Think There's Still Some Use For The Democratic Party? Here's Some Considerations For Improving It

Yesterday, we bolded a description of the Democratic Party from a spot on essay by Kate Aronoff when she referred to the party as “a somewhat random collection of politicians, staffers, and consultants aligned behind the loose goal of their own gainful employment.” Here at DWT, we tend to focus on the politicians, since they can be pressured and— at least in theory— voted out of office. For example, it’s important to make sure Democrats know the names of the 15 conservative House members who voted with the GOP last week to give Trump the power to destroy non-profits he disagrees with. 183 Democrats  (and one Republican, Thomas Massie) voted NO while these 15 GOP-lite assholes thought it was a good idea:

• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)— did you contribute to his Senate campaign? (Not through Blue America, you didn’t.)

• Yadira Caraveo (New Dem-CO)— good riddance

• Ed Case (New Dem-HI)

• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)— looking forward to the bribery trial this spring

• Don Davis (Blue Dog-NC)

• Jared Golden (Blue Dog-ME)— barely survived the election

• Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX)

• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)

• Jared Moskowitz (New Dem-FL)

• Jimmy Panetta (New Dem-CA)

• Marie Perez (Blue Dog-WA)

• Brad Schneider (New Dem-IL)

• Tom Suozzi (New Dem-NY)

• Norma Torres (New Dem-CA)

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL)

I listed the names for 2 reasons. The DCCC and other organizations will be hitting you up for contributions that will go towards helping to reelect these mostly unpopular incumbents in 2026. JUST SAY NO. And some of them may draw primary opponents. In those cases JUST SAY YES!

As I was saying, we mostly concentrate on bad politicians. But Aronoff also included another leg of the recently failed stool: bad consultants. And Russell Payne did a deep dive into that area yesterday. It’s worth reading in full but we want to emphasize the role of consultants as part of a deep “structural problem with how the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside party elites.” I don’t know if the GOP runs their campaigns the same way or worse. I suspect they do, but I don’t care. This is about the Democrats. And the problem is that the cure-all for everything in a campaign— a flood of 30-second TV spots that almost never cures anything— is pushed by consultants who are getting a percentage. “At every step in the process of making an ad, everyone is taking their cut. ‘The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created 30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking their skim,’ [Bernie adviser Faiz] Shakir said. ‘There’s a huge escalation every step of the way because of a skim at every level.’… [E]ven senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending. This way of doing paid media where the cost escalates at every step of the process is how campaigns end up like Harris’, spending upwards of $690 million on paid media. According to an analysis by The Times, outside groups supporting Harris spent even more on paid media, $2.5 billion.”

Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders. For example, Media Buying and Analytics LLC, received upwards of $281 million for media production and ad buys from the Harris campaign in the 2024 cycle and is owned by Canal Media Partners, according to Business Insider, a firm that has worked with hundreds of Democratic campaigns and was founded by Bobby Khan, who has been in and out of Democratic politics since the early 1990s.

…“We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren't in the elite bubble,” Shakir said. “You can be a good person with good character trying to do the right thing to try and help Kamala Harris win but when you are surrounded by monied interests you have to figure out how you don't become bubblized.”

Gabe Tobias, a veteran strategist who has worked on insurgent Democratic campaigns for candidates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri, told Salon that he sees the influence of people like Reid Hoffman, billionaire founder of LinkedIn, as exemplary of this dynamic. 

“Reid Hoffman is emblematic of the problem of wealthy donors being the ones steering the party,” Tobias said. “He’s just a rich dude, why does he have so much of a say in what the party does?”

Hoffman was one of a few business moguls who seemed to have sway at the Harris campaign, attending meetings like “Business Leaders for Harris,” which featured both the billionaire and campaign staff like policy director Grace Landrieu and campaign deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzalez, as reported by the American Prospect.

“Reid Hoffman needs to be a servant to a larger policy-making platform and not a decision maker in it,” Tobias said. “The scary part is that no one is. These wealthy donors are inserting themselves when they feel like it.”

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn't intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework. 

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to The Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

In Tobias’ opinion, the Democratic Party needs to put forth candidates who either outright turn down business executives with divergent interests from working-class Americans or candidates who will at least force them into a position where they are not influencing policy or the campaign. He says the seats at the table currently occupied by people like West, Cuban and Hoffman should instead be occupied by people that, at the very least, represent popular constituencies, like the president of the AFL-CIO.

The problem, as Tobias puts it, is that Democratic campaigns have become reliant on the money of billionaires because years of attempting to appease wealthy donors via policy concessions have hollowed out the party’s base of support.

“There isn’t a base for them to easily turn out or mobilize around so they’re forced to rely on big money to help them win elections,” Tobias said.

…Some strategists who worked on the Harris campaign but wished to remain anonymous pushed back on the notion that she didn’t focus on economic issues and suggested that headwinds like inflation would make it difficult for any incumbent to win. They did, however, often agree that the Democratic Party has a brand problem that has been building for years, but which Harris stood little chance of solving in her 107-day campaign, a brand problem in that it's unclear what the central tent pole of the party is.

Shakir summed up the problem: “It’s the influence of money, which is absolutely a cancer.” 

“You have to be aware that the monied influence isn’t helping,” Shakir said. “There is a world where good monied influence might have been helping you but that’s just not where we’re at with the modern Democratic Party and modern Democratic consultants.”

In a guest essay for the NY Times yesterday, economist Daniel Chandler noted that Señor T’s victory “was a rebuke of a Democratic Party that has positioned itself as protector of a despised status quo, rendering it unable to connect with an electorate desperate for change. Defeating Trump in the future will require liberals, progressives and others on the left to articulate a positive vision that can capture the imagination of a broad majority of Americans.” He urged Democrats to trust in the work of political philosopher John Rawls. 

Chandler wrote that in his “epoch-defining treatise A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, Rawls set out a humane and egalitarian vision of a liberal society, an alternative both to the toxic blend of neoliberal economics and identity politics that has dominated Democratic thinking in recent decades and the pessimistic anti-liberalism that holds sway among some more radical parts of the left. In this time of crisis for liberalism, it offers an unparalleled, and as yet largely untapped, resource for shaping a broad-based and genuinely transformational progressive politics— not just for Democrats but for center-left parties internationally. The philosophy of Rawls, who died in 2002, is grounded not in self-interest and competition, but in reciprocity and cooperation… Rawls argued that we should choose two guiding principles for how we design society’s core political and economic institutions, its ‘basic structure.’ First, all citizens should be free to live according to their own beliefs and to participate in politics as genuine equals. Second, we should organize our economy to achieve equal opportunities and widely shared prosperity, only tolerating inequalities where they improve the life prospects of the least advantaged.”

Such lofty principles might seem detached from reality, and given their high level of abstraction, it’s no wonder that liberals, conservatives and socialists have at times cited Rawls or even claimed him as one of their own. While it’s not immediately obvious how to put his ideas into practice, this is starting to change, as a growing number of progressive economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, are looking to Rawls for inspiration.

While Rawls was an idealist, he was also a realist, arguing that a society organized according to his principles would be not only fair but also stable. His 1971 book contains a remarkably prescient warning that a deeply unequal society like modern-day America, where economic success is equated with individual worth, would lead to a politics of resentment that could threaten the survival of liberal democracy itself. The solution is not simply greater material equality, but to secure the dignity and self-respect of the least well-off.

…The Nov. 5 election has been widely characterized as pitting a Democratic Party committed to defending American institutions against Trump and the MAGA movement, which appear to want to overthrow them altogether. The reality, of course, is that most Americans seem to want something in between: a political vision that recognizes the value of democracy and a market economy and the need for far-reaching reform of America’s political and economic structures.

It’s here that Rawls’ ideas come into their own, offering the kind of animating vision that could rejuvenate the Democrats— and other center-left parties around the world. A political party inspired by Rawls would stand up for an inclusive and tolerant society, a vibrant democracy, equality of opportunity and fair outcomes. But it would also be honest about just how far America falls short of these ideals and embrace the task of responsible but radical reform.

Rather than simply seeking to protect America’s ailing constitutional democracy from Trump’s inevitable attacks, a party committed to Rawls’s first principle— that citizens should be able to participate in politics as genuine equals— would harness popular frustrations in support of a bold agenda to break the grip of private money on American politics, for instance through public funding for political parties, strong limits on private donations and depoliticizing the judiciary through an independent commission for appointing Supreme Court justices.

On the economy, Rawls has frequently been misunderstood as advocating a familiar politics of redistribution, where society seeks to maximize growth and compensate the “losers” through welfare payments. But in fact he was one of the first champions of what we would now call “pre-distribution,” and his ideas point toward an economic agenda that would tackle inequality at its source by promoting good jobs, a fair distribution of wealth and greater democracy in the workplace.

In practical terms for a modern political party, this would mean going all out for a pro-worker agenda to address the long-neglected concerns of non-college-educated voters— not simply for higher incomes, but for meaning, community and a chance to contribute to society. Democrats must continue to call out Trump’s economic policies of almost certainly inflationary tariffs, tax cuts for the rich and attacks on unions for what they are, a dangerous con, and instead present big ideas that would actually advance the interests of working people. They would include huge investment in vocational education and left-behind places, forming an effective industrial strategy to create good jobs and giving workers more of a say in how companies are run.

…In the end, it is through politics, not philosophy, that America and other democracies must find a way forward. Yet the challenge facing the Democrats and their counterparts elsewhere is not simply to win votes but to change minds. In Rawls’ ideas, they can find a big-picture vision that is rooted in the best of the liberal tradition and can show the way toward a much-needed period of reconciliation and renewal.