Government shutdowns always hit federal workers the hardest—and they have political consequences as well. The current budget fight comes at a moment when the Democrats remain unpopular with their voters and stuck in an identity crisis. How can the Party get moving again? Plus:

Erin Neil
Newsletter editor

Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 didn’t have nearly the same shock factor as it did in 2016, but it did force Democrats across the country to reconcile with a question: What went wrong—again? It’s been almost a year since the election, and there’s no shortage of theories about where the Party faltered—and what it needs to do to win back voters. A few recent pieces from The New Yorker consider these questions and offer clues as to what the Democratic Party of the future might look like.

The Democrats still need a cohesive message.

The Party has failed to find both a singular message and messenger, Jon Allsop argues in his latest column. Some prominent figures have stood out in their opposition to Trump—the governors J. B. Pritzker, in Illinois, and Gavin Newsom, in California, and New York City’s Comptroller, Brad Lander, who has become a fierce advocate for immigrants. But for the most part, Allsop writes, “Democratic leaders are not meeting this dangerous moment with the focus it requires, and, if the Party as a whole is still widely perceived as feckless, that is in no small part self-inflicted.”

Many Democratic campaigns spent the 2024 election warning that Trump’s return to office would be an “existential threat” to democracy. While that message was certainly prescient—and one that the Party should not abandon entirely—Allsop also believes there’s room to adopt a more concrete platform against specific examples of élite corruption or the trampling of civil liberties. But regardless of the message, ultimately it must be a unified one, instead of the “factional hesitation” happening now.

Voters may need to feel that the candidates actually like them.

Communicating a clear and unified message to voters, however, might require different elements of the Party to support, even if reluctantly, a set of popular candidates. But what makes a candidate popular? In a recent interview with David Remnick, Ezra Klein argues, “one of my most strongly held views about politics is that the most important question for voters is not whether they like the politician but whether the politician likes them.” Klein believes that the worst part of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” speech, from 2016, was her use of the word “irredeemable” to describe Trump voters. “When you begin to talk like that, it’s a severing of political community,” Klein said. Instead, he believes that Barack Obama modelled the ideal type of politics, by offering a “very open-palmed approach.”

Cities and states might hold clues to where the Party is headed.

“It’s possible that the Democrats are assembling a new way of governing, not at the federal level but at the municipal one,” Bill McKibben writes in a recent piece about the success of progressive mayors and mayoral candidates such as Michelle Wu, in Boston, Zohran Mamdani, in New York City, and Katie Wilson, in Seattle. They don’t, McKibben argues, seem to be making empty promises on affordability or crime. Instead, this cohort of young politicians has figured out how to “talk about things that actually matter to the diverse pool of voters who will inevitably make up more and more of the electorate.”