Competing visions emerge on how US democrats can climb out of identity crisis

After Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton staggeringly lost the 2016 US presidential election to Donald Trump, she famously retreated to the woods to escape the media frenzy and regroup.

Eight years later, after another bruising defeat — again to Trump in 2024 — the entire Democratic Party appeared to follow her example, disappearing on what seemed like a collective retreat to reflect on how it became a party that vast portions of the country “love to hate,” as reflected in the devastating election results.

For months after Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s loss, the party’s think tanks — one of the key players in her campaign — were largely silent. Recently, however, these factions appear to be re-emerging, each with its own ideas for reinvention, as an article on the UnHerd platform argues.

According to the piece, this resurgence has produced a flurry of competing visions for the party’s future. The author groups these emerging blocs as: the “Welcome” moderates, the “Persuasion” progressives, the “Abundance” techno-optimists, the Kamala Harris loyalists (whose strategy mostly seems to involve waiting for the GOP to self-destruct), to name just a few.

While the article notes that this ideological diversity shows Democrats are grappling with their identity and values, it also stresses that almost none of the current debates address the bigger question: "How do you change a party whose 21st-century structure and ecosystem — donors, NGOs, media, universities, consultants — thrive on staying exactly the same?"

The author contends that none of the Democrats’ proposals fully answer this question, though a few offer partial ideas.

One such effort is “Deciding to Win,” a new report from the centre-left group "Welcome," which began as a political action committee in 2022 and has since expanded into a research organisation. The report bluntly argues that since 2012, Democrats have morphed into the party of donors, activist organisations, and media commentators — “the affluent and highly educated” — while losing touch with non-college voters and working-class communities across all racial groups. This is not 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," the article states.

The Welcome report stresses that its version of moderation is not the traditional technocratic centrism often associated with weakness, but a model closer to a popular leader who takes strong but sometimes heterodox positions and does not reflexively protect establishment or corporate interests.

A hypothetical populist-moderate candidate, for example, might resemble Dan Osborn, the independent union leader in Nebraska who sounded like Bernie Sanders on economics but more like MAGA on various cultural issues.

This hybrid approach appears elsewhere, too. The article highlights Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, a progressive who has significantly improved his favorability ratings among Republican voters. Jared Abbott of the Centre for Working-Class Politics also points to Nathan Sage in Iowa, Graham Platner in Maine, and Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke as economic populists who are “taking pragmatic positions” on certain cultural debates.

On the other end of the spectrum, many Democrats reject the idea that the party needs to imitate Midwestern union populists.

A competing vision known as "Persuasion 2025" argues that the problem is not progressive ideology but a deficit of courage and message discipline. Supported by donors in the "Way to Win" network, Persuasion advocates contend that Democrats have relied on polite incrementalism when they should have been shaping public opinion with moral clarity and repeated messaging.

In their view, the past decade did not reveal that progressivism is out of step — it showed that Democrats never genuinely tried it. Unlike Welcome, Persuasion leans further into wokeness, promising to pursue “disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, water justice and air justice,” while warning against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus.”

Their solution calls for more activist energy, more movement-style politics, and a re-engagement with young people, MAGA voters, and disaffected minorities. They argue that persuasion must happen through modern communication channels, including podcasts and platforms like TikTok — a strategy inspired partly by the Republican success of tapping into popular conservative personalities such as Joe Rogan, who identifies as a centrist but ultimately endorsed Trump in 2024.

While Persuasion imagines victory through moral fervour and mobilised grassroots groups, another growing faction, “Abundance” envisions it through capacity-building and renewed confidence in government. Popularised by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s manifesto-length work, Abundance supporters — typically Silicon Valley–aligned urbanists — argue that voters don’t want another civics lecture; they want tangible improvements: more housing, faster trains, more energy infrastructure, more child-care centres — visible proof that government can still build. It is a forward-looking optimism that Democrats lost as they drifted into being the party of the status quo.

The author wraps up the analysis of these various movements by urging Democrats to learn from what Kamala Harris and former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have recently done. Both have released books reflecting on their time in the White House during the campaign. Critics argue they are engaging in finger-pointing and hollow branding exercises instead of confronting the party’s weaknesses and searching for tangible solutions.

Ultimately, the article predicts that none of the above strategies will win out. Instead, it suggests the party might default to what it describes as a political “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."

By Nazrin Sadigova