Eliot Wertheimer is an intern at Searchlight. He is a rising sophomore at Tufts University.

If my 10-year-old self knew how few people cared about gun violence in 2026, he’d be furious.

I was in fifth grade when I went to Portland, Maine’s March For Our Lives protest. A few years later, I walked out of history class and marched to Susan Collins’ office after the Uvalde shooting.

I called for “banning all guns” and voting out the members of Congress who didn’t share my maximalist positions. I knew this was an extreme approach, but after witnessing such horrible shootings at schools much like my own, I believed such action needed to be taken.

The peak of the gun control movement happened in 2018, when 200,000 people marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The March For Our Lives protest called to force lawmakers to back restrictive gun control laws, and with public opinion seemingly on our side, legislative progress seemed possible.

Since then, however, momentum has fallen. Gun control was one of the least salient issues in the 2024 election. This election cycle, even though ghost guns are surging and gun-inflicted suicides are increasing, it’s hard to find a single candidate talking about gun control.

But just because gun control has fallen out of the public eye, it doesn’t mean that a future Congress can’t take action.

In a recent polling survey, Searchlight asked voters how they feel about gun control and whether Democrats and Republicans can find any common ground on common-sense legislation.

While gun control is not a particularly salient issue, it’s not all bad news. Our polling found that 69% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans and 64% of Independents, believe it should be harder to buy a gun. Even a majority of gun owners (56%) agree with this statement.

Capitalizing on this support means reckoning with the nuances of public opinion.

When asked to list the single-biggest reason why Americans should own guns, the overwhelming majority of respondents listed self-defense, constitutional rights, and hunting. Only 10% of respondents did not support civilian gun ownership. That’s a fact gun control activists need to reckon with, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pass gun control legislation in the future.

It’s time to revamp our movement

For too long, the left has been quick to jump on mass shootings as justification for sweeping reforms few Americans support. In doing this, we squander the political opportunity these horrible shootings create and polarize an issue that should command broad-based support.

Perhaps the most infamous example of unpopular and impractical gun control proposals came when Beto O’Rourke said: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.”

I remember hearing that answer and trying to convince my mom to vote for him. She was dismissive, saying “No, Eliot, he has no chance of winning.” As we think about the best measures for addressing gun violence, we need less seventh-grade-Eliot attitude and more Eliot’s mom-attitude.

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That being said, the movement has reached some policy success. In 2022, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded background checks, school safety programs, and mental health services. Unfortunately, much of its funding has been slashed by the Trump administration.

But the operative word here is bipartisan. We will need buy-in from some Republicans, Independents, and gun owners if we’re going to pass any more meaningful legislation. And to ensure this legislation is durable, we will need to emphasize a new set of policies and messaging that avoids alienating those with cultural values far different from my own.

There is still a path towards common-sense gun reform

Our polling found broad support for a series of large-scale reforms: enacting tough-on-crime public safety programs, requiring the safe storage of guns, and repealing the law giving broad immunity to gun manufacturers.

Together, these policies reflect an agenda capable of uniting Americans around effective gun violence prevention policies.

Of these policy reforms, increasing prison sentences for people who illegally have guns was the most strongly supported, with backing from 77% of voters, including 81% of Democrats, 78% of Republicans, and 71% of Independents.

This gets at one of the core ideological conflicts inside the gun control movement. We want to deter gun violence, but because we live under the progressive tent, we’re wary of tough-on-crime policies. This polling shows that harsher punishments for illegal gun owners actually command wide support across the political spectrum. While severe punishments are not the most effective way to deter homicides, it does point to the fact that voters are open to more enforcement. When district attorneys refuse to prosecute illegal guns, they’re on the wrong side of the public, and they’re making their community less safe.

The next most strongly supported policy is requiring guns kept at home to be locked in a safe, which 74% of voters — including 89% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans, 68% of Independents, and even 51% of gun owners — strongly or somewhat support.

Easy access to a gun in the house triples the likelihood of suicide and doubles the likelihood of homicide and fatal accidents. Requiring these guns to be locked in a safe not only reduces this threat, but toes the line between infringing on a constitutional right millions of Americans care about and keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

Across the country, 26 states have enacted some sort of Child Access Prevention (CAP) law that holds parents criminally accountable if a child accesses a gun because it wasn’t stored properly. These laws have been found to decrease suicide rates by 14%, and those that require guns to be stored unloaded in safes have an even greater effect.

The final strongly supported policy is making it easier to sue gun companies that sell guns to those who aren’t allowed to have them, which a supermajority of voters — including a slight plurality of Republicans — strongly or somewhat support.

The Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was passed in 2005, and it gave unique, broad immunity to gun manufacturers. The result has been a chilling effect on all lawsuits aimed at the gun manufacturers. Repealing this law would not significantly reduce gun homicides, but it would force gun manufacturers to face more accountability when their guns malfunction or are knowingly distributed to people who use them for mass shootings.

Building a big tent for gun control

Finally, it is essential that all measures to limit gun violence and improve public safety are underpinned by a protection of legal and safe gun ownership.

The least popular policy in our polling was taking away guns from those who purchased one legally, but are no longer allowed to own one because of new laws. Combine this with the polling result showing 10% of Americans do not support civilian gun ownership, and it’s clear that public opinion here is not in favor of the most maximalist gun control positions.

While the issue’s low national importance is at times pointed to as the reason for the lack of legislative progress, the messaging surrounding it is also to blame. In that same poll, we found that traditional pro-gun control arguments weakened support for stricter gun reform by 14 points. Two separate partisan interpretations of these facts decreased support by 20 and 21 points, respectively.

Ultimately, any form of federal gun control will need to pass through the Senate, which means it will need the support of senators who represent culturally conservative states with strong cultures of gun ownership.

A member of Congress from New York City can appease seventh-grade Eliot’s views on guns, but Senate candidates in Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska (all states that had Democratic senators during Democrats’ 2009 supermajority) will likely not. They should listen to their constituents’ actual views on guns and champion the policies supported by a supermajority of Americans.

Though this heterodox strategy would not have appealed to me 10 years ago, embracing a big tent on gun issues avoids fueling the backlash that has hindered our movement’s progress — and puts us back on a path towards winning.

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Once again, the Democratic Party has woken up on a Wednesday morning with a hangover and an identity crisis. The party is a sophomore in college, and it has two more years to find any sort of clarity.

This primary season has been a constant cycle of setting, unraveling, and resetting narratives about which faction is in charge of the party. Before the polls closed last night in Michigan, it seemed like the factional Left was going to make their most definitive statement yet. Then, El-Sayed’s projected near-twenty-point victory ended up being a single percentage point. The Michigan Democratic primary electorate is closely divided; this was not a definitive ideological mandate.

The party and much of the media covering these factional debates are hungry for a definitive statement about who controls the Democratic Party. And this is understandable; it’s been a good long while since there’s been a strong party leader to settle intra-party differences. Give or take ten years, depending on how you count it.

President Obama left as a popular lame duck. His chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, lost a devastating general election. President Biden beat the Left, empowered them to set his domestic policy agenda once he became President, alienated them over his policy towards Israel, and then helped set the conditions for Donald Trump’s return to power.

Each of these events has contributed to today’s state of fracture. The party is rudderless, has been for a long time, and everyone is searching through the electoral tea leaves to gain some clarity about which faction should be in charge.

This is a fool’s errand.

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This primary season has revealed some answers, namely a rising anti-establishment sentiment and an electorate that is increasingly wary of special interest groups and corporate influence. But when you look at the actual election results, the factional Left is still quite fractional. Insurgent House primaries in Colorado, New York, and Michigan have gotten a lot of media attention. But there are still many examples like Wesley Bell, who fended off his Left challenger in St. Louis last night. On the Senate side, El-Sayed is the only real example of a factional Left candidate competing in a critical swing-state election.

Dig into the demographics of these elections and the story becomes even more muddied. The Left has run on an agenda that is supposed to appeal to more working-class voters, but in states like New York and Michigan, their base is primarily the educated and well-off.

There just isn’t a neat narrative to describe any of this.

I think we should all get ready to be satisfied with being unsatisfied, and for a good long while too. That’s because the debate over what the Democratic Party is, the policies it prioritizes, and who should lead it is still very much an open question. The Searchlight Institute is working to shape this conversation, and ultimately, a more definitive answer will come when presidential candidates start competing in the 2028 primaries.

Even then, the leader who emerges could be ideologically left on economics, while moving to the center on issues like energy and immigration — two positions where the Democratic Party was once definitively very left-wing.

What do you label a future Democratic Party leader who rejects 2020-era litmus tests over issues like border decriminalization and fracking bans, while also embracing a form of Medicare for All, a wealth tax on billionaires, and a pledge to end all military aid to Israel? Do we have the right vocabulary to describe this possible outcome?

Thus far, I say no. According to most media outlets, the battle over the Democratic Party is still being fought between the Left and Center. I don’t think either ideological label aptly describes the factional war. The candidates running this primary cycle have been quite ideologically heterodox. This applies to candidates across the factional divide.

“Moderates” like James Talarico and Josh Turek regularly bash big corporations and billionaires on the campaign trail. At the same time, the face of the factional Left, Abdul El-Sayed, rarely mentioned climate policy and modified his Medicare for All plan to allow for workers and their families to keep their insurance — a policy change that is a pivot away from Bernie Sanders’ health care plan, which has long been the benchmark on the Left.

I mention these examples not to nitpick the media’s coverage or to completely dismiss simple ideological labels. Each of these candidates can still be generalized into the Left or moderate camp. Strategically, the best move for a candidate like El-Sayed would be to moderate and explicitly court swing voters who have deeply held conservative positions on issues like immigration, crime, and energy policy.

But everybody needs to dampen their expectation that a clear factional victory will happen this November or even the November two years after that. America’s enduring and inescapable ideological diversity will ensure that both sides will need to compromise if any enduring governing majority can form.

I know this fact is uncomfortable for some people to admit. The Left, in particular, built a political project assuming that there was a secret majority of voters that hated billionaires, wanted to fight climate change, and opposed any form of order at the border. This coalition does not exist. By the same token, there isn’t a secret coalition that loves data centers, unfettered support of Israel, and is completely satisfied with the American health care system.

In the grand scheme of American history, this ideological diversity is quite modest. We’ve been far more divided, and we’ve still kept the faith. Walt Whitman, writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, has some words that apply to today’s fractious Democratic Party and the country at large.

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem… Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations… Here is the life of the Republic.”

There hasn’t been a winner of the factional battle this primary season, but rather an assortment of wins for the factional Left, heterodox outsiders, and yes, even a few bog-standard establishment politicians. Whoever eventually takes control of the Democratic Party and establishes a durable governing majority must unite this “teeming nation of nations.” That’s one of the oldest rules in American politics. And it’s a good one.

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There’s a lot of speculation about what AI-induced job loss will look like in the future. Will AI reduce demand for entry-level work? Will AI reduce the white-collar wage premium? Will AI cause entire industries to simply… vanish?

These are all valid questions, and there are many AI experts and economists working on them. But as an economist who studies labor markets and unemployment programs, I think there is also more research we should be conducting today to make sure we’re ready for a variety of potential job loss scenarios.

As I wrote last month, the existing evidence shows that public sector reemployment programs, which are the exact programs that would need to be scaled up to help solve a potential AI job apocalypse, are not particularly impactful. How do we help policymakers design new programs that could be more effective?

The answer to this problem and many others quite like it could be found if we dedicated more resources to understanding disruption in the labor market. I believe this work would be best accomplished through a coordinated research program that operates inside the Department of Labor.

I’m as interested in the speculative essays and podcasts about AI job loss as everyone else. But it’s time to think critically about how to create more government-backed institutions that are designed to actually solve these future problems.

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The questions we need to answer

Before I explain the proposal for this coordinated federal research program, let’s look at some high-level labor market questions that a research institution like this could help answer.

• How is AI impacting the labor market? So far, AI seems to have had a limited effect on the labor market. But it’s unclear whether this will always be the case, or if AI is having an effect that is hard to detect. Most of the estimates of AI effects rely on a measure of “AI exposure” by occupation, but we could simply not have an accurate understanding of the occupations most exposed to AI.

• Why has US employment fallen behind other nations? Two decades ago, the US labor market was the envy of other large countries, exceeding the employment rates of most of our peers. Today, that situation has reversed, and the US lags behind peer countries. That means a future of AI-induced unemployment could hit the US especially hard. Why is this happening? How can we fix it? These are important questions to answer, even outside the context of artificial intelligence.

• Why is unemployment duration increasing? Even though the unemployment rate is low and stable, unemployment duration—how long an individual is unemployed for—keeps rising. The average unemployment duration is currently 25.5 weeks, and it had never exceeded 21 weeks before 2007. This is an increasing problem for both the unemployed and potential employers, and I have not seen a satisfying answer for why.

Each of these challenges is important—but we do not have the proper institutions focused on solving them. Instead, they are dealt with on a piecemeal basis by individual academic economists, think tank staff, and journalists. Each of these players uses data from government surveys or administrative records, but there’s no pipeline that directly leads from problem to diagnosis to solution.

A coordinated research program for AI job loss

Imagine if the government looked at these issues and created new institutions dedicated to addressing them. This would need to extend beyond academics examining a problem and actually empowering the builders and tinkerers to solve them.

For example, right now the federal government simply observes the increase in length of unemployment. Certain academics and labor market analysts propose theories for why this is happening, but the problem continues to go unsolved. A coordinated federal government research program could both observe this problem and fund and restructure reemployment programs to be more impactful.

We already have examples of this working on a smaller scale. The Department of Labor funds states to run “Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment” (RESEA) programs. This is a program modeled after the success of a similar program in Nevada, which reduced unemployment in the state by over three weeks on average.

RESEA started as a pilot program in 2005, serving 77,000 UI claimants in its first year. Today, nearly all states run a RESEA program, serving over 1.2 million UI claimants. The Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office works with states to help them evaluate the success of these programs.

RESEA is arguably the most evidence-mandated federal program — the problem is that it is still backwards-looking. States can evaluate new ideas, but there’s no guarantee that the successful programs will be scaled up or that ineffective ones will be eliminated. The Chief Evaluation Office is constrained; it can provide evaluation support and technical assistance, but is not in a position to scale successes or kill failed models.

To prepare for an unprecedented labor market disruption, the Chief Evaluation Office needs a significantly larger mandate with the power to actually ensure that successful labor market interventions are scaled across the country.

There are existing coordinated research programs this could be modeled after, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA has been used to push forward the development of new technologies that would be useful for defense. Critical inventions like the GPS and the internet all benefited from DARPA-coordinated research.

Following the DARPA model, project managers within the Department of Labor’s coordinated research program would be empowered to identify, support, and expand programs that have been proven to assist reemployment. For example, if Nevada’s RESEA program was able to reduce unemployment duration by three weeks, more focused experimentation and milestone payments for success could identify specific mechanisms in the program that assist reemployment even more.

Instead of each state experimenting with ideas in near isolation, project managers would fund specific experiments to improve program operations. This could be continued grants to states, but could also include for-profit, non-profit, and academic partners.

The key is making sure that evidence-backed reemployment programs are acted upon. A successful program results in more funding and scaling; a program without success gets cut. This sort of framework allows for iterative, goal-directed research, rather than an ad-hoc program evaluation process.

While the impacts of AI so far are limited, we could be on the verge of unprecedented labor market disruption. A coordinated research program embedded inside the Department of Labor could serve as a critical institution to advise policymakers on the programs that will be needed to solve future issues in the labor market. There’s a lot of speculation about what AI-induced job displacement might look like, but this is a tangible step that could be taken today to solve the problems of the future.

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When Politico’s Jonathan Martin traveled to North Dakota over the Fourth of July weekend for the opening of the new Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library, he sat down with three prominent local Republicans—Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Gov. Kelly Armstrong, and Sen. Kevin Cramer. Together, they worked to place Roosevelt’s big government politics in the framework of today’s GOP.

The conversation was very revealing.

Roosevelt, Martin noted, had subscribed to a brand of populism that was, at its core, incredibly bullish on robust government action. The Colonel spent his nearly two terms combating the power of robber barons, fighting to strengthen the military, erecting dams throughout the West, laying the groundwork for the National Parks System, and building the Panama Canal—all of which suggests that Roosevelt’s populism extolled the role of the public sector.

President Trump, of course, is also known as a populist. So Martin asked his subjects to square the circle: Doesn’t populism sorta point towards growing the government?

Cramer wasn’t having it: “Roosevelt,” the senator explained, “looked at government as a solution, whereas the president looks at government as a problem,” at which point Governor Armstrong interjected with a laugh: “And we have 140 years of proving President Trump right.” In essence, the three modern-day Republicans retreated into the old Reagan vernacular. As the Gipper famously argued: “The nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

At the same time, however, in New York Harbor 1,500 miles to the east, Vice President JD Vance was delivering a very different July Fourth message. Far from painting a picture of oppressive government gone bad, he was ruminating on the long story of James Buchanan Eads, a self-trained civil engineer who worked with the federal government to build the Ironclad gunboats the Union commissioned during the Civil War to erect the Mississippi River jetty system commissioned by Congress, and to construct the first major bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis.

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Vance went on to regale listeners with a second story—this one centering on the son of German immigrants named Henry Kaiser. A high-school dropout, Kaiser abandoned a stockroom job in Utica, New York, to eventually find his way to Spokane, Washington where he founded a business that helped build the Hoover Dam, vast stretches of highway across the Western United States, and the shipyards required to replace the Navy vessels lost at Pearl Harbor during the Second World War—projects, we should note, that were financed by the federal government.

Vance was focused on James Buchanan Eads and Henry Kaiser because their stories highlight individual ingenuity. In the spirit of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, they harkened to a notion that, as the vice president put it, “our history is one of people carving a great civilization out of the wilderness.” That, he argued, is what makes America great—the reality that “everything that we have done, everything that we have done as a country, we have done together, not as citizens divided against each other, but as a common people working towards a common future.”

That said, hanging over Vance’s argument, but never addressed directly, was the element that tied all the projects he celebrated together: the presence of public authority.

Eads and Kaiser weren’t ensconced in cabins off Walden Pond. Their work was done hand-in-hand with a government that sometimes funded the work, and at other times explicitly made it possible. Government was contracting for the projects, or providing necessary permits, or financing the various endeavors. However much he tried to avoid saying so explicitly, Vance was nakedly making an argument for big government.

Which just begs the question: Which of these two conflicting visions represents the true and only conservatism? If bureaucrats and bureaucracy are forever standing in the way of America’s wellbeing, as so many Reagan-style conservatives continue to argue, how can Vance’s litany of examples of our national greatness be suffused with examples of government action?

Much as Republicans might want to elide past these distinctions, the reality is that the two narratives are fundamentally incompatible. You can’t make the Mississippi navigable, or build the Hoover Dam, or construct the nation’s expressways, or build up our Navy if, as the North Dakotans clearly articulated, government is a scourge, any more than you can make a ham and cheese sandwich without having bread, ham and cheese.

Some on the right have argued that “abundance” represents a nose under the tent for conservatism within progressive circles—that the popularity of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, among other literature pointing in the same direction, reflects a realization among Democrats that government is too often a hindrance. But as Klein recently argued, “abundance” is bigger than cutting superfluous red tape—it’s about green-lighting the sorts of projects and initiatives that would serve the public interest.

As Vance’s chosen examples reveal, those projects and initiatives, far from being the exclusive province of the private sector, often begin with, or depend on, public authority. And conservatives are at a loss when trying to metabolize the competing impulses that were expressed by the North Dakotans and the vice president.

This dissonance is playing out in real-time with how the right is handling the opportunities available through renewable energy resources. We on the left are so convinced they’re in the bag for Big Oil—and, to be sure, those accusations bear out in some instances—that we’ve failed to notice they don’t know which side of the debate over domestic energy production they want to be on.

Just look at what’s happening in Ohio and Texas, two places in which public authority controlled by the GOP has been used both to propel and to block the clean energy transition.

Texas leverages its state authority to explicitly prohibit counties from imposing regulations on unincorporated land. That is, even if a community objects to how someone who owns land wants to use it—leasing their land to, say, utility-scale solar—the local government is precluded from imposing land-use restrictions that might get in the way.

Ohio, taking a very different tack, passed legislation to empower local government to upend new development. Incensed that solar and wind developers were leasing land from local farmers on which they would place turbines or solar panels, conservatives in Columbus passed a law, Senate Bill 52, which explicitly licenses counties to weigh in. Unsurprisingly, dozens of counties had enacted bans on either solar or wind farms, or both.

Now, any given conservative can be forgiven for taking either view to a point—but no one should be given license to argue that they are ideologically coherent.

Those of us on the left are conflicted too, in as much as we both envision government stepping in where the market fails, and we worry about coercive government officials, a la Robert Moses.

But as the debate over “a liberalism that builds” illustrates, we’re trying to strike the right balance. From the progressive movement’s founding in the late 19th century, those wanting to use government for good have struggled to centralize power so public authority is more effective, or to diffuse it so it’s less coercive.

In my book, I distill this debate to our Hamiltonian instinct to build power up into institutions that can resolve “tragedies of the commons” and our Jeffersonian fear that those same institutions will bulldoze powerless communities.

This tension serves as a backdrop for one of the central debates inside the Democratic Party and was explored in books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Yoni Appelbaum and Jennifer Pahlka, as well as forthcoming titles from Adam Jentleson, Diego Zambrano, and Nick Bagley.

Needless to say, these debates are not happening inside the Republican Party.

There are certainly examples of Republicans advancing legislation that aligns with the Abundance movement. The recent bipartisan federal housing law is one piece of evidence, and of course, Texas’ state preemption counts as another. But Vance’s speech hardly makes the GOP the party of abundance. Trump’s executive branch is too busy cutting funding for critical research and coercing states and localities to adopt policies they abhor (for example, on wind farms) to have any credibility in the abundance movement. Go even further into GOP history and you find Reagan’s fear-mongering that the government is wholly and entirely evil.

It’s not our job to point the GOP out of its jam. Nevertheless, all of us underneath the big tent need to offer a more compelling answer of our own. We can all agree that we don’t need another Robert Moses. We do, however, need a public sector capable of harnessing American ingenuity to build vast new transmission systems for clean energy, much more housing, and the sort of modern infrastructure befitting a nation as prosperous and promising as our own.

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What do James Carville and Abdul El-Sayed have in common?

More than you might think.

On a recent call with donors, El-Sayed said he was going to treat an opponent as an “ogre on a pike” to intimidate others into adopting his preferred positions. “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” he said.

Meanwhile, James Carville sought to gatekeep from another corner of the party. “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” Carville said, speaking of recent victories by DSA-backed candidates. They “have no place in the Democratic party,” he said, adding, “I’m not in that fucking political party.”

In their own way, Carville and El-Sayed each revealed a deep commitment to enforcing ideological purity. According to their strategy, Democrats can win more power by shrinking the tent.

They’re both wrong. Winning the broad-based power we need to defeat the rise of fascism and enact the sweeping change required to keep it at bay means building a big tent. Rather than enforcing purity from new angles, we should embrace big tent absolutism, an approach to politics where the only litmus test is that there are no litmus tests.

The point of politics is to enact policies that help people. Beneath all the posturing, everyone from El-Sayed and Claire Valdez to Jared Golden and Adam Gray is a vote for an agenda, and they will come together somewhere around 75 percent of the time. In a democracy, the question of whether their views are acceptable or out of bounds is for the voters of their states and districts to decide. For Democrats writ large, the strategic question that matters most is whether we will be able to enact big change or be forced to settle for tinkering at the margins. That comes down to how much power we can win, and building a big tent is the only way to win in more places.

The key to big tent absolutism is to embrace the best approach to winning in the states and districts we need to build lasting power. Just as a moderate couldn’t win a primary in New York City’s “Commie Corridor,” we know that candidates with a heterodox mix of policies are more likely to win the swing and red areas we need to expand the map. In those places, there is simply no getting around the mathematical reality that winning a general election means persuading large numbers of Trump voters to support a Democrat or an independent.

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To see how ideologically diverse coalitions are necessary to enact generational change, look no further than the Democratic supermajorities that defined the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Democratic supermajority that supported the New Deal included everyone from self-avowed white supremacists like Richard Russell to Vito Marcantonio, a known communist. In the 1960s, LBJ leaned on staunch segregationist Wilbur Mills to shepherd Medicare through the Ways and Means Committee. In the 2000s, the Affordable Care Act couldn’t spare a single 60-vote defection, which meant holding together a coalition that included Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich on one end of the spectrum, and senators like Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Mary Landrieu on the other.

Putting the challenges we face today in historical perspective also reveals that the tradeoffs we are being asked to grapple with pale in comparison to those of past eras. Far from accommodating white supremacists, Democrats today are simply being asked to embrace compatriots who share the goal of, say, universal health care, but have different ideas of how to achieve it. There is nothing abnormal about seeing DSA members like Melat Kiros caucus alongside Josh Gottheimer this January. Rather, what’s unusual is that so many factional combatants on all sides seem to regard this as intolerable.

This brings me to another key tenet of big tent absolutism: everyone in the tent is allowed—indeed, encouraged—to say what they think about everyone else inside the tent, out loud and in public.

That means it’s entirely fair game for Democrats to express their vehement disagreement with the DSA, especially on extreme positions like prison abolition and defunding the police. This is healthy! It accurately signals to voters that the DSA represents a small minority of the party, and allows politicians in competitive races to define themselves on their own terms.

As I write in my upcoming book, Supermajority, one of the biggest mistakes Democrats made in 2020 was not being more vocal in their denouncement of the defund the police movement. President Biden took weeks to explicitly express his opposition during his presidential campaign, and even then he did not lean into the disagreement as a way to define himself to voters. Biden later admitted to knowing that it was bad politics for down-ballot Democrats who were trying to win over swing voters. In a leaked recording after the election, he said the GOP used “defund the police” to “beat the hell out of us.” The Left is certainly not afraid to communicate these kinds of disagreements, routinely calling their fellow Democrats everything from corrupt to genocide apologists.

For candidates who are concerned that the DSA will be the same down-ballot drag on Democrats as “defund the police,” the answer is simple: distance yourself, loudly and proudly. Those adjectives are important: don’t say what you think quietly and apologetically, say it with your full chest and embrace the constructive conflict it sparks. In a world where attention is hard to win, that kind of conflict reliably breaks through and signals to voters that you are the kind of politician who will think for themselves—a “different kind of Democrat.”

In the past few weeks, the most compelling articulation of big tent absolutism came not from a moderate, but from Mayor Zohran Mamdani: “If they are Democrats and they run as Democrats and they win as Democrats, then they should be a part of the Democratic Party. There are people with whom I have vehement disagreements with on any number of topics. But if we can find a place of agreement, that’s what I’m going to focus that relationship on.”

Another clear statement of the idea came from Congressman Pat Ryan, who represents a New York swing district. Ryan wants the Democratic Party to be a big tent, and is fine collaborating with anyone in the party: “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and I have done a bunch together… We don’t agree on every single thing, but we’re focusing on the things we agree on, and people have really responded to that.”

Ultimately, Democrats face a simple choice. They can wring their hands and complain about this or that faction, and preen about litmus tests. Or they can be big tent absolutists. In a country as ideologically diverse as the United States, narrow majorities will never be enough to enact durable change on the size and scale we all desire. We need a supermajority, and the only way to win one is to build a big tent.

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Mikey Dickerson was the first administrator of the US Digital Service under President Barack Obama and now leads Searchlight’s Tech Viaduct — a team of technologists working to develop a gameplan for a future federal administration that is committed to effective government service delivery.

Earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched New York’s new Public Interest Technology (PIT) crews — five teams of local government technologists working to improve the city’s digital public services. It’s a much-needed bit of good news that has triggered a huge outpouring of support and enthusiasm in the “public interest technology” community, including from the Tech Viaduct team. It also raises the urgency of our work to reach a clear-eyed understanding of what we have all learned in the last decade of “digital service” reform.

As veterans of the last two Democratic administrations, we are acutely familiar with the many obstacles government puts in the way of doing the right thing. And we know how to circumvent them with the usual array of hacks and incremental workarounds. But we had never really tried to think about what big-picture digital service reform would actually look like.

In the last few months, our loose federation of fellows, contributors, advisors, and other well-wishers has interviewed about a hundred people, read thousands of pages of reports, and participated in adjacent projects and convenings with the Federation of American Scientists, Future of Government Initiative, Center for Civic Futures, and others. As a result, we have new insights about why this goal is difficult, and how we can chart a path towards real government service reform.

The “digital service team” era was organic, not strategic

Before I share some of these insights, it’s important to understand how we got here. I was the first administrator of the US Digital Service, and as I look back on my ten years of experience working with “digital service teams” in various American jurisdictions, it’s hard to make sense of the results.

I’m not the only one who has had this experience. As a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists found, there isn’t much agreement among the people on these teams as to what their strategy or purpose was. One reason is that when USDS was founded 12 years ago, it never implemented a grand plan. The projects it worked on were important, but never grounded in any particular unifying vision.

We inherited the ruins of a number of big government-reform projects that had their roots in the George W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Eisenhower administrations. Experts debate how effective they were, but certainly none of them were finished.

There wasn’t anything we could do to clear these previously stalled strategies out of the way either — each one was embodied in a whole bureaucracy of its own. We instead tried to do as much as could be done, with the time and people we had.

This is the reality of USDS, the erstwhile GSA-based team called 18F, and all the similarly styled teams of the last decade. The budget, funding source, and reporting structure are decided once, at the beginning, when we know the least about the problem. These decisions constrain and channel the work that the bright-eyed team takes on. They have a large influence on the projects and shape whether they succeed. Eventually, various people retrofit a “strategy” or “theory of change” to the projects and mythmaking of the past. In my experience, the bright-eyed team members themselves are not aware this has happened. So, downstream, you find a multiplicity of strongly held beliefs about what the strategy was.

For instance, the Obama-era USDS ran significant projects at HHS, DHS, VA, and the Department of Education. The actual reason those agencies were chosen boils down to the fact that they were what was possible given the internal politics at the time. But the rank and file had little visibility into that. One could look at the set of choices and reason that the “strategy” of USDS was to build citizen-facing services. Or, one could conclude that the “strategy” of USDS was to support presidential priorities.

The two theories predict extremely different outcomes when the presidency transitioned to Trump. If the purpose of USDS was to support presidential priorities, well, those priorities are tariffs and deportations. So is that what USDS works on? Longtime staffers, changing leaders, and new political overseers have different answers. The resulting conflicts weakened and distracted the organization throughout the Trump and Biden years.

While researching the book Crisis Engineering, we found that the pattern is the same in any large organization. Most of the time, a “strategy” is a story that was retrofitted to events that were forced by a crisis. Stories are important because they hold the organization together, but you can rarely reason forward from one and predict what an organization is going to do.

The next era of digital service reform needs to be grounded in a broader mission.

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We need to think much bigger

A second, related observation from tech-reform research is that almost no one is thinking beyond problems that require immediate solutions. Digital service teams have evolved in isolated, hostile environments. Like the plants that grow wild in the desert around my house, they are extremely parsimonious with resources, and put most spare calories into defense mechanisms.

Today’s population of civic and government-tech practitioners has been working for years in isolation from mainstream government processes, with shoestring budgets, and little influence over policy design. Thus, we are mainly good at generating ideas that act as band-aids on failing systems.

The irony is that “propping up failing systems” is another way of saying “preserving the status quo.” I find Jen Pahlka’s Three Horizons framework to be a helpful way of sorting through this problem. Horizon 3 is the future of government reform we’re working towards, Horizon 2 is the place where that change occurs, and Horizon 1 is the unacceptable present. Band-aid work fits into what Pahlka calls “Horizon 2 minus” — it is needed, and it’s happening now, but it ultimately serves to entrench the unacceptable status quo.

It follows that, ten years in, we find digital service teams that had success making incremental improvements to a dilapidated program, and have internalized their working constraints so well that they are resistant to any further change.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Of course, this mindset was partly created by the impoverished environment. Even digital-service teams structured to do interventions have been like ambulance crews with no hospital to drive to. The digital services team that was tasked with assisting healthcare.gov during the crisis period stayed open for more than ten years after the launch. That was excessive. The need for frequent changes persisted (and always will), but the war-room model dragged on because the agency was not capable of managing those changes outside of a multi-year procurement cycle. The situation became akin to keeping a patient on emergency-room dialysis for ten years because there was no capability to do the needed kidney transplant.

Searchlight fellow Marc Dunkelman examined the history of progressive politics writ large in Why Nothing Works, and found that the pattern of “poor implementation leads to timid policy leads to poor implementation” is by no means limited to the gov-tech arena. It is hard to get anyone anywhere to think about “Horizon 2 plus” ideas, meaning the near-future actions that accelerate progress towards a “third horizon.” But that is exactly the sort of thinking we need to usher in this new era of digital service reform.

Where we go now

As people who still believe that the government could function better than it does, we are in a window of opportunity that won’t last long. The two challenges above happen to mirror what’s been called the “Stockdale Paradox” — the need to both maintain the faith that success is possible, while still staring down the cold hard truth of how hard that will be. With future-facing efforts like Tech Viaduct, we need to expand our imagination of what’s possible and realize that we can get there. But we also need to confront the frustrating facts of how hard that will be, especially given that even more capacity may be lost in the Trump administration.

Recent history tells us to avoid policies that depend on empty announcements, “pilot programs,” or hope that masses of people will see the light. Tech Viaduct aims instead to find points of higher systemic leverage, as defined by Donella Meadows.

Past efforts have gone no higher than “modifying information flows,” which Meadows ranks as the fifth-most effective type of change. We now need to overhaul the rules, incentives, constraints, and distribution of power. This is the only way to break the cycle of perpetual emergency-room dialysis.

We need generational changes in the federal systems for workforce management, procurement, and data governance. These problems are enmeshed in, and connected by, technology. Tech Viaduct will figure out those parts, but will not have the complete solution. We need our partner organizations, aspiring candidates, and fellow schemers to push their writing and thinking to be bigger. Err on the side of being too ambitious, even though you may be laughed at in the DC scene. We can always water down the policies later. It’s really hard to water them up.

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When Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act, I served as the health policy director for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions under the chairmanship of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. That meant I played a critical role in developing and writing the ACA — one of the most transformational and progressive health care reforms in American history.

Over recent months, we at Searchlight have released a health care agenda that would reshape our health care system once more. The proposals will lower health care costs, make health care more available for Americans, and help rebalance power away from corporate interests and towards patients.

We call this the Health Care Unity Agenda. It’s a plan that can appeal equally to those who want to make significant and much-needed changes to our health system and to those who want to work within the framework of the current system to provide more, not fewer, good health choices for Americans.

Pragmatic idealism

Before I dive into what this plan actually is, I want to take us back to the last time we made sweeping health care policy changes in this country. Many of the debates we’re having today have their roots in that moment, including the debate over Medicare for All.

When I worked for Senator Kennedy, I wrote a Medicare for All bill — but it did not have a single co-sponsor when it was introduced and had no pathway to enactment.

While the Medicare for All idea has gained more support since then, it would still require a massive restructuring and multi-trillion-dollar refinancing of the health system. Public support for such a profound change appears to be ambiguous at best. Searchlight polling has found that although Americans are open to a much larger government role in our health care system, they have doubts about government’s ability to administer it successfully, and most do not want to make the changes in their health plans that would be required under a single-payer system.

The idea that health care should be a right and not a privilege was a guiding passion of Senator Kennedy’s life. While his goals were idealistic, his approach to reaching those goals was utterly pragmatic. He wanted to use each bill and each session of Congress to make as much progress as possible — then build from that point to make more progress in the next session.

Senator Kennedy had been part of several unsuccessful efforts to enact health reform from the 1970s to the 1990s and had no wish to be part of another noble failure in 2009. That’s why, instead of making a futile attempt to pass a bill that had no pathway to success, he emphatically chose to move forward with the most progressive health care reform that could pass Congress and be signed into law.

That bill was the ACA, with all the compromises it entailed.

Pragmatic legislating can disappoint idealists, but as a result of that pragmatism, millions of Americans have been protected from discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and have received better health care. None of those progressive improvements in our health care system would have been possible had Congress tried and failed to pass a more expansive bill. Even then, the ACA barely squeaked through the legislative process without a single vote to spare when it passed on that snowy Christmas Eve.

Moving forward with the most progressive bill that could actually pass was the right choice for the ACA, and I believe it is the right choice now.

The Health Care Unity Agenda

Our plan provides millions of Americans with new coverage, makes basic primary care free for every American, reduces the cost of prescription drugs and medical care, and reins in the power of monopolies and private equity to dictate terms to patients. It includes a robust public option to keep costs down and gives Americans a voluntary alternative to for-profit health insurance.

You can read the full report here. But this is a brief overview of the practical changes we are proposing.

The ACA required private insurance to make preventive care cost-free. We expand that provision to include basic primary care. This means a patient’s usual first point of contact with the health care system, which focuses on treating common illnesses or physicals, will now be available for patients at zero out-of-pocket cost.

The ACA allowed kids to stay on their parents’ plan until they were young adults. We expand that idea to include family members and loved ones, giving more people access to coverage.

To rein in costs, we build on existing proposals like negotiated drug prices, but add in new ideas, such as allowing the federal government to open up more competition when the prices of some drugs are too high. We end the games that companies play with patents to jack up prices for consumers, and establish a new $2,000 out-of-pocket threshold for drug costs, modeled on Medicare.

To make health care work better for patients, we crack down on “rationing by inconvenience,” where insurance companies set up rules to deny care and frustrate patients. We also set up new safeguards to prevent private equity firms from looting the medical clinics local communities rely on, demonstrably worsening outcomes for patients. Our plan establishes new thresholds for oversight, a new license to engage in health-related private equity transactions, and tough new penalties for interference in medical decisions.

Building on the starter home

President Obama called the ACA a “starter home.” And it was a pretty solid one. While I’ve seen the ACA derided from the left and the right, it is a signature progressive accomplishment of this century. It made a tangible difference in millions of people’s lives. Today, it serves as a model for how we can improve our health care system in a way that is pragmatic and supported by the public.

Again, I want to emphasize the word unity.

The ACA passed because a working majority in Congress, through much debate and inspired leadership, came together around a unified plan for how to reform our health care system. To achieve that unity, Members were prepared to put the broader goal of reform above achieving some of their own personal priorities. That same unity and flexibility will be necessary to enact the health reforms that are needed to make health care truly serve patients at costs they can afford.

To improve lives, we don’t need to tear down the ACA “starter home” and build a new one. Our proposals offer a new set of blueprints for renovating it in a way that is pragmatic and responsive to what Americans want out of their health care system. They offer a way, once again, to create the most progressive bill that can pass a future Congress and be signed into law.

Over the past few months, I’ve argued in a number of outlets, sometimes with Robert Gordon, that Democrats need to push back on demands from the unions that represent cops, teachers, and transit workers.

The reason isn’t that government workers are undeserving. Far from it. Unions, both in the private and public sectors, are critical for ensuring workers are compensated fairly and their rights are protected.

The problem is that public sector unions regularly push for clumsy work rules and badly designed pay packages that make it harder to supply efficient and effective government services.

Rejecting these counterproductive demands is good policy. For many of the progressive mayors who pledged to expand public transportation, fix urban schools, and keep people safe, it is essential that they strike the right balance between protecting workers’ rights and serving the city as a whole.

Some governors are beginning to take the need for public sector reforms seriously. North Carolina’s Josh Stein just signed bipartisan legislation that would make it easier to hire based on skills, to pay employees for their performance, and to fire for misconduct. Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger vetoed sweeping legislation that would have established very broad collective bargaining rights that would have increased the cost and degraded the quality of government services. And New York’s Kathy Hochul suspended the state’s rigid civil service exams, enabling the rapid hiring of more than 40,000 employees.

These reforms are all calibrated to leave intact the core rights of public sector employees while protecting the government’s interest in efficient and effective public administration. They are what good governance looks like—and they bear little resemblance to the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to the federal workforce.

But are these reforms good politics? Are voters concerned when the demands of public sector unions clash with the interests of the broader public?

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To test that question, Searchlight worked with Tavern Research to float an online survey to more than 1,500 likely voters. The survey probed whether and to what extent voters support policies that increase accountability for public sector workers. Generally, these are the sort of policies that public sector unions staunchly oppose.

Take performance pay for public workers. Paying for performance might entail, among other things, giving a bonus to highly effective teachers based on classroom observations and principal evaluations. The biggest teachers’ union in the country, the American Federation of Teachers, hates the idea.

A whopping 72% of voters, however, supported performance-based pay. Just 14% were opposed, and another 14% were unsure.

We also asked respondents whether they supported the principle that government workers shouldn’t be treated differently from private-sector workers “just because they work for the government.” More than half (54%) agreed.

We then showed respondents arguments both supporting and opposing this principle. Even then, about two-thirds of respondents (64%) said that it should be at least as easy to fire government workers as it is to fire private-sector employees. Only 1 in 5 (20%) thought it should be harder. But public sector unions consistently push for policies that make it very hard to fire bad cops or teachers.

That’s an especially striking result because even reform-oriented Democrats usually accept the need for some added due-process protections for government workers. Yet the voters—including most Democrats—want no part of it.

The kicker was a question asking which of the following “comes closest to your view”:

More than two-thirds of respondents picked the third option, which maximizes accountability for public sector workers. Just 11% picked the first option, which minimizes it.

These survey results, which you can find here, deepen the findings of a recent study from David Broockman and Josh Kalla about how Democrats can improve their electoral prospects. Across 29 topics, the authors found that the third-best issue for winning over voters was teacher accountability. (Ending affirmative action was first.) It’s a better issue for Democrats, the authors found, than more high-profile topics like moderating on transgender kids in sports or immigration.

Results like these should be a wake-up call for Democrats. As David Schleicher and I have argued, “[i]t is an extraordinary fact about the 2024 election that the areas that turned most aggressively toward President Trump were those cities and states that have long been Democratic bastions.” Voters don’t believe Democrats when they say they care about excellent schools, safe streets, and reliable transit. Voters don’t believe it because it’s not true. If Democrats did care, they wouldn’t keep cutting deals with unions that make it difficult or impossible to provide those services.

A better approach is possible. The governors we named earlier are following the lead of President Obama, who made a political virtue out of standing up to the teachers’ unions and insisting on good outcomes for kids. Democrats today are too timid to do the same, but these lopsided survey results should give them some confidence. Insisting on accountability in the provision of public services is good policy and good politics.

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Ideological litmus tests often backfire among Republicans and Democrats alike. On the Democratic side, politicians are constantly forced to satisfy the demands of some outside interest group — whether it’s banning fracking or withholding criticism of Israel — even when it’s clearly bad policy and bad politics. The result is a party that can’t build a governing supermajority.

As an equal opportunity hater of litmus tests, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the most absurd one in all of American politics: the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. This Republican Party litmus test isn’t being pushed by a group at all; it’s one man: President Donald Trump.

It was on full display during a prime-time address Thursday night, when Trump repeated many of his old grievances about election interference and accused China of buying, hacking, or stealing voter data in 18 states. These are all provable falsehoods. There’s also no reason to think this will improve the GOP’s electoral prospects in November — in fact, during the 2021 special elections in Georgia, there was evidence that Trump’s election denialism contributed to the party losing two Senate seats.

This is an obsession for Trump, and it’s potentially a politically damaging litmus test for the rest of the Republican Party. Still, over the coming days, expect many in the party to contort themselves into absurd positions to back Trump’s claims of election denial.

Democrats will be rightfully outraged when this happens, especially because it will be clear that Republicans are only doing it to appease their interest group of one.

But that also presents an opportunity for reflection. Democrats have their own electorally damaging litmus tests. They undermine the party’s ability to compete in red states, which consequently empowers the very politicians pushing Trump’s election denialism.

We know how embarrassing this is for them

Earlier this week, Senator Jon Ossoff asked DNI nominee Jay Clayton a very simple question during his nomination hearing: Who won the 2020 election? And Clayton, a man who is attempting to oversee the U.S. intelligence community, simply refused to answer it.

Why did Clayton subject himself to such public debasement? Because he was trapped: either admit to an obvious truth or pass Trump’s litmus test. So he took the second option, and the future Director of National Intelligence looked like an obstinate child on national television.

This is the state of politics in America today.

To the Democrats who bemoan this situation, I sympathize. I also ask them to use this as an opportunity for some self-reflection. It’s easy to notice when a politician you disagree with adopts an extreme position that puts them out of step with public opinion. It’s harder when that politician is someone you support, and that litmus test is something you find to be broadly agreeable.

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Democrats must look inward at their own litmus tests

I don’t want to imply an equivalency between Trump’s election denialism and fracking bans; one is just a bad policy, and the other is a complete fabrication that serves to rot our American political system. But the mechanism by which these litmus tests are imposed reveals important truths about how our two political parties operate.

The GOP is ruled by Trump — a delusional, mad king, who generally gets his way unless he’s trying to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters. The Democrats are ruled, in part, by a network of interest groups, many of which advocate for well-meaning causes, but force Democratic politicians into electorally compromising situations that are also usually bad policy.

Eliminating private health insurance, border decriminalization, and halting the expansion of fossil fuel projects — these are all examples of litmus tests that have been advocated for inside the Democratic Party. There’s nothing wrong with certain Democrats agreeing to these positions; the problem comes when they become a litmus test for Democrats to remain in good standing or receive endorsements during a presidential primary. The result is an election like 2024, where, despite Kamala Harris’ attempt to disavow her old litmus test positions, swing voters still saw her as too left-wing.

It’s also worth noting that these litmus tests don’t always come from the Left; this election cycle, AIPAC is forcing Democrats out of step with public opinion on Israel.

It’s bad for democracy when politicians are forced to adopt positions to satisfy interest groups. We all know how strained and exasperated Republicans look when they’re forced to answer or obfuscate questions about Trump’s election denialism. And Democrats come across the same way when they’re forced to talk about their past extremist positions.

Admittedly, the party is getting better about this. The League of Conservation Voters watered down its candidate questionnaire after it was criticized for being too ideologically rigid. More ideologically diverse candidates are also running in Iowa and Texas.

But the tyranny of litmus tests is not completely over.

Can you care about protecting immigrants while refusing to abolish ICE? Can you support decarbonization and environmental justice and still vote for a bipartisan permitting reform bill? Many immigration groups and environmental groups are still saying no. That’s bad policy, and that’s bad for Democrats who want to be more electorally competitive in red states.

We should all be equal opportunity litmus test haters

This is likely a familiar argument to most readers. The problem is that it is still not shared widely enough by engaged Democratic primary voters — the exact sort of people who find the 2020 election lie litmus test to be completely abhorrent.

The election analyst Nate Silver recently outlined the three main factions inside the Democratic Party: the Left, Abundance Libs, and Resistance Libs. As Silver explains, that latter group, the people whose primary goal in American politics is kicking Trump and MAGA Republicans out of office, has still not been sufficiently convinced about the need for a more ideologically diverse and explicitly populist Democratic party.

They watch Trump’s election denialism with rightful horror. They desperately want to beat Trump and all of his loyal supporters. But then they refuse to adopt the right strategic politics that would actually reduce the power these politicians have in our country. Fighting Trump is about suing him in court and calling him names on social media — two strategies that are certainly fair game for Democrats. But if it’s the entire political message, then the strategy becomes more expressive than strategic.

The right path is thinking critically about how Democrats can expand their electoral appeal to voters who support Trump, but do not share his obsession with the 2020 election.

The election denial litmus test Trump has imposed upon the Republican Party is without equal. It serves to undermine trust in our election system and deepen polarization at a time when America desperately needs to unite and restore faith in its institutions. But that will only happen if Republicans lose power, not just narrowly, but become a minority party in the country.

That means the only way to beat the election denial litmus test is for Democrats to drop litmus tests of their own.

Picture it. It’s one year from today. MSNOW has just opened the first Democratic primary presidential debate. Ten candidates stand before a bespectacled Rachel Maddow.

The first question: “Candidates, raise your hand if you support single-payer health care that would eliminate all private health insurance.”

Over the next 30 minutes, would-be commanders in chief spar over health care policy minutiae that make even the wonkiest among us groan. The typical voter watching at home, the sort of person who actually benefits from better health care policy, is unable to follow the conversation. And the Democratic brand is widely seen as muddled, fractious, and completely out of touch.

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because Democrats spent almost every single presidential debate in the 2020 cycle going through this same routine.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Democrats can break through their longstanding health care feuds. For the sake of the party and for the sake of actually improving people’s lives, they must find a compromise.

How I realized the health care debate is broken

Like so many things in Democratic politics right now, the health care policy debate is frozen between two intractable factions: the single payer absolutists (as best exemplified by Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation) and those who want to continue extending ACA subsidies without offering a real vision for what comes next for American health care.

The M4A enthusiasts cast the opposition as either unambitious or shills beholden to the health care lobby. Those who favor single-payer alternatives often accuse the other faction of sloganeering and promoting half-baked ideas without backing them up with substance.

I have admittedly straddled both factions. During the 2020 primary, I was an avid supporter of M4A, but what shifted my perspective was watching the policy contortions Senator Elizabeth Warren made to ensure that her single-payer system could be implemented without raising taxes on the middle class. As numerous non-partisan think tanks have pointed out, broad-based tax increases would, of course, be needed. The idea is that people might end up paying less for coverage because their premiums will go down. But the political problem Warren attempted to contort herself out of, which has become even worse today, is that Americans do not want to pay higher taxes.

The contentious health care debates became even more pointless when the slim Democratic trifecta ultimately decided not to move on even the most moderate health care reform plans from the primary, and instead expanded tax credits that made ACA plans more affordable. My conclusion was that single-payer was a worthy goal that should be pursued with more incremental changes—such as a non-profit public option.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that a single-payer Medicare for All system isn’t the right approach to bringing universal health care to this country. We are too large, too diverse, and hold too many ingrained ideas and expectations about the provision of health care for this type of system to ever be workable. But being against single-payer Medicare for All doesn’t mean I don’t share the important end goal of a truly universal system of health care coverage.

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I have no great love for the private insurance industry and find issues like the cost of insulin to be morally abhorrent. If I were to start from scratch, I would prefer the German system, which has an employer element as well as a universal mandate that would be an ideal model for the U.S. But we’re not starting from scratch, and this isn’t some political science experiment. These are real people’s lives. We are living in a political reality where most Americans are skeptical of the government’s capacity to do most things right. And recent Searchlight polling has found that this also applies to the federal government’s ability to administer health care.

Beyond this question of trust, dogmatic single-payer advocates also tend to wave away the genuine concerns voters have about the broad-based taxes needed to finance the system, higher wait times, and access to physicians. And these are not unreasonable concerns; other countries with single-payer systems struggle with these exact problems all the time.

If you’re a M4A dead-ender, the rejoinder to all this is relatively simple: the policy polls incredibly well even after voters hear about the increased taxes. Our friends at Data for Progress found this in research they conducted at the end of last year. We found similar results in a polling collaboration we did with the progressive new media outlet Zeteo. But one big caveat: as you got more descriptive about what single-payer Medicare for All system would entail, when you explained that it would replace private health insurance, the proposal lost popularity.

The most jarring finding from that same research was the overwhelming number of Americans who would simply prefer to keep their health insurance rather than receive it from the federal government.

I believe our debates should reckon with the complexity of attempting to make any sweeping policy change. As this polling makes clear, this is not a straightforward environment to make policy.

For people who believe in universal health care, the goal shouldn’t be to bash each other over the head with competing proposals. The goal must be to convince a skeptical populace that the government is, in fact, capable of providing such an intimate service well. And providing a public option is a great way to secure that trust.

This leads me to the false choice at the center of this debate: building on the demonstrable success of the Affordable Care Act or sweeping the system away and starting anew. Absolutists on both sides miss the point. Health care policy in this country should always have both a practical element and an aspirational one. One can advocate for pragmatic steps, while also building toward a single-payer system if the public eventually comes around to it.

We also forget that dramatic public policy change can lead to electoral backlash. President Obama’s “if you like your plan, you can keep it” line was used as a political cudgel against Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterms to disastrous effect because it turned out not to be totally accurate.

The ACA itself—reform pilloried as “half measures” by many detractors—did not enter positive approval territory until Republicans tried to take it away. This happened after an extended period where the idea of more government involvement in health care enjoyed robust support. It’s not too hard to imagine a theoretical 2030 midterm gone bad because a lofty policy goal actually fell flat once the rubber met the road. It is a fate that Democrats would do well to avoid, especially because the consequences could be the return of MAGA Republicans.

A better way to debate

Both factions should start with a bit of honesty and humility. For M4A hardliners, that means accepting that private insurance—regardless of how you might feel morally—is always going to have a role to play in the provision of health care in this country (as it already does with many administrative functions of Medicare). It’s also important to admit that a single-payer system is incompatible with the widely shared pledge inside the party not to raise taxes on Americans making under $400,000 per year.

For those opposed to single-payer, I propose we retire the frankly annoying retort of “How are we going to pay for it?” In a moment where tens of billions of dollars are being spent on military exploits abroad and cutting wealthy people’s taxes at home, that sort of rhetoric isn’t going to fly with an electorate that is angry at the establishment and hungry for change in the health care system.

Earlier this year, Searchlight began releasing some health care policies that can help unify this debate. David Bowen, our senior health care fellow, will have more to say about this soon. But we believe it is comprehensive, cost-effective, and responsive to public opinion. There’s a robust public option, free primary care, and a plan to break up health care monopolies.

The response from M4A enthusiasts like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was, predictably, that the plan wasn’t Medicare for All and thus should be dismissed as a needless half measure. I’m all for having robust debates about health care, but I am frankly sick and tired of this Medicare for All dogmatism. And as I’ve tried to argue here, if you are not reckoning with the nuances of public opinion, then you are not contributing helpfully to this debate. The stakes are improving people’s lives, not winning a factional war.

For inspiration, look to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no slouch on the single-payer absolutist front, who recognized the utility in accepting a public option and breaking up health care monopolies as an important step. That’s a fair response, and evidence that aspirational health care goals do not need to be in tension with practical health care reforms. There’s room for debate.

It is likely that, come 2029, a Democratic governing trifecta will have the opportunity to make a real advancement on health policy again. Between now and then, Democrats should build and campaign on health care policies they can explain succinctly and actually pass once given the opportunity. Health care has always been the party’s best issue; there’s no reason Democrats should diminish their advantage by advocating for maximalist policy ideas that, when fully explained, do not hold majority support among the public.

The path forward to a healthier health care debate is to listen to the Medicare for All wing, but tune out the ideologues who ignore the realities of public opinion. This will preserve the aspiration and hope that Medicare for All advocates hold dear, while also coalescing around something that can tangibly improve people’s lives. The alternative is a tired and elitist debate that fails to actually deliver material change to anyone. And we’re all sick of that.

Two years ago, I heard about the strategists who eventually became known for recruiting Graham Platner to the Senate. Before they became synonymous with political scandal, before they had even gone to Maine, they had a political theory that I thought — if adopted by more Democratic strategists — was going to usher in a supermajority.

The premise was this: the Democratic brand was simply too tarnished to win deep red races. Whether it was Amy McGrath in Kentucky or Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, prototypical Democrats would lose no matter how much attention they received or money they raised. To even have a slight chance at beating Republicans in these races, Democrats needed higher-variance candidates — political outsiders whose heterodox beliefs would not pass every party litmus test, but would be a substantial improvement over their MAGA opponent. Some of them wouldn’t even need to run as Democrats.

Dan Moraff, the mastermind behind the strategy, was driving around states like Iowa and Nebraska in search of blue-collar workers who fit this archetype. Importantly, he wasn’t just looking for bearded candidates in plaid shirts; he wanted someone who could authentically fuse economically populist and culturally moderate politics.

Today, Moraff is known for his failure to properly vet Platner, insistence that his brand of left factionalist politics would overcome the campaign’s numerous scandals, and most recently, his own sexual misconduct allegations. Altogether, he doesn’t seem like a particularly wise political operator or really all that good of a person.

But the original theory had merit. The problem in Maine, before the sexual assault allegations, was that Platner’s advisors let themselves be seduced into thinking a blue-collar aesthetic was sufficient to win over working-class swing voters. They forgot about the second part of the formula: taking on the right set of issues.

The ideal candidate

In 2024, Moraff recruited Dan Osborn, a union mechanic who was known for organizing the Kellogg strike, to run for Senate in Nebraska. Osborn eventually lost his Independent bid against Republican Senator Deb Fischer. But according to the election modeling firm Split Ticket, he fared 17.7 points better than a typical Democrat would have. That made Dan Osborn the single-best electoral overperformer in the country; no other candidate won such a large proportion of crossover voters.

Inside the Democratic Party, Osborn is a sort of Rorschach test. He’s proof that a Bernie Sanders-style populism can win over Trump supporters. Or, he’s an example of how shedding Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions can win over Trump supporters.

Both interpretations have important insights. Osborn did talk a lot about the corrupting influence of money in politics, the rich cheating on their taxes, and corporations ripping off consumers. What often goes overlooked when left political commentators write about Osborn isn’t just that he moderated hard on issues like immigration, but rather that his actual economic policies are not standard leftist fare.

This cycle, Osborn is running for Senate again (Moraff is not behind his campaign) on an economic agenda that is virtually identical to his platform in 2024.

Instead of wealth taxes and Medicare for All, it’s a middle-class tax cut and a pledge to protect Medicare and break up health care monopolies. There are anti-corporate consumer protection laws as well as an entirely separate plan to “balance the budget.” How does one describe this agenda? The rhetoric is certainly populist, but the policies are, as the strategist David Shor says, “popularist”; virtually all of them would command supermajority support among voters in both parties.

Of course, Osborn also courted the many Nebraska voters who hold right-wing beliefs on immigration. In one of the most attention-grabbing ads of the election cycle, Osborn wielded a blowtorch and promised to help Trump build the wall. This was a perfect example of how blue-collar identity politics can be leveraged to highlight an issue that appeals to more conservative voters. If Osborn wore his mechanic attire and called for a Green New Deal, it just wouldn’t have the same effect.

And if there were any remaining doubts about the sort of message Osborn was trying to convey, his Super PAC ran an ad during the final week of the campaign calling him “the only real conservative in the race.”

Campaign finance reform, economic populism (“popularism”), and conservative immigration were Osborn’s entire platform. Israel was a very salient issue for certain voters in 2024, but the campaign did not mention it because the priority was winning over Trump voters in Nebraska.

Looking back on the campaign today, it’s crazy to think that Graham Platner’s strategists were the ones behind this messaging. Dan Moraff had previously organized for the DSA and voted for Jill Stein. And here he was backing a candidate who wanted to balance the budget and didn’t talk about Israel and Palestine.

This means Moraff understood one of Searchlight’s fundamental theories of politics: the Democratic Party is a big tent, and it stretches from DSA candidates in Brooklyn to heterodox candidates in Nebraska.

What went wrong in Maine (aside from the obvious)

When evaluating Platner’s political appeal, it’s hard to separate his troubled past from his actual politics. But before the sexual assault allegation that took down his campaign, he was a case study of what happens when strategists overrate the appeal of blue-collar, ultra-masculine identity politics.

Maine is more liberal than Nebraska. So when Moraff began scouting the state, he could afford to find someone who better matched his own leftist politics. Still, winning Maine means courting the tens of thousands of voters who split their ballot between Susan Collins and Joe Biden. Perhaps Platner’s brand of uncompromising left populism could have won some of those voters, but aside from moderating somewhat on gun control, the campaign never really made any Osborn-style attempts to appeal to voters who had sent Susan Collins to the Senate for the past five election cycles.

They filmed an ad in which Platner said: “The only thing the DC establishment can agree on is a love of Jeffrey Epstein — and a hatred of me.” Sixty percent of his fundraising emails mentioned Israel — more than any other Democratic candidate in the country. He was a vocal advocate of abolishing ICE.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a strong moral stand on Israel’s conduct in Gaza. As Searchlight President Adam Jentleson wrote last month, Democrats that ape the most maximalist pro-Israel positions are out of step with the electorate. It’s just that his stump speech, ads, and the vast majority of his policies defined him as a hard-left factionalist. What was the appeal to crossover voters? When asked about Platner’s scandalous personal history in his infamous Wall Street Journal interview, Moraff argued that it was an integral part of Platner’s case: “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats.”

The polling never bore that argument out. Platner did maintain a narrow lead over Collins, but the previous Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon, consistently ran even further ahead in the polls until she was eventually trounced. Collins also maintained a substantial polling advantage over Platner among working-class voters — the exact sort of people who were supposed to support this blend of uncompromising left politics and blue-collar identity.

Again, we’ll never know how he would have done in the general election. But Moraff and his strategists didn’t just imagine Platner squeaking out a narrow victory against Susan Collins in a favorable Democratic electoral environment. They were privately telling people that Platner was a future 2028 presidential candidate. By all accounts, this infatuation started immediately. Morris Katz, another strategist behind the Platner campaign, said, “Within, like, five minutes [of meeting Platner] I was thinking, Holy shit, this guy can help save the Democratic Party.”

Five minutes isn’t enough to understand someone’s worldview. It isn’t enough to know if he would run on the sort of issues that could win over Trump voters in states like Ohio or Iowa. It’s an admission that you were overly seduced by the political appeal of Platner’s gruff voice and blue-collar aesthetic. And it’s proof that you forget the core lesson of why Osborn was able to appeal to so many Trump supporters — issues matter even more than identity.

Identity is never enough

I’ve never made the ill-advised decision to recruit a sketchy candidate, imperil the Democrats’ hopes of securing a Senate majority, and create a national scandal for myself in the process — but I have made a similar version of this mistake.

Last year, I wrote an article evaluating the merits of economic populism, and I questioned Chris Murphy’s populist appeal on the grounds that he didn’t have the right background: “Chris Murphy will likely run for president in 2028 on a platform of ‘big tent’ populism. But it’s worth asking if the lawyer and two-term senator from Connecticut has the profile to authentically deploy the populist message that can win back the working-class.”

It’s a bad argument. Who knows if Chris Murphy will run for president? If he runs, wins the Democratic nomination, and loses in the general election, it won’t be because he’s a lawyer from Connecticut. It will be because he failed to take on the heterodox set of issues necessary to win over the sort of swing voters who previously supported Trump. His lack of an authentic blue-collar identity will not be a liability or an asset.

How do we know this? Well, look at the two biggest political figures of the 21st century. Barack Obama, the Harvard lawyer with a funny name, won the support of millions of working-class voters in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan. He didn’t do it by adopting some sort of blue-collar aesthetic; he simply moderated on certain issues: increasing penalties for hiring illegal immigrants and promoting America’s fossil fuel industry.

Those same Midwestern voters then switched their votes from the Harvard lawyer to the crooked real estate magnate from New York. Again, issues mattered here more than identity. Trump railed against NAFTA, moved even further right on immigration, and moderated on Social Security and Medicare — the albatross that had undermined Republican support for decades.

I want to make this clear: Moraff’s blue-collar outsider recruitment strategy had important insights. Democrats have been getting steamrolled in red states for over a decade now. Finding and properly vetting candidates at union shops or established small businesses is exactly the sort of low-risk, high-reward strategy the party should be trying. The key is to remember that issues matter too. Blue-collar identity politics might sound good to the sort of cosmopolitan folks who pontificate about politics online. It just isn’t sufficient to win over voters who decide elections.

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In 2024, I was featured in one of Donald Trump’s campaign ads. You probably remember seeing it on TV. “Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.”

Five years earlier, I sat for an interview with Harris in a downtown Los Angeles hotel when I was the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). And here it was, my interview and my likeness in a presidential political ad for a cruel and craven candidate whom I did not support. By the end of the 2024 campaign, it is estimated that Trump and his Republicans went on to spend almost one-quarter of a billion dollars on anti-trans attack ads.

I am not one to believe that the anti-trans ads were the deciding factor in the presidential race, but of the swing voters who broke for Trump during the final stretch of the campaign, 67% thought Democrats were “too focused on identity politics.” Subsequent polling has shown that certain issues important to the trans community have become divisive, if not outright unpopular with the voting public.

As Democrats gear up to retake the House and Senate this election cycle, candidates and political operatives have been asking me how to counter these attacks. How can they advance trans rights in a political environment that is, and we must be aware of this, turning against trans people? Just a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individual states can decide whether to ban transgender girls from participating in sports, allowing 27 statewide bans and any future laws to be enacted. Democrats need to be ready to talk about this decision and articulate where they stand.

I’ve spent thirty-plus years working in this space. We are still in a much better place with this work than when I started. Which is why we need to be pragmatic in advancing a politics that protects trans people while not empowering the sort of hateful politicians that run those ads.

Here’s my answer for those candidates: It depends. Sounds simple, but there’s actually more to it than it sounds. “It depends” means we need to give more Democratic candidates more space to answer questions that align with the values and voters in their districts. I’ll elaborate below on what that means to me.

First, I want to make it clear that this does not mean Democrats should further any hate against trans adults or children. That’s what President Trump is doing. He says that being cruel to trans people and using us for political purposes is gold. His party, as always, is shamelessly following his lead. That’s why my top goal is to kick Republicans out of power.

Still, Democratic candidates, especially in swing districts, will be asked questions about trans issues this election cycle. They need to be ready to answer them.

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No evasion, no litmus tests

I’ve seen some political operatives say that Democrats can avoid questions around trans issues and just pivot to issues like affordability. I think that’s just bad politics. Voters rarely reward avoidance or insincerity.

Even if it is not a priority for most people, many voters now have an opinion about trans issues. So if a candidate avoids direct questions from voters or reporters, or doesn’t respond to attack ads, they look insincere or uninformed. Conversely, voters usually appreciate authenticity and commitment. They reward candidates who show conviction and appeal to universal values around empathy, fairness, and respect.

But I also often think about something a Democratic political operative told me:

“Republicans aren’t actually attacking trans people, they’re attacking Democrats. Trans people are just the prop. They want to make Democrats look weird, evasive, captured by radical activists. The way to beat that is to not be those things.”

That’s why it’s important for candidates, as well as the transgender community, to understand where public opinion is on our issues. Again, I’ve been doing this work for a long time. I started the National Center for Transgender Equality in 2003. Public opinion on trans issues is in an entirely different place than it once was. But I want to highlight a few key findings from my recent Searchlight report.

• A majority of Americans (59%), including a plurality of Democrats, believe that trans children should play on school sports teams that match their birth sex rather than their gender identity.

• A large majority (67%) support access to hormone treatments for adults after physician consultation, but 61% believe puberty blockers and hormone treatments should not be available to those under eighteen.

• Fundamental civil rights are still popular: 69% of voters think businesses and landlords should treat trans people equally, and 70% agree that people should be able to live their lives free from discrimination and bullying. Admittedly, many or most Americans don’t understand that trans people can’t work if they are frequently being bullied or called the wrong name. And if there is a rule against us using the bathroom, we can’t work there. Still, almost 7 in 10 people believe we have the right to exist.

I read this polling and I see tough, yet navigable terrain. I don’t have a single answer for candidates, but I do want to share one more finding that provides an important general framework when dealing with sensitive issues around trans minors. Ninety-two percent of Americans believe it is important to ensure that parents are involved and have the most important say in decisions about their children.

I understand that a vast majority (74%) of voters do not support gender transition surgeries for minors (which is so rare that it is basically just a Republican talking point) and that hormone treatments for minors are also fairly unpopular. So candidates can ground their answer in discussions about youth trans healthcare with the belief that a parent should have the most important say in their children’s lives.

On sports, 59% of Americans do believe that trans children should play on teams that match their birth sex, but our polling also found that only 48% of Americans believe a federal law is needed to enforce this rule across the country. That means opposing federal legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in youth sports will put you on the wrong side of some voters.

But there are plenty of examples of politicians discussing the issue with reasonableness and humility, emphasizing that the decision should be made by leagues and athletic associations or parents, rather than by candidates or legislators.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear told Bill Maher just after vetoing a sports bill and a youth healthcare bill: “I care too much about sports to want to let the government run them.”

Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that trans rights issues should be handled with “compassion for transgender people” and “empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them.” Specifically around sports, Buttigieg added that there were “serious fairness issues” when it came to sports participation that have to be answered, but that “decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians.”

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has said that he would veto any bill that does not make everyone in the state feel safe and welcome.

Candidates cannot hide from these challenging questions around trans issues and trans rights. The candidate’s answers should also adapt to the district they’re running in. Transgender activists need to understand that too. The stakes are just too high to impose litmus tests. We lose the support of the public, and we empower the exact politicians that hate us.

Candidates should be authentic to their values

Transgender attack ads are just politically motivated negativity. The gotcha questions are just gotchas. Sometimes, though, attacks or questions from voters and reporters are opportunities to connect the issue back to your values and personal style as a candidate.

For example, if the candidate is a parent, grandparent, or doctor, they should speak from that perspective and solidify the positive vibes from that point of view. For instance, if you are a parent, express how you would feel if you found out your child was transgender, and Congress or your state legislature had outlawed or prevented insurance coverage for the medical treatment that providers were recommending. If you are a physician, express how you feel that your expertise had been pushed aside so legislators or the president could pretend they were medical experts.

I also firmly believe candidates should always use shared language rather than virtue-signaling jargon that activists might prefer. For example, rather than “gender affirming care,” they should talk about “healthcare for trans people.” Voters know that they are tired of politicians making “healthcare” decisions, but most don’t have any familiarity with “gender affirming care,” except as activist-speak. It might sound like special rights only for transgender people.

Shared language is always the best way candidates can show they are concerned for all their constituents, including the person asking a question at a public event. That’s partly about the language used, but also about showing unconditional positive regard for whoever they are talking with or talking about. Voters don’t just want to like a candidate; they want to like a candidate who likes them.

Remember, different candidates will need to take different approaches. Candidates and activists need to better understand that the goal isn’t to install more purity tests, it’s to advance transgender rights in a manner that is cognizant of public opinion—in a manner that will actually work.

And if you see me in one of your opponent’s ads, I’m sorry. I was not consulted.

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Every election cycle I’ve worked in polling, I’ve seen different factions of the Democratic Party debate whether voters want a single, federally administered health insurance program. And each time, I’ve asked voters about it. At this point, I’m extremely familiar with the central dynamic around the issue: “Medicare for All” as a term is generally popular, while the actual proposal commands less support.

Last week, Searchlight collaborated with Zeteo, a progressive new media organization, to ask voters whether they’d support the federal government playing a larger role in the American health care system. We asked a variety of questions regarding coverage for pharmaceutical drugs, surgeries, etc., and found that voters overwhelmingly wanted more government intervention. On the question of Medicare for All, however, the results were mixed.

Both of our organizations support expanding the role of the federal government in providing health care coverage. The difference is that Zeteo advocates for Medicare for All, while Searchlight has a plan that achieves many of the same policy goals in a manner that we believe is more pragmatic and mindful of voters’ deep-seated opinions.

I’m a progressive and I want to see the federal government provide more quality care at lower cost. But I’m also a pollster who has spent years grappling with public opinion. Support for Medicare for All varies a lot depending on question wording; the more you spell out the details of the program and what it would require, the more voter support for the policy drops. The questions we developed with Zeteo were developed as a compromise between two organizations with two competing visions of what health care could look like in this country.

What do voters think about single-payer health care?

Since voters’ opinions change depending on exactly how you word the single-payer plan, we split our poll into three equal groups and asked voters questions with three different wordings.

My biggest takeaway from these results is that Medicare for All is not a surefire political winner; it only cracks the majority of support in one of our questions, and support declines as you provide more information about the proposal. Many advocates will insist this can be fixed with messaging, but our research shows that policy design matters far more than any messaging.

Our first question asked voters about their support for a robust public option (a policy Searchlight supports): 48% of all voters say they would strongly or somewhat support such a proposal — while 18% say they would neither support nor oppose and 21% say they would somewhat or strongly oppose.

Our second question asked about automatically enrolling Americans in a comprehensive single-payer plan, but with soft language that didn’t specify replacing private insurance: 52% of all voters say they would strongly or somewhat support such a proposal — while 19% say they would neither support nor oppose and 20% say they would somewhat or strongly oppose.

Our third question asked if voters would support the government replacing all Americans’ private health insurance with a single federal health insurance program: 40% of all voters say they would strongly or somewhat support such a proposal — while 16% say they would neither support nor oppose and 30% say they would somewhat or strongly oppose.

Why did support fall off so much for the last policy proposal?

Voters trust their insurance and don’t trust the government

The single-biggest and perpetually undiscussed reason why we don’t have Medicare for All in this country is that the vast majority of Americans are satisfied with their health insurance plan. That doesn’t mean they don’t have issues with the health care system in general (most will say the system as a whole is broken), but that they are generally okay with the coverage they personally receive. Americans also trust their doctors and insurers more than they trust the federal government. The idea of switching off their current plan to one run by the government taps into both fear of uncertainty and loss aversion.

Candidates sometimes do this dance where they avoid saying they want to eliminate private insurance, either by describing niche cases where it would still be allowed (“supplementary” plans, or occasionally union insurance plans) or by describing Medicare for All as a public option that just naturally supplants private insurance. For example, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed evolved his Medicare for All position from outright abolishing private health insurance to automatically enrolling everyone under 65 in a comprehensive single-payer health plan. In his new model, private insurance would still exist, but it would be redundant compared to the comprehensive public plan that has no premiums, copays, or deductibles. This constant redefining of Medicare for All makes it frustrating to poll, since the policy details are contentious and ever-changing.

As you can see in our poll above, a fully described M4A plan is the least popular option we polled. As I said before, this has been my experience across years of polling this issue. Voters like the idea of reforms and government intervention, but are uncomfortable with tradeoffs like the loss of private insurance. They’re also likely confused about what Medicare for All means, since the term has been used for several different policies by different politicians.

Gut checking

Asking about general support for government health care programs can be a bit abstract — after all, none of these are likely to become law any time soon. To get a more grounded read, we asked voters to imagine that there was a government-run health insurance program being offered to them today, and to decide if they would switch from their current insurance. The result was a resounding “no” from 70% of voters. This result was strong across majorities in all political affiliations, but was the most significant among Independents and Republicans.

The explanation here is twofold. First, voters are overwhelmingly satisfied with their current insurance. Second, fifty-seven percent of voters do not trust the federal government to successfully administer a national health insurance plan. The number of voters, across parties, with “a lot of confidence” in the federal government is just paltry.

I’m not a health care policy wonk. David Bowen, our senior health care fellow, will be writing more about his plan to make coverage more affordable and more available over the following days. I have, however, spent a ton of time thinking about and measuring American public opinion. It would be a mistake to read Americans’ frustration with the health care system as an endorsement of a government takeover of that system when they’re even more frustrated with the government itself. Advocates for a greater governmental role in the system need to start by proving the government is competent. Until then, voters will keep choosing the option they know (private insurance) over a public option run by a government they don’t have confidence in. Advocates for Medicare for All face a second hurdle as well — overcoming voters’ discomfort with higher taxes and expensive new programs. Our polling makes it clear that voters want reforms to the health care system. The details are, as always, more complicated.

Graham Platner is almost certainly about to drop out of the Maine Senate race. After months of controversy and factional disputes, the candidate who has attracted the most attention this election cycle will soon be leaving it because of a very credible sexual assault allegation.

In The Argument this morning, Jerusalem Demsas reflected on Platner’s demise in a piece titled “What Graham Platner’s defenders refused to see.” In the article, she persuasively argues that Platner’s defenders blinded themselves to his numerous defects because he was a member of their team.

Here’s the relevant point:

“The problem, of course, is that Platner’s defenders have done some bad practical reasoning. They have decided that the world is sorted cleanly into friends and enemies, which means evaluating claims is a matter of figuring out which team you’re on, not whether the argument has merit. That’s why every time people raised concerns with Platner’s behavior, it was shot down as an attack on a friend by an obvious enemy.”

This failure to see clearly that someone with Platner’s track record was probably a rotten guy was rooted in another impulse. Platner’s most fervent supporters incessantly defended him because the stakes for what he stood for transcended any sort of character flaw.

In a system where every political and policy problem is directly downstream of the billionaire class, where the only reason Medicare for All does not exist is malign political influence, and each and every politician outside of their narrow tent only serves special interests, there are only a few candidates ideologically pure enough to support.

Simply put, Graham Platner could not fall. If he did, who else would be left? A tribe, after all, must protect its chief.

That’s what I found to be so dispiriting and revealing about the whole Platner debacle. There are other Democratic candidates running this election cycle who also espouse righteous critiques of the establishment, billionaire donors, and political corruption. But they were never beloved by the same political commentators and strategists who obsessively defended Platner until the most damning revelation of all.

Why? It’s because they didn’t pass every litmus test imposed by that political coalition.

Consider James Talarico in Texas, the Presbyterian seminarian who is running for Senate on a mission to reclaim Christianity for the left. He calls out “billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians.” His platform also proposes profoundly progressive improvements to our healthcare system. But he doesn’t dogmatically back Medicare for All, receives money from more moderate Democratic groups, and speaks favorably about Texas’s oil and gas industry. As a result, he doesn’t attract the same type of zealous support.

In Iowa, Josh Turek is running for Senate as a “prairie populist.” His platform is also progressive, certainly dramatically more so than his Republican opponent, but like Talarico, he doesn’t box himself in with Medicare for All. He’s also viewed with suspicion because he was the favored candidate of Chuck Schumer. So, unlike Platner, who held all the right positions and had all the right enemies, he never gained much favor either.

Jon Ossoff is running for reelection in Georgia and creating buzz for a presidential run because of his viral videos exposing Trump’s corruption. He also calls the political system (which includes his political party) “coin-operated.” On the other hand, he supported a crypto regulation bill that has been labeled as “pro industry,” voted for a conservative immigration bill, and has all sorts of heterodox positions. That means he’s out too.

To be clear, these politicians are not actively opposed in their campaigns by the left populists who loved Graham Platner. But they just don’t attract the same ideological fervor. And if they ever faced the same barrage of credible accusations that Platner did, they certainly would never receive the same sort of scathing defenses.

I’m not arguing that they would be worthy of defense. Nobody is. But I do think left factionalists should be more interested in these politicians. They might not be ideologically pure enough, but they make many of the same arguments as Platner. And more importantly, they are running competitively in states more ideologically conservative than Maine.

On a less sexy note, everyone should take a closer look at Roy Cooper, too — the former North Carolina governor who is on track to blow out his Republican opponent in a state Trump has won three times. He doesn’t dogmatically toe the line of economic populism, but he wins votes.

Ultimately, it all comes down to this: If there is ever going to be a vote to reverse Trump’s regressive tax cuts, much less pass a progressive health reform like a public option, Democrats are going to need the votes of candidates who reflect the politics of redder states. They’re going to need a tent that is much bigger than Graham Platner.

So my call to all the die-hard Platner supporters isn’t just to reflect on the cognitive dissonance that got them here. Rather, it’s to think in politically practical terms. Open your minds to candidates who might not share every ounce of your worldview, but still get pretty close.

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Years ago, a seasoned political consultant confided in me that he’d polled a proposal to impose mandatory life sentences on child molesters and had been shocked to discover that Americans hated the idea. Why? Not because the sentences were too steep—rather because people wanted those pedophiles executed. If someone had done something terrible to a little five-year-old girl, almost nothing could satisfy America’s vengeance.

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I use this example to point out that there are narratives in life that resonate beyond the way we ordinarily understand their topical valence. In politics, consultants regularly pore over polling data to discern which issues are most salient—the economy, the border, reproductive rights, climate change, inflation, and so on. Candidates, seeing one issue move up or down the list, may rearrange their stump speeches to reflect what they believe the public wants to hear.

But even if a candidate’s priorities lined up perfectly with any given voter’s concerns, news that the candidate has abused a child, or even that the candidate had not been sufficiently determined to bring pedophiles to justice, would likely render the other stuff meaningless. The emotional valence of a deeply moral issue can block out the sun. That’s because it speaks to something deeper—what the famous journalist Walter Lippmann termed the “pictures in our heads.” The world is too complex for any individual to understand—but an act or position so egregious can provide a window onto a reality that colors everything else.

Why do I bring this up on America’s 250th birthday? Because it bears directly on contemporary progressivism’s relationship with patriotism. How we on the left and center-left feel about America isn’t typically measured among the litany of issues we’re asked to rank. But what I’ve termed our “cultural aversion to power”—our deep suspicion of any institution that has imperialistic, colonial, patriarchal, or coercive roots—has come to frame how many of us perceive the nation as a whole. Within the progressive bubble, the U.S. is a society rife with racism, sexism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and the list goes on. And it follows simply that outsiders, hearing our critique, have come to presume that we believe that America is bad.

That narrative is both substantively wrong and politically toxic. Even if American history is beset with all sorts of ugliness—and it certainly is—few Americans outside our ideological bubble doubt at root that America is good. Arguing that America is actually a malign influence is a “tell” in the worst way politically because to many Americans, patriotism is more than just a concept, it is a virtue. Set aside what we plan to do to strengthen the social safety net, protect the right to choose, bring peace to the Middle East, or fight climate change. If the electorate is led to believe our collective view is that America is fundamentally bad, few outside our narrow sliver of the electorate are going to stand with us at the polls.

Patriotism is good politics

Before exploring why progressives should embrace patriotism, I want to step back and establish that Americans are, by and large, patriotic. This may not be readily apparent in some parts of the progressive bubble, or even in the sort of ivory tower rooms I occasionally find myself in. But across the fulcrum of ordinary life, the bulk of your neighbors are proud to be Americans, and believe America acts in the globe’s better interests.

At my request, the Searchlight Institute did some preliminary polling on the topic in August 2025, well before the Iran War. Seventy-seven percent of respondents were at least somewhat “proud to be an American” (including 62% of Democrats), with a full 46%, a large plurality, saying that they were “very proud.” We then asked: “Overall, do you think America is a force for good in the world?” On this question, the responses again weren’t close: 68 percent of respondents said yes (including 53% of self-identified Democrats), while only 24 percent said no, with seven percent unsure.1 Put another way, however pessimistic progressives may be—however much we may feel as though the American Dream is slipping away—we have remained a fundamentally patriotic nation.

Then we asked a very different question: “Do you believe that most Republicans (and, in a subsequent query, most Democrats) consider America to be a force for good in the world?” Note—this question wasn’t asking what respondents themselves thought about the country—it was asking them about what they believed other people thought about America. And the results were striking. A full 65 percent of Americans stated that they believed Republicans consider America a force for good in the world—but only 43 percent stated that Democrats believe the same. When asked separately which party is more likely to view America as a force for good, the GOP maintained a 26-point advantage.

Put simply, the broad-based perception that Democrats aren’t patriotic cuts against reality. Sixty-two percent of Democrats reported being proud to be American, compared to only 33% who were not. But there remains a kernel of truth to the myth: Democrats are, in fact, the least rah-rah patriotic. Polling from Searchlight finds that Democrats are significantly less likely to consider clearly-patriotic ‘rah-rah’ acts as such. If Democrats intend to expand our appeal beyond the self-identified progressive tent—to the extent we want to draw together a coalition of heterodox thinking who might eventually constitute the supermajority we need to govern—we will need to draw support from those who are proud to be American.

I’m not suggesting that progressives whitewash American history or pretend that our collective past isn’t beset with all sorts of moral flaws and blemishes. It’s not to deny the reality of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and the rest of it. But it is to argue that those cuts do not entirely spoil our society’s remarkable and heroic story. America’s shortcomings need to be understood within the context of what can only be described as a kind of miracle—a nation of people with no common history, heritage, or language has managed to build and maintain the world’s longest surviving democracy. And until we progressives begin to understand the impact of dismissing that triumph—until we grapple with this deeper narrative challenge—we will struggle to win over voters who are fundamentally enamored with American society even if our policy agenda appears more to their liking.

How we got here

That progressives are deeply cynical about America will be entirely obvious to anyone who sits inside the academy, where it’s almost apostasy to interpret the world through any other lens. Postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonial studies—these phrases may not mean much to those who haven’t pursued a post-graduate degree. But in many cases they have had the combined effect of changing the underlying object of academic inquiry. Many researchers now set out first and foremost to uncover how some oppressive force has gone rogue: How capital has coerced labor, or how one nation has forced another to kowtow, or how an oppressive state has trampled over the civil liberties of its people.

To be clear, these dynamics are real—they are worthy of inquiry, and in many cases should be studied and addressed. But they are all born of the same narrative—that someone with power is doing something bad to someone without. In other words, the core frame in today’s academic discourse—the picture in academics’ heads—centers on a deep cynicism about authority. And that same framing has come to define progressive politics writ large. Downstream of that gestalt is the notion that America is bad. American society, as reflected by all its flaws, is just another incarnation of the abusive centralized authority that many in the progressive movement writ large want to vanquish.

This wasn’t always the case. From the progressive movement’s birth through, say, Watergate, reformers not only weren’t inclined to vilify centralized authority—they tended to venerate it. From the Wilson administration’s creation of the FTC and the Federal Reserve, to the New Deal’s stirring of a massive alphabet soup of social welfare programs, to JFK’s first inaugural, to Lyndon Johnson’s massive “War on Poverty,” progressivism’s prevailing impulse was to use public power to do big things. America wasn’t bad in that story—it was good. The TVA bringing power to the poor farmers in the Upper South was good. The Marshall Plan—a “TVA for Europe”—was good. The Peace Corps was good. NASA was good. America was, in the progressive worldview, a force for good.

But then progressives discovered, much to their own disgust, that the “establishment” running those behemoth programs weren’t always working in the public interest. The urban highway program slashed through neighborhoods, and government bureaucrats let agricultural behemoths spray DDT on crops, and Washington let Detroit produce cars that were, in Ralph Nader’s famous phrase, “unsafe at any speed.” The progressive impulse to deploy centralized authority was replaced by a desire to cut it down to size. And with that cynicism came a generalized skepticism of American society—a sentiment that could easily be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as the antithesis of patriotism.

That change in story was justified. Today, who among us would have such faith in a standard-issue government agency to carry out a New Deal project like the Tennessee Valley Authority? We on the left are often now the ones suing and blocking the government from legalizing multifamily housing opposed by the locals, building interstate transmission lines across pristine forests, and constructing large scale infrastructure for fear of the impacts on various neighborhoods. Those emanations of public authority now look to many of us like the most likely perpetrators of social injustice. Had only Robert Moses been answerable to the broader public—the American people almost certainly would have been better served. But that skepticism fueled a notion, prevalent in certain corners of the left and center-left, that the American government was bad.

In many cases, the progressive movement—a movement to which I myself subscribe—still *thinks* that it’s united by a desire to empower public authority to do more. We *think* we want to empower government agencies to build a Green New Deal and reindustrialize the country. But we don’t actually want to engage with the trade-offs necessary to empower these agencies. That’s because fundamentally we believe that whenever America exercises its power—whenever someone is granted authority—it will be used in a way that is rotten at its core. That’s why I don’t just want progressives to reclaim patriotism for political reasons. I want us to believe in the inherent good of America because it is a prerequisite for accomplishing the policy change we seek.

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Why progressives need to reclaim patriotism

No one’s denying that America is far from perfect. But like any wayward family member, or grandparent who makes off-hand comments that are entirely politically incorrect, our national story cannot be defined exclusively by our worst moments. And the alacrity with which some of the most vocal members of the progressive movement make that jump—the eagerness with which they attack our national history as an abomination—not only misses the essence of our story but it alienates voters who might otherwise join our cause.

This isn’t a new revelation—and it certainly isn’t mine. Consider Frederick Douglass’s counterintuitive approach to championing the cause of emancipation in the years before the Civil War. The Great Orator might have been tempted to harangue northern whites for having allowed the institution of chattel slavery to exist in the U.S. for as long as it had. As a former slave himself, Douglass could have emerged as a moral voice demanding recompense—certainly he wouldn’t have been wrong to shower them with approbation.

Instead, however, Douglass chose not to frame the white and Black experiences in America as separate and at odds, but rather as parallel and in concert. He likened the emancipation of the slaves to the birth of liberty born from the Declaration of Independence. He connected the Black struggle inside the U.S. to the nation’s broader march toward freedom and prosperity. In his telling, America wasn’t bad for embracing slavery, terrible as that institution was—it could be exalted for banishing the practice. And that being the case, it was now incumbent upon every American to take up the cause.2 To note, Martin Luther King Jr. employed much the same strategy when leading the Civil Rights movement a century later, explicitly connecting the Black struggle to the American creed born in 1776.

In neither case was the progressive call to limit the power of the American state. King advocated for a Marshall Plan for Black communities— which would have had the federal government invest billions in physical infrastructure for urban slums and rural hamlets alike. But in the decades since, that same cultural aversion to power that has soured progressivism on patriotism has hardened into the notion that government authority can’t be trusted.

Douglass and King’s instincts should be instructive for all of us who subscribe to the goals of progressive politics. It does us no favors today to embrace some notion that America is irredeemably bad—to suggest or imply that its founding principles are corrupt, that its governing institutions are shrouds for malign intentions, that we’re all ciphers in some grand conspiracy to keep the powerless oppressed. And from a more practical standpoint, set aside whether you support any given progressive idea on the merits—there’s no reason to believe that even the most lightning-rod proposals (Medicare for All, or student loan forgiveness) would be more likely to be achieved if more Americans believed government was bad.

The bottom line here—the notion that progressives should embrace a worldview that America is good, actually—won’t seem like much of an ask to most progressives. After all, as the polling reveals, most voters in the party they identify with are already there. But if patriotism is banal among the party’s rank-and-file, many who comprise its educated elite—those who have been steeped in the cultural aversion to power for decades—will likely find the notion harder to swallow. And as the Searchlight Institute polling suggests, those are the ones who define the public’s perception of the Democratic Party’s relationship with patriotism.

All too often, at the end of a losing campaign, progressives lay the blame at the feet of their messaging. Had they only chosen a slightly different way to frame their agenda, we tell ourselves, we surely would have won. More often than not, however, our indictment of the message serves simply to protect us from having to look under the hood. At long last, we need to peer more incisively into our branding—beyond even our policy agenda. We need to derive a better picture of how ordinary voters understand our values. What do they think has gone wrong in America? Do they think we’re rooting for America to succeed—or do they think we want to take American society down to the studs? What is the story in their heads?

Put more simply, to succeed politically, our movement needs to be proud of America. We need to make clear that we are cognizant of where it has fallen short, and broadcast that we are hopeful about what it can achieve in the future. We should be honest about the mistakes that our country has made, but we should simultaneously acknowledge that, for all its flaws, America is a shining city on the hill. The birth of freedom represented by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago was a miracle at the time and continues to represent one of the great moments in human history. Yes, we’ve faltered in our past. But the progressive creed should promise to brighten America’s glow and expand the circle of those who can bask in its glory here at home and everywhere around the world.

Nine months ago, we launched the Searchlight Institute to break the culture of rigidity that has suffocated the left-of-center ideas world for too long. Doing so requires saying “no” to interest groups that enforce ideological conformity and push Democrats to adopt policy positions that are wrong on the merits and politically disastrous. Most of these groups exist on the left—but not always.

One group in particular has come to deploy the same counterproductive tactics used by left-wing groups: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise known as AIPAC. By pushing elected officials to take ever more uncompromising positions, it has vacated the moderate middle, leaving a void filled by extremist candidates, including those who outright deny Israel’s right to exist. I noted this evolution when we launched, but given the outsized role AIPAC has played in a number of high-profile primaries recently—and the way its influence is consistently wrongfooting candidates—it is worth fleshing out the argument.

An important distinction to make up front is that not all groups are “Groups” in the pejorative sense. Having lived and worked in the DC area for most of my life, I know and am friends with lots of people who work for many nonprofit groups; I have worked for and started some of them myself, including Searchlight. The criteria for whether a group is a “Group” is pretty simple: does it demand that elected officials take positions that are wrong on the merits or politically disastrous, or both? Does it use misleading polling and policy analysis to make its case? Does it deploy resources such as donations, endorsements, volunteers, and TV ads as pressure tactics against candidates who refuse to kowtow to its rigid litmus tests? If so, then yes, it is a “Group.”

Over the past decade or so, AIPAC has evolved from a group to a “Group,” a trajectory that tracked the rise of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. In my lifetime, under leaders ranging from Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s to Likud’s Ariel Sharon in the 2000s, Israel succeeded in surviving as a liberal democracy under hostile and often punishing conditions, seeking a formal peace process and a two-state solution despite a steady stream of terror attacks and two Intifadas. The hawkish Sharon even pushed through a forced evacuation of Israeli settlers and military forces from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, breaking with Likud to form the centrist party Kadima.

Netanyahu changed all that. As prime minister, he has pushed Israel to abandon the goal of a two-state solution and imposed his militaristic, doomsday worldview on the nation, approaching every conflict as existential and steering the nation towards repeated and sustained use of overwhelming military force and community violence against Palestinians.

I first experienced AIPAC’s influence in 2015, when President Barack Obama successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a diplomatic agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear abilities. Netanyahu vehemently opposed the deal and applied major political pressure on Congressional Democrats to vote against it. In a shocking breach of protocol, Republican Speaker John Boehner circumvented the Obama administration and invited Netanyahu to give a joint address to Congress, which Bibi used to blast the deal. Backing Bibi, AIPAC launched a massive lobbying campaign, spending nearly $30 million in an attempt to kill the JCPOA.

At the time, I was working for Senator Harry Reid, who resisted AIPAC’s lobbying and supported the JCPOA. With Democrats in the minority in both houses of Congress, Reid dedicated himself to the tricky task of protecting the JCPOA against the efforts by AIPAC and Republicans to overturn it. AIPAC’s ferocious lobbying succeeded in getting Chuck Schumer, then the third-ranking Democratic leader and presumed successor to Reid, to oppose the deal, “shaking [the] Democratic firewall,” as the New York Times reported at the time. Yet Reid prevailed, and the deal stood.

Whatever you think of the JCPOA or American support for Israel on the merits, AIPAC could, back then, credibly contend that it was pushing Democrats to take politically popular positions. Support for Israel among the American public had been strong and durable for many years. While I personally believe the JCPOA was a good deal and a historic achievement—a view underscored by watching Trump struggle to secure what is virtually guaranteed to be a significantly worse deal—the fact remains that it was politically unpopular. A Pew poll taken at the time found just 21% of Americans approving of the deal, compared to 49% who opposed it.

Since then, however, Netanyahu’s stances have grown more extreme, as have the actions of the Israeli government under his leadership. This development has shifted public opinion on Israel in the U.S.—including among American Jews, among whom Netanyahu now has a -16 approval rating—and played a role in increasing antisemitism worldwide. Whereas AIPAC once had public opinion on its side, the reverse is true today. In 2022, Americans had a favorable opinion of Israel by a thirteen-point margin, yet today they have an unfavorable view by a twenty-three point margin. By a fifteen-point margin, voters think Israel is committing genocide. Sixty-one percent of American Jews, who overwhelmingly (76%) believe that Israel’s existence is vital for the future of the Jewish people, say that Israel is guilty of war crimes in Gaza. Only 31% of American Jews support AIPAC’s demand that the U.S. provide unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel, while 44% believe the aid should be conditional, and 26% believe the U.S. should simply stop providing the assistance.

This decline in support has serious consequences for Jewish safety. As J Street CEO Jeremy Ben-Ami and UCLA political scientist Dov Waxman argued in a report for the Nexus Project, “giving Netanyahu and his far-right allies carte blanche to do what they like in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank does not protect Jews, it makes them less safe.” When Israel engages in military operations that cause major casualties among innocent Palestinians, antisemitic incidents and hate crimes spike, as Jews are unfairly blamed for the extreme actions of Netanyahu’s government—which AIPAC insists American politicians continue to support.

As Netanyahu’s actions have become increasingly indefensible and politically toxic, Democrats must face the reality that AIPAC is mirroring the worst behavior for which I have criticized left-wing “Groups”.

Every element of the case against them now applies to AIPAC. Acting as a pressure group focused on its own narrow interests, AIPAC forces Democrats to take positions that are out of step with the American people and morally wrong. It does so by bestowing or withholding valuable resources such as endorsements, cash, volunteers, and other campaign resources—many of which are in-kind contributions in all but the strictly legal sense. And it plies them with skewed polling and policy analysis to support its case. In the same way that left-wing “Groups” enforce extreme litmus tests, AIPAC demands that Democrats not just support the best interests of Israel, broadly defined, but unquestioningly support Netanyahu, spending millions against supporters of Israel who dare criticize him, even as he executes what some of the world’s leading experts have classified as a genocide.

I saw this firsthand when I served as chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman had always been a strong supporter of Israel and was not shy about saying so during his 2022 Senate campaign. At the same time, he also opposed forever wars and expressed a thoroughgoing commitment to human rights. Yet as AIPAC allies leaned on Fetterman, those compassionate, countervailing commitments fell by the wayside, replaced by an unquestioning obedience to the AIPAC line. Fetterman is an extreme example, but the trend is the same for other Democratic politicians.

As Democrats reconsider their relationship with AIPAC, they should factor in that the magnitude of the policies for which AIPAC has whipped support exceeds that of left-wing “Groups.” AIPAC lobbies for Democrats to turn a blind eye to war crimes and to continue supplying weapons to Israel without any restrictions—a unique privilege among American allies. It endorsed more than 100 members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And it has demanded that politicians fall in line as Netanyahu drew America into a disastrous war with Iran that left the Iranian regime strengthened, while dramatically undermining America’s geopolitical interests and driving up costs at home.

My criticism of the “Groups” is rooted in a larger concern that their actions undermine our ability to beat Trump and his fascist cohort; their pressure pushes Democrats to adopt the sort of extreme policy positions that make it harder to win in red and purple states where they used to be competitive. This prevents Democrats from building the broad-based supermajority coalition necessary to defeat the rise of fascism.

Once again, this criticism applies to AIPAC. In recent elections, AIPAC has spent a remarkable amount of money primarying Democrats and instigating needless factional infighting. So far in 2026, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project has spent over $38 million through direct spending, shell PACs, and donations to aligned organizations.

Since their money is contingent on candidates agreeing to extreme positions that are unpopular with Democratic primary voters (as well as general election voters), these interventions sometimes backfire, which sends more extreme people to Congress. In New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, AIPAC spent $2 million attacking Tom Malinowski, a pro-Israel moderate, because he refused to support unconditional aid to Israel. This paved the way for Analilia Mejia, a left-wing candidate, to defeat Malinowski in the primary by a margin of 889 votes. In Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, AIPAC spent millions against former Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, a supporter of Israel and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, because he refused to back unrestricted military aid to the Netanyahu government. In 2024, AIPAC spent over $4.6 million against California Congressman Dave Min, another moderate supporter of Israel, whose offense appeared to be privately criticizing Netanyahu for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlements. Min prevailed, but AIPAC made his effort to hold a swing district more difficult.

Now, AIPAC’s involvement is wrongfooting otherwise strong Democratic candidates, both progressives and moderates. As opposition to AIPAC becomes a major motivator for many of the party’s most engaged voters, candidates with extreme views have surged in recent primary elections, and several of them are now on their way to Congress.

The risk for Democrats is enormous. In the 1960s and 70s, infighting over Vietnam toppled Lyndon Johnson and opened the door to Nixon, Reagan, and thirty years of wandering in the political wilderness, as Republicans dominated the White House for all but four years between 1968 and 1992. Today, the positions AIPAC is pushing Democrats to take threaten to consign the party to a similar spiral of internal conflict, when we should be uniting under a big tent to fight right-wing authoritarianism.

For those of us who love and admire the state of Israel and are heartbroken at what Netanyahu has done to it, rejecting AIPAC is a step towards rebuilding the support he has squandered. Just as left-wing groups push Democrats to reject mainstream positions on issues such as climate change or immigration, AIPAC’s absolutism leaves no room for moderation. To Democrats of all factions, including those who fret about the rise of the party’s insurgent left wing, I would give the same advice as I do on other topics: just say no to interest groups who push you to take extreme positions that are morally indefensible and repel American voters.

Just say no to AIPAC.

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Today’s article is from Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and Daniel Delgado, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

Today, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, a little-known case that has enormous ramifications for our ability to manage land border crossings and facilitate lawful trade and travel. In this decision, the Court clarified that someone has not “arrived” in the United States until they have physically crossed the border. This will allow border officials to ensure they have the resources necessary to process undocumented people — people who do not have a valid visa or other travel authorization — at our ports of entry before they allow them to cross the international boundary and “arrive” in the United States. In fact, this is no different than what routinely happens at airports, where we only allow people to fly to the United States who are authorized to travel here, and the number of flights that are allowed to land are directly tied to the resources we have to process them.

Today’s decision affirms the importance of being able to manage our land border in an orderly and safe manner. While some may be quick to call the court’s decision another “win” for the Trump administration, it is actually a victory for commonsense immigration policy. Anyone who wants to avoid the chaotic scenes we saw periodically at the border under the Biden administration needs to be clear-eyed about this, and not oppose it merely on the grounds that Trump was in favor of it.

The policies that sparked this lawsuit actually began under the Obama Administration (when one of us was working in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) front office). While President Obama did, in fact, allow a certain number of migrants to be processed each day regardless of whether they had documentation, President Trump instead exploited the use of metering to essentially shut down access to ports of entry for people seeking asylum.

Despite this, as we know firsthand from our experience serving as senior border officials with the Department of Homeland Security, the ability to meter the number of arrivals at land border ports of entry is an important tool that ensures those critical crossings operate safely and efficiently. We want to explain why today’s decision matters, and more importantly, why it won’t fix our broken immigration system.

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Where “metering” came from and why it matters

In 2016, we experienced a surge of undocumented Haitian nationals seeking to cross the border at the San Ysidro port of entry in southern California. These Haitians had left Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010 to work in Brazil and Chile, where they had been welcomed. But as the economic situation in those countries began to deteriorate, thousands of migrants made their way north towards the United States to claim asylum at our southern border near San Diego. After a few weeks, CBP was overwhelmed.

Under our current immigration laws, people who are inside the United States, or who have “arrived” at a port of entry, must be allowed to claim asylum. But processing people without a valid visa or authorization to come to the United States takes several hours per person, and our ports of entry are simply not designed to hold the number of people that arrive during surges like these. To respond to this influx, CBP was forced to redeploy personnel and convert conference rooms, and even the Port Director’s office, into temporary holding spaces. Wait times for normal border crossing activity, such as lawful trade and intra-country travel, ballooned.

The situation was completely untenable.

As a result, CBP put officers at the international boundary — the line that separates the United States and Mexico—to review people’s documents. Only those undocumented individuals that CBP had the capacity to process safely were allowed to cross the boundary and present themselves for inspection. Those who were turned back had to wait in Mexico until CBP was able to process them into the United States at a designated port of entry. This practice came to be known as “metering.”

In response, in 2017, the immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado (AOL) filed a lawsuit on behalf of 13 asylum seekers against the Department of Homeland Security. They alleged that the practice of “metering” was a violation of international law and migrants’ rights to due process.

If AOL had succeeded in this case, CBP would have no recourse at the land border to manage our ports of entry during times of crisis at the border. The court’s decision correctly affirms the government’s right to manage its borders using tools that promote orderly processes — especially as the frequency of illegal crossings surges and CBP resources grow more strained.

The problems at the border go far beyond metering

It’s important to remember that metering does nothing to address the root cause of border crises like these: Our broken immigration and asylum system takes far too long to decide cases and has effectively become the most generous labor pathway into the country. This continues to drive migration to the southern border regardless of conditions abroad.

Because asylum cases take years to resolve — evidenced by a growing backlog of over 3.2 million immigration court cases — migrants are incentivized to make frivolous claims, delaying legitimate ones and undermining border enforcement. Despite these concerns, none of the major comprehensive immigration reform efforts over the past 30 years would have directly addressed the asylum system. This means that even if these bipartisan efforts to craft legislation based on enhancing border security and providing a pathway to citizenship for those who are here illegally had become law, surges at the southern border almost certainly would have continued.

Policymakers in Congress need to understand this fact. And they need to know why.

Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen firsthand how border staffing and infrastructure have not kept pace with increases in legal trade and travel. This puts immense strain on our border processing and, at times, leads to extended wait times at border crossings. This reality then becomes exacerbated by the periodic surges in illegal immigration, which have occurred under Presidents of both political parties.

Our current immigration laws make it too difficult to deliver timely and effective consequences to those who cross illegally — a critical tenet of any functioning immigration system — and Congress has continually failed to address this slow-motion crisis. This reality has sparked these recurring surges in migration and led a succession of Presidents to attempt overhauls of our immigration system by executive fiat.

This has, at times, forced CBP to shift limited resources away from other critical missions. For example, in response to record high levels of illegal crossings in December 2023, CBP curtailed or suspended operations at numerous points of entry along the southern border — including the suspension of vehicular, rail, and pedestrian traffic in some places — causing a significant disruption to lawful trade and travel into the United States.

It’s time to fix the root of the problem

Ensuring that our ports of entry can function safely should not be a partisan or controversial issue. Before people retreat into their partisan corners to reflexively praise or criticize today’s Supreme Court decision, they should take a step back and ask themselves the simple question that lies at the heart of this case: Does our obligation to allow people to claim asylum at ports of entry outweigh the imperative to ensure that the type of lawful activities that fuel our economy and connect border communities are not disrupted? The commonsense answer, which the Supreme Court affirmed today, is clearly no.

We believe liberals should take this opportunity to lead the conversation. After all, it was President Obama who spoke to the realities of a broken immigration system, and the critical need to secure our nation’s borders in his 2010 speech on comprehensive immigration reform. “Ultimately, our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship.” He continued, “Government has a threshold responsibility to secure our borders.”

As a country, we should welcome immigrants who come the right way — through the front-door, with a visa, even as we close the loopholes and backdoors in our laws that incentivize illegal immigration. If you’re curious about how exactly we can craft a border policy that builds a lawful immigration system that works for both the American public and migrants, read Blas’ policy report: No More Back Doors: Recapturing the Public’s Trust on Immigration.

A sovereign nation starts with a secure border, and to be effective, the government must be allowed to operate that border within its own capacity and without the threat of frivolous lawsuits that refuse to recognize the reality of what common-sense border management looks like.

Those who are serious about securing our nation’s borders and ensuring that lawful trade and travel are not adversely impacted by illegal immigration should welcome today’s court decision. It’s a win for common sense, not the Trump Administration. At the end of the day, until Congress finally does its job to update our woefully outdated and broken immigration system, we all will continue to suffer more losses than wins.

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Three hard-left, Mamdani-backed candidates swept through New York City congressional Democratic primaries last night. Down-ballot, the DSA cleaned up as well.

Predictably, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party is thoroughly spooked. Vicente Gonzalez, a Congressman from a Texas swing district, responded to the results by saying, “Nationally it’s a huge concern, how they push policies within the Democratic caucus that we’re going to have to defend. A lot of these policies I don’t agree with and would be very difficult for me to sell to people in South Texas.”

There’s no denying that Darializa Avila Chevalier’s views on crime and immigration would play poorly in Gonzalez’s moderate, Hispanic-majority district. And we shouldn’t over-index on the magnitude of last night’s result; the DSA is still only gaining power in the deep blue urban centers.

That being said, the same centrist Democrats who demand the party make room for politicians with more conservative views on immigration and public safety also need to get along with people like Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. That means understanding why they have been successful: They are riding a wave of deep-seated anti-incumbent sentiment and representing a part of the base that has become more progressive and accepting of socialism over the past decade.

It’s still an open question how a Democratic presidential candidate can square the fact that primary voters are substantially more progressive than the sort of voters that decide presidential elections. But in the immediate term, as the party gears up to take back Congress this November, they can’t write off the political forces that are electing these hard-left candidates to office. This means understanding that beating Trump and forming a true supermajority will involve governing alongside leftist allies who represent the views of their constituents just as much as the members of Congress who represent swing districts.

It’s essential to note that this is a two-way street. If hard-left candidates want to run on the party line and caucus with Democrats, they need to provide assurances that they’re not aiming for a hostile takeover of the party and avoid goofy legislative stunts that put frontliners at risk. They should know that they’re welcome in the big tent, but just like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they still need to vote for the sort of compromise legislation that actually makes it through Congress and improves people’s lives.

Brad Lander struck exactly the right tone in an interview this morning.

“We need to build bridges between more progressive candidates and moderate candidates. Two years ago, I knocked doors for Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. I joked that I did it in like a disguise mustache so I wouldn’t hurt their chances.”

And he continued with a fair warning to the moderates who defy primary voters at their own peril. “But I think part of the reason Dan Goldman didn’t win last night is he couldn’t endorse Mamdani when he was the Democratic nominee for mayor.”

A supermajority-focused Democratic party will need to welcome left-wing representation from the big blue dots, while also remaining dialed in on winning the districts and states that will give the party a durable governing majority. That’s a big bull to wrangle, and a job that won’t get done without taking lessons from Democrats all over America.

The left flank may have won in New York, but they have also suffered primary defeats in districts like Utah-01. Moderates like Josh Turek and Roy Cooper1 are putting red seats firmly in the flip column. Basically, there is no magic bullet that makes Democrats successful. As with most things in electoral politics, it depends on where you’re running.

This is where Searchlight’s founding principle of heterodoxy comes in. No one faction, policy, or person can save the Democrats. That remains true whether you’re talking about campaigning or governing. You wouldn’t run a Democratic Socialist in the Rio Grande Valley any more than you’d run a Blue Dog in Brooklyn. Even if Democrats are in the majority, compromise is the only way to effect change in a Congress that represents our vast and ideologically diverse country. Expanding the social safety net and taxing the rich will require buy-in from all sides.

I’m well aware how lofty that goal may seem in the thick of a contentious primary season. But I actually think Democrats’ willingness to openly disagree with each other is the party’s superpower. As Will Rogers said, “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat. Democrats never agree on anything; that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.”

So far, artificial intelligence seems to be having limited effects on the labor market. Despite the occasional viral headline announcing AI-driven job cuts, we are not seeing a big increase in unemployment or layoffs. While there are some weak signals in the market (notably the decrease in hires), there’s little support showing this is due to companies no longer demanding labor.

At the same time, we should recognize that this might not always be the case. It’s possible that a few years from now we will see dramatic shocks to the labor market. Policymakers should be preparing for these shocks now, so that appropriate policies to respond are already in place.

One of the most popular policies for mitigating the employment effects of AI also appears to be the simplest – we could just have the government create more jobs by directly hiring people. Polling by Blue Rose Research shows that 54% of Americans would support the government creating jobs directly, sometimes referred to as a “Job Guarantee.” Conversely, only 17% are in favor of direct income support without an attached job.

The US government previously used public employment programs similar to a Job Guarantee to help solve mass unemployment during the Great Depression. Agencies like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps loom large in American history and serve as a reminder that a robust government can materially improve people’s lives with a paycheck and the dignity of work.

However, I want to be clear-eyed here and note that the existing literature shows we should be skeptical of a Job Guarantee working at scale today. While there are certainly great positive economic effects of high employment levels, I worry that we sometimes lose track of why jobs are good for people. A job doesn’t provide purpose, meaning, or skills in a vacuum. It provides those qualities in the context of that specific job being something employers demand.

A job created solely for the purpose of employing someone will not necessarily provide skills that will be useful elsewhere in the labor market. Moreover, employment will only feel valuable to people if they believe that their job is providing a valuable service. While there are cases where public works demand public employment, “make-work” jobs will not have the same functionality as jobs that exist to provide a specific service.

I have some ideas for how policymakers can think creatively about how to deal with a future of possible AI-induced unemployment. But as an economist who studies unemployment and job training programs for a living, I want to first start with a technical look at existing labor market interventions and an awareness of how effective these programs truly are.

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Let’s begin our preparation for the potential AI jobs apocalypse by looking at the Congressional Budget Office’s 1976 typology for labor market interventions. It’s important to first understand how a federal jobs guarantee compares to other government programs.

• Skill development programs try to enhance the skills of employees through a combination of classes or on-the-job training.

• Work experience programs try to give an introduction to the workforce for people without previous employment, such as younger workers. Unlike on-the-job training, the goal is not to develop skills for a specific job, but to give job seekers experience working in general.

• Employability development programs help people search for appropriate jobs. This includes job search assistance, resume help, and creating job boards to help workers and firms find each other.

• Public sector employment programs hire the unemployed directly. These programs create new jobs expressly for the purpose of decreasing the number of people who are unemployed. These programs are typically aimed at adults with previous work experience.

So how well do these programs work compared to other labor market interventions? To examine this, we can look at a meta-analysis across over 200 evaluations of workforce programs.1 The results show that evaluations of “skill development” and “work experience” programs tend to find weak results in the short run and strong results in the long run.2 “Employability development” programs, such as job search assistance, find strong results in the short run, and weaker long run results.

But “Public sector employment” – the programs a “Job Guarantee” would scale up – consistently find weaker results than the other three frameworks, in the short, medium, and long run.

Why is public sector employment ineffective? In part, because it crowds out other activities that the worker could be doing. A person who loses their job and receives unemployment insurance can spend their time looking for suitable jobs, developing skills to match what employers are looking for, and applying for positions. A person working in a public sector employment program has less time to do these things. Moreover, because the job was created for the purpose of providing employment, it might not provide the worker with skills that other employers will demand.

This doesn’t suggest that a Job Guarantee can’t be part of the package of programs intended to help workers with AI shocks. Perhaps a more expansive Job Guarantee will have fundamentally different effects than narrow public sector employment programs. Alternatively, maybe policymakers simply need more experience designing these programs and working to make them better. Proposals to pilot a Jobs Guarantee in a specific area, such as Senator Cory Booker and Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman’s Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, could help work out any bugs.

But we should also be focusing on scaling up effective programs and making them work even better. For example, a randomized trial of Year Up (a program that combines training and job placement) found that it increased wages by over $8,000 a year up to 7 years after the program ended. Scaling this program, or reworking it to focus on AI-related job destruction, could substantially help people adjust to any shocks. There are also useful tax reforms that could be enacted. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program is effectively a work subsidy – increasing the take-home pay of workers and making them cheaper for employers – and has substantially increased employment. Scaling the EITC up, such as Marco Rubio’s 2014 proposal to transform the EITC into a wage subsidy, could build on this success and keep people employed. Reforms that allow for more predictable unemployment taxes can also encourage greater hiring rates.3

Novel programs – including Job Guarantees – that are designed around the unique challenges of AI can supplement existing programs. But the core of our AI labor policy has to be programs and incentives that have been demonstrated to work. Policymakers across the political spectrum are right to be concerned about the prospect of future AI job displacement. It’s time they acted on that concern, and the public’s growing angst, to start developing solutions for it.

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral tenure has started on a good note. His generational political talents on the campaign trail have translated into genuinely strong mayoral leadership. He has smartly touted good governance policies like fixing potholes and forged a working relationship with the governor to secure funding for universal 2-K. Mamdani has also achieved buy-in from more moderate skeptics by releasing a smart housing policy and supporting a plan to increase headcount at the NYPD. The mayor is clearly aware that the best form of politics, even in deep blue cities, involves taking on a heterodox set of issues.

Mamdani also hasn’t had to deal with some of the problems that can bedevil big-city mayors. There’s no ‘migrant crisis’, major crime is falling from pandemic-era highs (although less than in other major cities), and the vibe in the city is, well, immaculate. Between the Knicks’ championship and the World Cup, New York City is ready to party. And there’s no one better to oversee that party than their young, hyper-charismatic mayor.

The urban Left that backed Mamdani from the beginning is set to take a victory lap. Before they begin, they should ask themselves this question: What if the fundamentals in New York City weren’t as strong? What if Mamdani governed under the weight of the Biden-era migrant crisis? It might be politically convenient to memory-hole the event that sunk mayoral approval ratings, cut city budgets, and helped hand Trump the White House. But as the Democratic Party looks to define its immigration agenda, it is something that can’t be forgotten.

There is a consensus among many national Democrats that the next administration needs to reform the immigration system and secure the border. Progressives have signaled their interest in achieving these policy goals too. But to ensure that another politically destabilizing crisis doesn’t happen again, the left-wing of the party needs to reflect on a still unresolved tension.

There is a conflict between the border policy advocated by Left groups at the federal level and the conditions that allow for Left mayors to thrive at the local level.

Trump’s interior enforcement strategy has been cruel, lawless, and unpopular (although not as much as one would hope). For that matter, the decision from governors like Greg Abbott to bus migrants across state lines for political purposes was also wrong. But Mamdani has doubtlessly benefited from the fact that migrant encounters at the southern border are at their lowest level in fifty years.

There’s a path forward here that doesn’t involve Trump’s inhumane immigration policy. That path also means the left needs to confront the excesses of their immigration activist groups, too, and implement the sort of policies that will prevent another migrant crisis.

Who the migrant crisis hurt the most

Last year, I reported on Brandon Johnson’s failed mayorship in Chicago. I wanted to figure out why the once insurgent left-wing mayor had seen his approval rating fall to 14 percent. After speaking with several city aldermen and policy experts in the city, I found that the migrant crisis was the most significant factor.

One of the most interesting stories I heard was that some of the low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods that voted for Johnson were also some of the most impacted by the migrant crisis. That’s because many of the migrant settlements popped up in their communities, and when they saw the City Council allocate large sums of money towards these newcomers, they were understandably upset. Progressive City Alderman Desmon Yancy expressed this exact sentiment when the Council passed a $70 million migrant aid bill: “When Black residents see the large financial investment being made to help support the migrants, they rightfully question when it will happen for them.”

Johnson certainly could have handled the crisis better. But other big-city mayors faced the same trade-off between increasing or even maintaining funding for city services and redirecting taxpayer dollars towards migrant settlement. In Denver, the city was forced to spend $180 million supporting tens of thousands of newcomers. For that to be fiscally sustainable, Mayor Mike Johnston reduced recreation center hours and enforced alternating weekly closures at DMV offices.

The progressive mayor repeatedly begged the Biden administration to deal with the border because the crisis made the job of governing Denver significantly harder.

New York City is the most glaring example. During the city’s migrant crisis, Mayor Adams cut billions in funding for everything from summer camp programs and libraries to trash pickup.

As one might expect, low-income New Yorkers were the ones who bore the brunt of these budget cuts. When the city reduced hours and cut Fridays for “Summer Rising” — a summer program focused on reducing learning loss and providing free meals to students, 30,000 low-income families suffered. When there is less funding to empty trash cans, neighborhoods like the South Bronx get dirtier, and richer neighborhoods can pay to stay clean.

This isn’t to say these mayors shouldn’t have redirected money to migrants. It was a genuine humanitarian crisis, and these people needed shelter, food, and healthcare. The problem is that when a city like New York is forced to pay 3 billion dollars a year on migrants, it creates an inherently zero-sum situation where the city is unable to maintain services for its citizens. Nobody should be surprised when the citizens who rely on city services get upset.

The month after the 2024 election, I chatted with a progressive city councilwoman from Queens about the borough’s rightward shift to Trump. I expressed shock, and she wasn’t surprised at all. Over the past two years, her office had fielded countless calls about migrant issues, and she expected Trump’s border message to resonate in her district.

Tax and spend progressivism needs an orderly border

It’s important to remember that the mayors who dealt with the migrant crises entered office with plans to increase funding for city services. Just like Mayor Mamdani, they see the government as the primary mechanism to redistribute wealth and create a more egalitarian society.

At the federal level, progressive immigration groups that advocated against the Biden administration’s (fatefully, late) decision to restrict asylum claims are guided by a similar moral impulse. They see the plight of the migrants, even those fleeing for strictly economic reasons, as something that must be rectified by the United States, a much wealthier country.

The problem, of course, is that these immigrant groups are not accountable to the voting public. And as much as some on the left want to exclusively blame increased migrant flows on issues like American imperialism, that’s not going to solve the sort of border crisis that happened under the Biden administration. That’s not going to satisfy the working mom in Queens who can’t drop her kid off at a city-funded summer camp because it’s closed on Fridays.

There are real political ramifications to this. It wasn’t just New York City where the migrant crisis moved voters towards Trump; a study from the USC Price School of Public Policy found that counties that received migrant buses from Texas saw Trump’s vote share increase by three points compared to the 2020 election. Trump nearly swept every Texas border county in the 2024 election, doubling his previous electoral performance. These counties are overwhelmingly Latino.

I don’t want to overstate the role immigration played in swaying voters; cost-of-living was still the primary factor. It’s also worth noting that the mayors who presided over the migrant crisis, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, saw their approval ratings rebound somewhat after the issue abated.

But there is still an important and unresolved tension between progressive immigration policy and progressive economic policy. The Left used to be more cognizant of this. Remember when Bernie Sanders railed against open borders? If the Left wants to become a more formidable electoral force and show they can actually govern, they’re going to need to return to the era when they embraced more heterodoxy on immigration.

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Fixing asylum is a policy necessity and a political winner

President Biden did not campaign on a plan to massively increase migrants into the country. Nor did his administration develop a plan to allow substantially more migrants. It was the result of the administration moving to the left on asylum policy, regional push factors, and a functionally broken immigration system that hasn’t been properly updated in decades.

That means the next Democratic administration needs to enter office with a plan to prevent another migrant crisis from happening. Sitting back and hoping one doesn’t materialize is a strategy that invites political doom.

When most people think about Democrats’ plans to fix immigration, they think about Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, makes an important point:

None of the major comprehensive immigration reform efforts over the past 30 years would have directly addressed the asylum system—which means that, even if they had been enacted, surges at the southern border almost certainly would have continued.

More than a pathway to citizenship or enhanced border security, fixing the asylum system is the primary way to rebuild the public’s trust on immigration. I’d encourage anyone reading to check out Nuñez-Neto’s full immigration plan, which he released for Searchlight, but I want to briefly highlight the reforms on asylum.

• People who cross illegally between ports of entry should generally not be eligible for asylum, unless there is an extraordinarily compelling reason—such as their life being in imminent danger.

• Create an orderly process that starts abroad for individuals who are fleeing persecution or torture to claim asylum safely at a port of entry.

• Increase the screening standard used during credible fear interviews at the border to ensure economic migrants are identified early in the process.

• Repurpose existing federal funding to create asylum processing facilities where everybody encountered at the border goes through this expedited process and is not just released into the country.

Some of these policies are contentious in certain more left-leaning parts of the party. But I’d like them to really reflect on that tension I began my piece with. A mayor like Zohran Mamdani can not increase funding on city services or govern with durable political support if he’s dealing with a migrant crisis. For that matter, no progressive Democratic president could govern popularly while allowing such chaos to reign at the border.

Every wing of the Democratic Party needs to remember the political catastrophe that doomed the Biden administration and start discussing actual solutions to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.