Opinion | The Democratic Party Is Having an ‘Identity Crisis’

In Michigan, the Democratic Party now holds both Senate seats, all statewide executive offices and both chambers of the State Legislature. Part of that, Lavora Barnes, Michigan’s Democratic Party state chairwoman, told me, is that the Republican Party became so extreme that it scared off many of its traditional voters. But part of it is that the Democratic Party molded itself into a shape that fit an anxious electorate.

“We have become almost the pragmatic party,” she said. “The party that recognizes the importance of building a government that supports its people and supporting that government in the process. If you look at what’s happened in Michigan and the sheer volume of work that this legislature was able to do in one year of this trifecta majority, it was about being practical.”

Democrats have won in Colorado and Michigan as well as in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a deliberate, understated way. “The experience of being in a really competitive state suggests that what the Democratic Party is, at its core, is very different than what you see on Twitter or in the national debates,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said. “Fundamentally, Democrats are the people who are in politics to make government work for people, which is a very old, New Deal conception of what the Democratic Party is about.”

As Wikler watched this message win Tony Evers the governorship of Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer the governorship of Michigan, he came to a theory of why it works so well in places where Democrats have so recently struggled. “When you talk to inconsistent voters and swing voters, you see a very high level of cynicism that government can ever deliver,” he told me. “To be persuasive to them, you need to credibly describe what kind of change you can generate and on what kind of things. And it tends to be on things that people know the government already does. That’s how you wind up with Whitmer and Evers running on fixing the damn roads in 2018. Then they did fix the damn roads. And then they got re-elected.”

Wikler likes to tell a story about the huge piles of coal in downtown Green Bay, near the Fox River, that have sat there for decades. “It’s an eyesore,” he says. “No one likes driving by giant piles of coal. And the Democratic mayor of Green Bay and our Democratic governor and now the president — supported with a tiebreaking vote from Tammy Baldwin — pulled together the money to move the piles of coal out of Green Bay. Democrats are the party that gets rid of the giant piles of coal.”