OpinionEzra Klein
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By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Joe Biden said at a rally four years ago in Detroit, flanked by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw standing behind me. They are the future of this country.”
That was the line then. Biden was the old warrior strapping on his armor one last time. Once Donald Trump was vanquished, the new guard could take over. “If Biden is elected,” a Biden adviser told Politico in 2019, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for re-election.” The Democratic Party was becoming something else. Perhaps a party built around democratic socialism, as Bernie Sanders and A.O.C. would have it. Perhaps a party more firmly rooted in identity and diversity. Either way, Biden was the last of his kind.
Today, Biden is 81 years old and he is running for re-election. Trumpism is anything but vanquished. And the Democratic Party no longer looks to be in transition. The Squad feels more like a faction than a future. Few think leadership of the party will smoothly pass to Vice President Harris. Polls have long shown Democrats aren’t enthusiastic about Biden running for re-election but he’s avoided any serious primary challenge or pressure to drop out.
The orderliness of the Democrats in the last few years stands in stark contrast to the chaos among Republicans. The G.O.P. has humiliated and deposed a string of House speakers and potential House speakers, run critics like Liz Cheney out of office and refused to admit Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. And now Republicans plan to nominate Trump again. That has been and continues to be a driver of Democratic unity.
“Donald Trump posed such a serious threat to so many Democrats that there was a strong desire both for stability and to win,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley and co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, told me. “And that was at least as much a force or more of a force than the voices saying we need transformation.”
The cliché used to be that Democrats fell in love and Republicans fell in line. The reality, in recent years, has been that Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart. The Democratic Party’s establishment has held, even as the Republican Party’s establishment has buckled.
Perhaps the Democratic Party’s establishment has held because the Republican Party’s establishment has buckled.
The Trump era has stretched the Democratic Party into an awkward shape. It has become both the party of progressivism and of preservation, the party that promises both to defend American institutions and to reform them. It has not lost its yen for policy change. Biden’s first term has been impressive, legislatively speaking, and the bills he and the Democrats passed are the most ambitious effort to change America’s built environment since the construction of the Interstate System of highways, if not before.
But his re-election campaign launched not by describing what he has transformed but by describing what he is still seeking to safeguard. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said. Before it is anything else, the national Democratic Party, for the ninth year running, is the not-Trump coalition. It is that first, and everything else second.
“The anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican Party places a unique burden on the opposition party,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. “When you have a movement trying to tear down the country’s fundamentals, your responsibility and your burden widens. I think you can feel that tugging at the party’s infrastructure. It’s really hard to protect democracy and the rule of law while also trying to fundamentally change the way in which government gives people a shot at the American dream.”
Democrats are aware that what has energized their voters most is not the better life that has been gained through Democratic wins, but the rights and certainties that have been lost to Republican victories. “I’ve definitely been in rooms where people are frustrated they’re spending so much of their time protecting things that our parents’ generation fought for,” Senator Booker, of New Jersey, said. “Union organizing rights. Women’s rights. Civil rights. Voting rights. A lot of the battles we’re fighting are battles where we feel we’re in the majority. That is frustrating, but also motivating.”
The difficulty for Democrats is how to balance the two sides of their modern mission. There are voters for whom the defense of liberal democracy and the restoration of reproductive rights are paramount. There are also voters who see politics more instrumentally — not as a titanic clash over the future of the Republic or fundamental rights, but as an imperfect and usually disappointing tool in their own bid to live a slightly better and easier life.
Democrats look and sound a bit different in the states they most fear losing, where those less ideological voters are the margin between victory and defeat. In 2018 — a banner year for Democrats — Jared Polis won the Colorado governorship by almost 11 percentage points. In 2022 — a much harder year for Democrats — he won re-election by nearly 20 points.
“Democrats can’t just be the party of protecting liberal democracy,” he told me. “That’s not the top voting issue for most Americans. For them, it’s really about how you’ll improve my life. We focus our agenda on reducing costs — particularly on reducing housing costs.”
In Michigan, the Democratic Party now holds both Senate seats, all statewide executive offices and both chambers of the State Legislature. Part of that, Lavora Barnes, Michigan’s Democratic Party state chairwoman, told me, is that the Republican Party became so extreme that it scared off many of its traditional voters. But part of it is that the Democratic Party molded itself into a shape that fit an anxious electorate.
“We have become almost the pragmatic party,” she said. “The party that recognizes the importance of building a government that supports its people and supporting that government in the process. If you look at what’s happened in Michigan and the sheer volume of work that this legislature was able to do in one year of this trifecta majority, it was about being practical.”
Democrats have won in Colorado and Michigan as well as in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a deliberate, understated way. “The experience of being in a really competitive state suggests that what the Democratic Party is, at its core, is very different than what you see on Twitter or in the national debates,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said. “Fundamentally, Democrats are the people who are in politics to make government work for people, which is a very old, New Deal-conception of what the Democratic Party is about.”
As Wikler watched this message win Tony Evers the governorship of Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer the governorship of Michigan, he came to a theory of why it works so well in places where Democrats have so recently struggled. “When you talk to inconsistent voters and swing voters, you see a very high level of cynicism that government can ever deliver,” he told me. “To be persuasive to them, you need to credibly describe what kind of change you can generate and on what kind of things. And it tends to be on things that people know the government already does. That’s how you wind up with Whitmer and Evers running on fixing the damn roads in 2018. Then they did fix the damn roads. And then they got re-elected.”
Wikler likes to tell a story about the huge piles of coal in downtown Green Bay, near the Fox River, that have sat there for decades. “It’s an eyesore,” he says. “No one likes driving by giant piles of coal. And the Democratic mayor of Green Bay and our Democratic governor and now the president — supported with a tiebreaking vote from Tammy Baldwin — pulled together the money to move the piles of coal out of Green Bay. Democrats are the party that gets rid of the giant piles of coal.”
But Democrats have notched these wins with a different kind of coalition than the one they once had. Democrats now typically win college-educated voters and lose voters without a college education. This is not how Democrats think of themselves. “We are the party of fighting for working families,” Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada told me. The working class is core to the Democratic identity even as it has ceased to be the core of the Democratic coalition.
“We need people who can really speak to those working-class voters, and we still don’t have enough of them in the Democratic Party,” Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me. “We don’t have enough people holding that microphone and comfortable holding that microphone.”
Republicans were once the party of voters who liked things pretty much as they were. Voters who thought America was already great. Now many of those voters back Democrats. Those are the voters who’ve made the Democrats’ anti-MAGA coalition into a winning force in American politics. But they have also placed a tension at the center of the party.
“We’re the party that now wants to preserve American-style democracy and make sure things work, and to that extent we become the party of the status quo,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii told me. “But there’s discomfort in that. As progressives, we are accustomed to saying things are not good enough and need to change. The coalition we have has people who basically want nothing to change and people who want everything to change.”
Biden and his allies are framing this election as order against chaos. The party that gets things done against the party that will make America come undone. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of the Republican polling firm Echelon Insights, believes that the Democrats are right that voters are craving stability. But she thinks they refuse to see that Trump is leading in many polls because voters believe that he is the one who might offer it. What Trump is pitching, she said, is a “push for order — ‘I am going to be the one who secures the border. I’m going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I’m going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices.’” To that list one might add Trump’s skepticism of America’s support for Ukraine and many voters’ dislike of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.
I’ve struggled with this portrayal of Trump as the candidate of stability. I doubt it can survive the gale-force winds of the actual campaign he will run, of the things people will hear and see from him when they tune in to the election. But I think Soltis Anderson is right when she says that Democrats are having trouble persuading voters of their central pitch: that they are the party of stability. It does not feel like a stable time. It is not Biden’s fault that the world is tumultuous. But that does not mean he will not be blamed for it.
Biden’s best argument is his actual record. Violent crime is falling, fast, and is now near a 50-year low. Inflation has fallen beneath 3 percent and done so without the recession economists overwhelmingly believed would come. Growth is strong, and rental prices are falling. More Americans than ever have health insurance, in part because of the boost Biden gave the Affordable Care Act. America is producing more energy than at any time in its history — and, despite the Biden administration’s focus on climate change, that includes oil, where America now leads the world in production.
Some of this reflects Biden’s policies and some of it reflects larger trends, like the world unkinking itself after the derangement and dislocation of the pandemic. But Biden has what so many candidates would give anything for: a brightening reality around which to build a message.
Biden’s worst argument is himself. The Democratic Party has been riven over the question of Biden’s age and whether it does, or should, matter. Whether it should matter is irrelevant. To voters, it clearly does matter. It undercuts the heart of the Democratic Party’s message. Democrats are selling themselves as the party of stability, the party that places competent, capable people in positions of power. But Biden is, himself, abnormal — he is the oldest sitting president ever and seems it — and he is not projecting to voters the competence and capability that his party is promising them.
There are ways a deft campaign might reframe this, but that argument needs to be made, and it needs to be made by Biden himself, who is, instead, doing far fewer real interviews and holding far fewer news conferences than his predecessors.
“I tell Democrats all the time, we have to run toward it, not run away from it,” Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said. “It’s front of mind for voters, and we can’t pretend that it isn’t. I think we have to make the case that when you get older, you do not just lose a step. You also gain wisdom, experience and capabilities, and that wisdom, experience and capability have been central to Biden’s success.”
At some point, though, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump will pass from the scene. And then some of the tensions in the Democratic Party that have been suppressed by their collision will re-emerge. One will be whether a party that represents those who like America as it is can also represent those who’ve been left out of this era of American prosperity. “As long as I am in public service, I will resist the Democratic Party becoming the party of normalcy,” Khanna told me. “We need to be the party of transformational change. A lot of Americans are frustrated with the system, and that anger is justified.”
The other tension will be what it means for the party that believes itself to represent the working class to be losing working-class voters. “It’s hard to say you’re the party of lower-income working families when they are rapidly leaving the ranks of your movement,” Murphy said. “I think our party has to squarely grapple with an identity crisis that will get worse as more and more low-income voters vote Republican even though we continue to claim those are the voters we are fighting for. Low-income voters get to decide for themselves who their chosen party is. If we don’t start listening to them about what they really want, we will no longer be the party of the working class, no matter how we label ourselves.”
For now, Biden is still trying to build his bridge. For now, Trump still stalks the Republic, uniting the normally fractious Democrats against his challenge. For now, the Democratic Party can perhaps be the party of both those who want transformational change and those who fear it. But for how long?
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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