itself Persuasion 2025, insists the party’s problem hasn’t been progressive ideology at all but a lack of guts and poor narrative discipline. Backed by donors in the Way to Win network, Persuasion types argue that Democrats have tried to coast on polite incrementalism when they should have been shaping public opinion with moral clarity and relentless message repetition. In their telling, the last decade didn’t prove progressivism is out of touch — it proved Democrats never really tried it. Unlike Welcome, Persuasion is doubling down on wokeness, vowing to find “disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, water justice and air justice,” and warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus.”
Their solution is more activist energy, more movement politics, and a renewed attempt to win back young people, MAGA voters, and disaffected minorities — especially in the Sun Belt. They don’t promise persuasion in the old retail, diner-booth sense, but in the broadcast-to-the-algorithm sense: flood the zone with justice-oriented messaging and let the vibes do the work. It is, effectively, the 2020 movement’s greatest-hits album, remastered for TikTok — what if the Democrats had a woke Joe Rogan?
If Persuasion imagines victory through moral passion and mobilized constituencies, Abundance imagines it through capacity and confidence: bulldozers, not bullhorns. Popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book-length manifesto, your typical Abundance Bros are Silicon Valley-adjacent urbanists who imagine that supporting zoning reform is a personality. They argue that voters do not crave another lecture about norms; they crave more houses, more trains, more power plants, more child-care centers — proof that the state can build again. It’s an appeal to the future-oriented optimism Democrats lost in their drift towards becoming the party of the status quo.
Meanwhile, the new Roosevelt Institute manifesto insists on talking about power. Authored by former senior Biden officials, it is perhaps the most explicit repudiation of the party’s post-Obama instinct to act like a think-tank fellowship rather than a governing coalition. Their program reads like a liberal answer to the Right’s “administrative state” crusade — a Democratic (and milder) answer to Project 2025 with 161 “practical ideas” such as rewriting the creaky “notice-and-comment” regime of the Administrative Procedure Act so it can’t be weaponized by bad-faith judges, and building new institutional guardrails — up to and including a specialized court for administrative cases and, yes, expanding the Supreme Court itself.
At one level, all of this intellectual ferment is healthy and necessary. At another, it resembles 1989 again. That year, the Democrats talked themselves into a necessary reinvention after losing their third consecutive presidential election. That included a loser of a candidate in Michael Dukakis, whom one pundit described as “slightly less animation and personality than the Shroud of Turin.” In response to Dukakis’s drubbing, a group of political consultants wrote “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency.” It’s a document that makes the Democratic Party of the Bush I years sound strikingly similar to the 2025 version. (Indeed, “The Politics of Evasion” is even cited as an intellectual inspiration for Deciding to Win). “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote.
The problem is that the man who took their advice and won — Bill Clinton — decided that in order to beat the Republicans, you had to govern like a free-trading Wall Street-loving one.
And that is the danger now. Democrats are again cataloging their failures with admirable honesty, again workshopping manifestos full of bold verbs, again flirting with the idea of governing with purpose rather than vibes. But even as they welcome talk about reform and renewal, you can already feel the gravitational pull of the consultant class and big money donors.
If history is a guide, the most likely outcome of all this renewal talk is not a populist-moderate revival, a progressive crusade, or an abundance revolution. I’d wager that the Democrats go into 2026 with an approach that might be called Kamala Harris-ism in the wake of the finger-pointing and empty posturing of Harris and former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during their recent book tours. It means to do very little — or, as James Carville bluntly put it in an essay for The New York Times, the “play-dead” strategy.
The idea is that Republicans are mired in chaos, so the smartest move is to let them collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and self-inflicted absurdities. That instead of fighting tooth-and-nail, Democrats should project calm and responsible governance while MAGA self-immolates. It is the least imaginative vision, but also the one that fits the institutional muscle memory of today’s Democratic Party: avoid fights, avoid risk, avoid offending donors, let the chaos on the other side do the persuading. Call it the Path of Least Resistance school of politics.
So yes, maybe their time in the woods did Democrats some good. They return with maps and theories for building a new path. But paths aren’t plans, and maps don’t matter if you refuse to leave camp. It is one thing to emerge from the forest enlightened. It is another thing to actually walk out.
