The Argument, 2026

On the one within the Democratic Party, and the one we need to make to voters

In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections, then-New York Times (now Rolling Stone) political reporter Matt Bai wrote a book, The Argument, about the conflict raging within the Democratic Party between its established powers and a cohort of bloggers, donors, and grassroots activists who had emerged, in large part, out of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.

The book’s title was a double entendre. Yes, Bai was writing about the internecine argument the Party was having — which, from flipping through its pages this week for the first time in years, was less about ideology than I remembered and more about tactics and style. But the big reveal, in the book’s final chapter, was that it was also about the substantive argument that Democrats were — or, to Bai’s point, weren’t — making to voters. Bai closes with an aging Mario Cuomo exhorting Democracy Alliance donors in Miami:

The main point of the speech, though, in between all the digressions, was to make these donors understand the transformative power of an argument…. The issues were too myriad and complex for voters to sort through and weigh, he said. It was simply too much to ask of them.

“So what happens?” Cuomo asked. His answer was not that you build the best voter turnout machine you can afford, or that you bring in a linguist to calibrate your message. “You seize the biggest idea you can,” he said, “the biggest idea you can understand. And this is what moves elections.”

He then went through, election by election, the larger arguments that had dominated every American presidential campaign since Watergate…. Which brought him to the present. “Now it’s 2006,” he said, “and we’re all rejoicing. Why? Because of Iraq. A gift. A gift to the Democrats. A lot of whom voted for the war anyway.”

“If Iraq as not an issue, then what issues do we have to talk about?” he asked them. “So far the Democrats have talked about what I think it’s fair to say are very timid proposals. The minimum wage? No one in this room would say that’s not a good idea. It’s a good idea. Lower prices for prescription drugs? Another good idea.” And yet, he went on sadly, none of these were grand enough to restore the soul of a party.

That closing scene with Cuomo père made a big impression on me when The Argument was published. The idea that you win elections with a powerful argument seemed at once obvious and what I wanted politics to be. And yet the 2008 election was won, more or less, without one. The primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was, in many ways, an extension of the factional dispute Bai chronicled, more about vibes than policy, and a victory for the insurgents; the general election outcome — a landslide by standards of today — driven by our nominee’s extraordinary talents, his tech-forward campaign, the Republican Party’s unpopularity after eight years of George W. Bush, and the 2008 financial crisis. And then, throughout the entirety of the post-Obama era, Donald Trump’s emergence — and a Democratic politics dominated by our opposition and reactions to him and the MAGA movement — relieved pressure on us to find anything “grand enough to restore the soul of a party.”

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about Bai, and Mario Cuomo’s counsel, a great deal as the Democratic Party descends into a nastier and nastier civil war. New York was an early front during last year’s mayoral race, in which Zohran Mamdani and the ascendant left scored a decisive victory over Andrew Cuomo. To ascribe the Mamdani victory solely to his skills as a politician or the organizing infrastructure of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is to miss that he took Mario Cuomo’s advice and that Mario Cuomo’s son did not.

Zohran Mamdani made an argument: “New York City is crazy expensive. I’m going to make it less expensive by freezing your rent and covering some basic expenses. I’m going to make billionaires pay for this. And I can explain it all in just a few words: ‘Freeze the rent. Fast and free buses. Universal childcare. Tax the rich.’”

There were problems, and not small ones, with this pitch. But it was clear, and it met the moment. Andrew Cuomo’s argument was, in effect, that Zohran Mamdani was scary and that he was not Zohran Mamdani. This was not a winning argument.

And yet, the Cuomo strategy lives on. I learned last week just how far back in my head my eyes are capable of rolling when I read in The New York Times that Third Way, the moderate think tank, had a secret plan to win the war: “a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.” SMDH, as the youngs might say. Or, as Mike Darner, Executive Director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted: “This new marketing strategy from Blockbuster will definitely take down Netflix.”

* * * * *

One thing about running for Congress in one of the most politically engaged and sophisticated districts in America is that you get a lot of advice. Perhaps the most common admonition I received — almost exclusively from voters who identified as moderates — was that my campaign was too focused on Donald Trump. I was making the argument to voters, based on my legislative track record and detailed plans for Congress, that I would be the most effective fighter against the Trump Administration; at least some of those voters were saying, “that is woefully insufficient: what are you for?”

This critique of Democratic Party messaging, more broadly, is actually a rare point of agreement between the left and center wings of the party: it is not enough to be against Trump. We must have an affirmative vision to improve the material conditions of people’s lives that voters can believe in.

That is the specific formulation I used on the campaign trail when talking about the failure of the Democratic Party to, in effect, make an argument, and it was an intentional one: An affirmative vision. A focus on the material conditions of people’s lives. Something both exciting and credible enough to believe in.¹

The left wing of the party has figured this out. (Whether they have a formula that can win general elections remains to be seen, and I suspect a verdict on that question will remain elusive even after November.) But the Democratic Party establishment most certainly has not. Mike Darner was being generous: moderates aren’t even making the argument for Blockbuster, merely — and self-defeatingly, at least in many primaries — that they aren’t Netflix. The notion that anyone would think that adding anti-leftism to anti-Trumpism would do anything other than make a weak argument weaker is, to me, astonishing.

* * * * *

What is the left’s argument? It goes something like this: A corrupt or, at least, negligent club of politicians and their patrons have failed to provide for your economic security, let alone prosperity, even amidst some of the most significant consolidation of wealth in human history. We will go to war with that club. In doing so, we will fix — through fundamental change — one of the most visible failures of the American social contract, our broken healthcare system. It was well-captured by Abdul El-Sayed’s remix of the Mamdani mantra: “Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for All.”

Directionally, this argument is right on the merits.

In the 2024 election cycle, $1.9 billion was spent in dark money, alone; lobbying is now a multi-billion dollar industry. No wonder Americans’ biggest fear is corrupt government officials. Not hard to convince the rational voter that government’s failure to do, well, much of anything is because the system has been bought.

Meanwhile, income and wealth inequality have skyrocketed over the last 20 years, our system of taxation remains stuck in an era in which wealth was generated as W2 income. And as Elon Musk serves as an avatar for the very rich getting very richer, anyone with teenage kids is wondering what on earth those kids are going to do for a living once AI has taken all the jobs, and a third of Americans are delaying or skipping needed healthcare appointments or treatments because they can’t afford them in a system where something that should be a human right is tied to increasingly tenuous relationships between employers and employees.

I think it is also directionally right on the politics, and the diagnosis, at least, is not particularly partisan. It is far from complete (the complexity of what ails the American sense of wellbeing is well-captured by this Derek Thompson piece), and there is more or less seriousness to the various policy prescriptions that derive from the argument, but the argument hangs together and it makes intuitive sense. Perhaps most important, no one doubts the convictions of its proponents. (More on this in a minute.)

And so it’s all there: Affirmative vision. Improving the material conditions of people’s lives. Excitement and credibility sufficient to inspire belief. The left’s argument meets at least this particular test.

The moderate answer to this? Hard to say, right?

* * * * *

I can squint hard and see two.

The first is what we might call light left. Yes to campaign finance reform, but with just a little less zeal (and continued reliance on big donors, in part because grassroots donors are generally not on offer at scale to moderates, at least in primaries). Yes to a more progressive tax code, but maybe not the paradigm shift that the American economic system of 2026 demands to get back to a semblance of fairness. And yes to reforming systems like healthcare — but again, we need not turn the tables upside down.

This has been the platform of every Democratic presidential nominee in the 21st Century. Matt Yglesias writes extensively, and often persuasively, on how moderate versions of progressive ideas do better with the broad electorate. I’m not going to take that question up here. But suffice it to say that if moderates can’t win primaries, it doesn’t matter much.

The second, fresher argument on the center-left, which hasn’t (as far as I know) yet been comprehensively adopted by any serious candidate, is “abundance”: Many of our problems can be tied to shortage, structural solutions can be found in relieving those shortages, and there are surprisingly cost effective ways of doing so, including by clearing obstacles to progress that do not serve the public interest. I am not a fan of the brand, but am solidly on board with much of the thesis, particularly when it comes to housing. (In general, I think Marc Dunkelman’s framing of what we think of as abundance policymaking in his outstanding book, Why Nothing Works, as a question of top down vs. bottom up planning and action, and the need for a recalibration in the direction of Hamiltonian top-downism, is spot on.)

The light left argument is neither sufficiently exciting nor credible to get people to believe in it, with all that the word connotes. It is not exciting for the same reason it is incomplete: because it diagnoses what’s broken correctly and then fails to prescribe solutions that meet the depth of the brokenness. Similarly, it is not credible because it is hard to persuade people you actually want to achieve — let alone will achieve — significant change when you start out with a more mealy-mouthed version of what the guy on your left is saying, even if that’s because you’re being more intellectually honest. (Trust me, I know the frustration!) I also agree with Hamilton Nolan that it reflects a bad legislative strategy, and voters intuit this:

Even if we grant the moderates the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their sincerity, we do not have to grant them anything when it comes to their skills as negotiators. They are masters of bargaining against themselves. Their most reliable move is to cede ground before the battle even starts. While they imagine that picking a more modest starting point marks them as realists, it actually marks them as marks. They give their opponents something for nothing. It is not necessary for the other side to wrestle them as far. If the moderates had had the courage to ask for everything rather than an increment, they would, after all the tussling was over, land closer to where they actually wanted to be. This basic principle of negotiation is clear to anyone who has had to struggle for something they need. But since moderates need nothing, and approach politics with a bias towards stasis rather than progress, they are prone to the pitfall of giving up on political substance in exchange for keeping the struggle itself as genteel as possible.

The problem with abundance is that the path it maps from A to B, when it comes to improving the material conditions of people’s lives, is long and winding. There is a tall stack of research that more or less incontrovertibly demonstrates that increasing housing supply will bring down rents over time (shockingly, housing is not the sole commodity immune to the law of supply and demand!), but try explaining that to voters who are barely hanging on today. You are proposing complex policy changes, to indirectly spur housing construction, which will occur years from now, eventually provide homes to people who do not know who they are, and deliver a marginal reduction in cost for others, mostly when they move.

In this way, abundance is not just substantively incomplete, it is politically insufficient in a big way. (It is also not mutually exclusive from antimonopoly policy — quite the opposite — a topic for a future Substack.) I was glad that housing supply proposals found a place in Kamala Harris’s platform, and even more prominently in Keir Starmer’s (RIP), but neither candidate seemed to feel it was worth talking about these plans much on the campaign trail because, really, no one cared. To be clear, as someone who thinks this is a critical policymaking direction for our future, I view this as a big problem. But it is not at all surprising that when poll-tested against traditional economic populism, abundance got housed. (Pun intended.)

* * * * *

It is also worth considering what convinces voters that politicians mean what they say, and on the role that enemies play in developing an argument that people can believe in.

There is a cheap and destructive way of thinking about this, which is that every story needs a villain, facts and fairness be damned. This is too often the modus operandi of the ascendant left. It may win elections but it is deeply unhealthy for our politics, and anyone who wants to think of themselves as a progressive should think about how much division they are willing to stoke to win votes.

There is a much more serious and important way of thinking about enemies, however. In government and politics, when things are broken, there are people who benefit from the brokenness. The more broken, generally, the bigger the benefits and beneficiaries. When you try to make a fix, they will fight you. If you win, they may hate you. Long ago, in discussions with colleagues about policy change, I took to saying, “If we haven’t pissed anyone off, we probably haven’t done anything.”

Voters understand this intuitively. They may understand it even better than politicians, because politicians studiously avoid pissing people off and of course do not want to consider the possibility that we are doing nothing. And voters, in turn, attach credibility to arguments, and the candidates making those arguments, that come with enemies, provided they are the right enemies. When a candidate is actually willing to take a risk, pay a price, their argument will carry much greater weight.

I will grant that there may not be a ton of difference, in practice, between the two different ways of thinking about enemies. I would like to believe that voters can tell the difference. But within the Democratic Party, it is candidates of the left that have both kinds of enemies — the fabricated ones and the well-earned ones — while arguments coming from the more moderate side of the factional dispute seem to come enemy-free. It is another reason those arguments are weak.

* * * * *

If you’ve gotten this far, you may be expecting my proposed argument, a unified field theory for Democratic victory. You will be disappointed. Not only do I not have one, if I did, I would suggest you take it with a grain of salt, writing as I am from the cozy confines of the Upper West Side, where I first learned to drive a car at the age of 34.

But I do think those who are not comfortable with some of the nominees emerging this primary season would do well to take a good, hard look at the argument the left is making, and why it is working as well as it is — instead of wringing our hands about the s-word, trying to convince Democrats they’ve got more to fear from within the Party than they do from a right-wing regime that’s taken us a good part of the way down the path to fascism.

Americans are worried, with good reason, about a rapidly transforming economy that may leave them behind and a political system that may be so irretrievably broken as to be unable to do a damn thing about it. Anyone interested in prevailing in a Democratic primary on a big stage, or in building a durable political coalition for the party, must make, and win, an argument that they know and will do what it takes to deliver fundamental change.

1. I tried, with limited success, during my campaign to communicate a plan that I called a 21st Century New Deal (or, in other instances, a New Deal for a New Generation; or, in this Daily News op-ed, a mashup of the two monikers, an inadvertent window into the difficulty we were having making an argument). The idea was that the Federal government should guarantee that every American can get their first job, their first home, and afford their first year of parenthood. Pithy, isn’t it? This longtime policy technocrat struggled a bit knowing that there were more than a few details to be worked out, but I held onto another great piece of political wisdom from Mario Cuomo’s — the one about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose.