No one faction, policy, or person can save the Democrats

There are no easy answers

Ben Krauss is the Searchlight Institute’s new Editor. You might recognize him from the Slow Boring Newsletter. He’s planning on increasing our editorial content and reach here on Substack. So be on the lookout for more articles from Searchlight fellows and staff. If you’re not already a subscriber, click the button below. If you already are, make sure to send this around to those in your life who want to read some big ideas for solving our country’s biggest policy and political problems!

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Two years ago, I attended a conference with Democratic staffers, Biden Administration officials, and friendly new media figures. The purpose was to celebrate the Biden Administration’s policy success, then a smaller portion of the conference was left to interrogate why their agenda had failed to resonate with voters. I hoped for some careful introspection, but left more pessimistic about the party’s prospects for the coming November.

One panel summed up the whole, frustrating endeavor. It was titled, “Naming Villains.” The conceit was that the Biden Administration’s agenda had failed to gain political traction because they had not vocally identified the right political enemies. Voters weren’t mad because of inflation and the border crisis. They had merely “misplaced” their blame away from the corporations, the self-enriching billionaires, and neoliberalism — the ultimate boogeyman at the conference.

Never mind the fact that the Biden Administration did regularly blame corporate greed for inflation or that many of the administration’s staffers came from the left-wing of the party; the whole premise just felt wrong-headed and, frankly, insulting to voters who had legitimate grievances with the past several years of governance. Those voters had lived through the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and felt the sticker shock of rising prices; they turned on the news and saw reports of a ‘migrant surge’ at the border one day or a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan the next.

We all know what happened in 2024. The party lost the White House and handed the Republicans unified control of the federal government.

There is an impulse inside every faction of the Democratic Party to only name villains that flatter previous ideological biases. But it’s important to remember that the villain changes depending on the policy in question. Should you name them to voters, you need to propose the right solution to fight them.

Think about some of the most important issues in society today: housing affordability, the clean energy buildout, and the rising cost of healthcare. There just isn’t a singular ideological lens inside the Democratic Party that can solve each of these issues. Deregulation can help reduce the cost of building more housing. There are monopolies in the healthcare industry that must be broken up. At the same time, there are regulations that need to be removed to increase the supply of healthcare providers!

This idea is really what drew me to the Searchlight Institute. The guiding philosophy is “heterodoxy,” and it allows us to release research that both flatters or offends all sorts of ideological biases across the political spectrum.

Look at some of the reports we released last month. One proposal aims to “reign in the power of health care monopolies” by giving the FTC the authority to investigate the consolidation of hospital systems using broader standards of community benefit. Research shows that hospitals with local monopolies charge consumers more for services than hospitals in more competitive markets. It’s a problem that needs to be solved.

That doesn’t mean we’re tied to every other issue that falls under the umbrella of left-wing economic thought. Take data centers, for example. Jane Flegal, a Senior Searchlight Fellow and former White House Senior Director for Industrial Emissions, recently released a report that explicitly rejects calls for a data center moratorium. Instead, she says policymakers should leverage hyperscalers’ energy demand to force them to help pay for a massive expansion of the grid and boost our transmission capacity.

Make no mistake, it is progressive to advocate for adding significantly more infrastructure to the grid. If we want to create more advanced manufacturing jobs, increase electric vehicle adoption, and lower utility rates for consumers, we need to enhance grid capacity.

The good thing about data centers, as Jane Flegal put it in a recent Searchlight interview, is they’re “really invested in an electricity system that can actually serve their demand, and if we can use their political power to counter the sort of historical opposition from utilities and states, it might be a real opportunity to do something big.”

This is a perfect example of why holding tight to any political dogma prevents you from solving the right problems. If you exclusively see any large tech company as a nefarious force that needs to be stopped, then you are effectively robbing our energy system of an enormous investment opportunity.

Of course, that doesn’t mean hyperscalers should not face more regulatory action in other areas of the economy. It’s just important to be rigorous in your policy analysis and not automatically default to any particular ideological bias.

The 2026 midterms are just around the corner. The presidential primaries will be here before we know it. Candidates from all sorts of ideological factions are hitting the campaign trail and espousing their favored solutions to a voter base that is understandably nihilistic about our nation’s politics. Be on the lookout for candidates who reject simplistic political solutions. Be wary of the political organizations and think tanks that always propose a hammer for every nail that pops up in the world.

Building a durable governing coalition is hard. Using that governing coalition to actually solve policy problems is even harder. That’s why philosophies like “big tent” and “heterodoxy” are so important. Fundamentally, it’s a humble approach to politics. It recognizes that every solution doesn’t need to flatter a singular ideological bias, nor does it always need to name a particular enemy.