Can Pragmatism Save the Democratic Party?

“Our intraparty opponents can inflict way more pain, very quickly, on a wide range of people,” WelcomePAC co-founder Liam Kerr told The Dispatch. “These activists—who don’t need to spend any time thinking about winning swing districts—have nothing better to do than text each other and get all whipped up if any Democrat gets out of line.”

Kerr explained as well that the Democratic Party’s recovery task is more “politically complicated than in the 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, he said, the party’s main issue was winning back a relatively homogenous bloc of Democrats who had voted for Reagan—“Reagan Democrats.” Today, the party has problems with multiple groups with gripes that sometimes overlap but are often different: younger voters, especially young men; Hispanics; and working class voters.