The Opinions - How Three Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

In the late 1980s, the Democratic Party was trying to figure out how to how to remake itself after having lost four of the five previous presidential elections. That’s when an upstart group of Democratic strategists decided the party needed to tack to the center, with a young, charismatic leader named Bill Clinton.Today, the party faces similar challenges. Three strategists from Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Galston, Elaine Kamarck and Will Marshall, join the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy to discuss what Democrats can learn from Clinton’s success in 1992, and how the party should move forward.A full transcript of the original round table conversation is here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. I've covered politics for decades, and I've never seen the Democratic Party soul-searching like it is right now. Many Democrats tell me that they want new leadership, new ideas, and new ways of standing up to President Trump. But they don't know how to do it. Some Washington Democrats think they can win by making Trump unpopular. But history and polls suggest that's not enough if a party wants to be a credible alternative to those in power.

Any successful political party has to offer something, a concrete agenda. That was the big takeaway from a recent roundtable I did with a few Democratic operatives who were the architects of Bill Clinton's breakthrough 1992 presidential campaign. Now that we have changed the world, it's time to change America. I talked to this group of political strategists for nearly two hours, and Trump's name barely came up. Instead, it was all about what the Democrats need to be offering. Back when these strategists rose to power in the late 19th,

the Democratic Party had lost four of the five previous presidential elections. Democrats were at a real low point, comparable to what the party is facing today. In 1992, this group of operatives helped transform the party and won a resounding victory for Bill Clinton. I hope it's fun for you guys. Yeah, we get to see each other. It's a reunion. There's more courage in this room than the rest of the Democratic Party can be on. Here's what these guys learned from their victory back then and what they think Democrats should be doing today.

First, don't be afraid of change. Here's Bill Galston, former policy advisor to President Clinton. Change is hard, right? It's one of the hardest things in the world. Changing ourselves as individuals is enormously difficult. And institutions aren't all that different. New ideas, important. power new groups with new champions. And giving up power that you've accrued over decades is enormously difficult. There are a lot of Democrats who are tempted today to say, well, look what's happening to Trump. He's underwater on his tariffs. He's underwater on his mauling of government. People are not happy about abandoning Ukraine and 80 years of U.S. international leadership.

That's Will Marshall, another Clinton policy advisor. I heard this argument last night with a bunch of Democrats. We shouldn't be evading each other. We should be keeping the spotlight intensely on our opponent in hopes of eking out a 49.3% victory next time that will leave, you know, leave us in this ping-ponging back-and-for situation in American politics, a virtual tie that we've been in basically since 2012. And so we got to break out of this syndrome. And it's in everybody's interest that we understand that we have a big job of reaching working class voters. that's just going to require a completely different orientation of our ideas and our political strategies. That's what Bill Clinton was in the early 90s. He looked at the big government messaging

that had been around since FDR's New Deal, and he realized it wasn't resonating anymore. The Democrats had to make big changes, especially on cultural issues that tap into identity and personal feelings that voters have about America. And that's the second lesson for Democrats today. They have to get their cultural message right. Here's Elaine K. Mark, another advisor on Clinton's campaign, on the problem Democrats face then. So in 1988, we had a real cultural problem. We had become the party of criminals, not the party of victims.

And it was just very clear. There was a big crime wave going on in the United States. There were murders that were random murders, and people were nervous. And so we had a cultural issue hanging over us, as we do today. And the problem here is that because culture evokes emotion, if you are on the wrong side of a cultural issue, nobody hears your economics. Doesn't matter how many chips programs and how much money you've put into education or whatever. Nobody hears it. And that, I think, was true back then and I think it's true now.

The issues have changed, but I don't think the disconnect has. Because in the intervening nearly four decades, we witnessed the rise of identity politics as one of the central organizing principles, not only of politics, but of how people and groups think of themselves. And Democrats have had a very hard time, I think. think, distinguishing between the kernel of truth and importance and morality in identity politics on the one hand and its excesses on the other. So I think a lot of ordinary Americans are asking themselves, do the Democrats know how to draw lines anymore? Or are they just pushed into extremes?

When you say draw lines, you mean to stop? Between what makes sense culturally and what doesn't. What represents a reasonable response to a problem as opposed to an excessive response that defies common sense and just deeply annoys people. And look, you saw one of those issues figure pretty centrally. You know, in the 2024 election. One of the most devastating taglines

in the history of American political advertising And Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. A lot of Democrats are pretending that that ad didn't make any difference. So much, Bill. So I keep being told and being given data that that ad didn't matter. And maybe it didn't.

Oh, come on. To Bill, Elaine, and Will, transgender rights is one of the cultural issues Democrats have to figure out soon. And Democrats need to address these issues with the right message, they say. Even the right slogan. And Bill Clinton, he was a master at this. Let me give you a perfect example.

His most frequently run commercial was end welfare as we know it. It was a bumper sticker. And it did two things simultaneously. It spoke to the people in the country and said, yeah, we heard you. We got it. This welfare system is a mess.

But then he said, as we know it. So in other words, he wasn't doing a Reagan imitation. He was not throwing the whole thing out. He was saying, let's change it. That was such a brilliant combination. And I think we need that again. The new emergent issue is the transgender rights issue. And I think there the party needs to look for a way of doing both things.

things that Clinton did with welfare. On the one hand saying, we get it public. You think this is very strange. You think this is frightening. Okay. You think that people, maybe children are going to be hurt. We understand your worries. And yet at the same time, they have to say, look, there are people out there who are really hurting because they're born gender dysphoric and we understand that. There's got to be a way to combine that into a end welfare as we know it. I'm not a good enough wordsmith, but I wish we could just rent one of the Republican guys because they're so good at this to figure that out. Because you cannot abandon your base. You can't stick a needle in the eye of your base. You have to say, we get it. We get it. But you also have to say

to the broader public, we understand your fears. I think people in the party are going to have to take a deep breath and be willing to say things that previously were regarded as unsayable. And I think that one thing I really want to emphasize about the Clinton phenomenon is just the appetite for new ideas. In 1991, it was palpable. And out there in the country, people responded to it, something fresh. And ending welfare, as we know, instead of fudson around with it, then a little tweak here, you know, whatever the liberals would give us by way of a kind of a stronger work requirement. You know, when we got away from that and had wholesale and structurally different ideas, volunteer national service, public school choice, reinventing government,

all that generated energy and excitement, and it helped that we had a next generation team in Clinton and Gore. So that's the key. It's, you know, to redefine a failing party, you need to capture imagination, and it's got to be with a new offer, and it's got to be with creative ideas. Elaine, what are the ideas now that you think would either speak to voters who might be skeptical or at least make them a little more open to hearing a message if the Democrats could find the right leader for it? Well, the first thing is immigration. I mean, we were simply on the wrong side of this issue. The country was being overrun, and the interest groups were saying something that was easily translatable into it.

open borders. So Democrats have to get right on immigration. And then inflation, they just didn't get it. It goes to the class basis. And I think this is why the Democrats at this point in time are so completely screwed up, which is that we are now the party of well-to-do people. Look at that billion dollars, Kamala Harris raised, right? Why? Because there's lots of upper middle class people in the Democratic Party. And so when your upper middle class, you miss the impact of inflation. Yes. Because you are not the person who's going through the grocery store counting up the cost

of what's going into your cart. That's lesson number two from these Clinton strategists. A winning party needs a message that says, America, we hear you without abandoning its base. The third lesson? Don't be afraid of an intra-party fight. Duke it out. It'll help the party get where it needs to go.

That's what happened in 1992. The Democratic Party didn't just wrap its arms in new ideas. It was a fight within the party, and it was by no means clear that the new would win and the old would lose. And you don't have to be Frederick Douglass to believe that power never concedes without a struggle, and that change is always a fight.

You may win it, but that means that somebody else has to lose. It's the fight that breaks through to the public and says, oh, that party's still alive. They're not as brain dead as I thought they were. What are some of the concrete lessons from your experience from 88 to 92 that apply to today? FDR sparked a revolution inside the Democratic Party that lasted for three generations. Ronald Reagan sparked a revolution inside the Republican Party that lasted for two generations. We gained at best an incomplete victory. And after Bill Clinton, it became clear that the party had accepted only some of the change.

that he stood for, we have to think bigger this time. You know, a larger and more enduring majority. And that will require, you know, whoever will carry the torch for the next generation of Democrats, because we're too old to do that, which doesn't mean we've left the field, will have to be, I think, even bolder than we were. Bill Clinton's moderate third-way politics

really withered once he left the White House. Elaine, Will, and Bill believe a new generation of Democrats should pick up Clinton's mantle and run with it. Tacking to the Center worked in 1992 after Democratic losses with liberal candidates. Progressives are going to sharply disagree with that advice. These Clinton strategists, they haven't run presidential campaigns in years, and running them and winning them is different in the 2020s

than it was in 1990. But there's one thing that hasn't changed, and that's that the most critical ingredient in successful presidential politics is having the right leader in the right moment with the right message to enough Americans. Who is that person for the Democrats? I asked our panel. A lot of governor's names came up. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Josh Stein and North Carolina. I have a soft spot for West Moore.

look, we have a deep bench. The good news is, good news is a deep bench. The next generation of Democrats, there's a lot of good people. And who knows, right, which one of them will emerge. As Elaine said to me, this is why political parties need open and competitive presidential primaries to find and to hone new talent. And 2028 isn't that far away. If you like this show, follow it on.

Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez-Boid, Vesacaa, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact-check team is Kate Sinclair,

Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.