Majority Democrats & the new center

The country is in crisis and Democrats are in the doldrums. A new organization, Majority Democrats, is fighting back and fixing ourselves. I’m the first chair.

Majority Democrats is starting with 32 younger elected leaders from across the country:

• mayors & State House leaders;

• members of the House & Senate; and

• the leading candidates to be the next governors of Virginia, New Jersey, and Colorado.

We intend to be the vanguard reshaping how voters see the Democratic Party: from ‘weak, woke and whiny’ to strong, confident leaders with a refreshing & relevant platform. We seek immediate impact and intend to influence the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. This will require not just bold ideas but also the courage to pursue them when they challenge the party line.

Right now, the party line points to a permanent minority. Since 2016, MAGA has realigned the electorate, to its benefit. By income & education, voters for Kamala Harris were much closer to Bob Dole’s base than Barack Obama’s.

Democrats must stop playing defense in this realigned reality. To go on offense, Majority Democrats will plant our flag in a newly defined center of a realigned electorate. Defining a new center changes the terms of debate. We can stop telling Americans who we are against and start explaining what we are for.

Defining a new center requires drawing from the disparate ideologies of American life. The old mapping of those ideologies onto parties no longer holds. Younger voters, in particular, are keen to hear about new combinations. For example:

• from conservatives, the respect for faith, family & the flag and the centering of personal responsibility

• from liberals, the commitment to individual freedom, rule of law, and equal opportunity

• from progressives, the conviction that equal opportunity requires a level playing field for everyone, not just one set of rules for everyone

• from libertarians, the uplifting of free minds & free enterprise and the healthy skepticism of centralized & personalized power

• from populists, the prosecution of corruption and the status quo

If Democrats are to win again and govern better, we must adopt the best ideas from across these factions. Then we must campaign and govern on them in an authentic, confident way. Majority Democrats is just getting off the ground: you can stay engaged here. And below is an edited & condensed version of a Boston Globe story about my decision to chair this effort:

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“…Auchincloss plans to focus on his new role as the inaugural chairman of Majority Democrats, a group formed this year by a cohort of young Democratic officeholders around the country who hope to rebuild the party brand by steering it toward a fresh platform and message.

…. Auchincloss is embracing a different, but no less contentious, competition: the one to define the future of the Democratic Party.

At the moment, that contest is wide-open. Nearly a year after President Trump and Republicans’ 2024 election victories, Democrats are still soul-searching and debating over how to rebuild their brand and appeal to voters they have lost. Even amid harsh backlash to the Trump administration’s sweeping government and public services cuts, as well as the president’s scattershot economic agenda, public opinion surveys still show Democrats registering some of their worst approval ratings ever.

…Launched in July, Majority Democrats consists of over 30 elected officials at the federal and state levels, including some considered to be rising national stars or even potential 2028 presidential candidates, including Senators Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who both won their seats last year even as Trump carried their states.

…The members share not a rigid set of ideological commitments but a sense that Democrats can only win again by challenging their own longstanding conventions and focusing intently on addressing voters’ concerns about the cost of housing and health care.

“I think of the vibe of it as like a patriotic, productive populism, where it is willing to be disruptive to the status quo, but offering workable solutions, rather than empty answers,” Auchincloss said. That means crafting not an aggressively antibusiness message but one that targets practices that are particularly harmful in peoples’ lives — like big tech platform algorithms or high pharmaceutical drug prices, he explained.

As chairman, Auchincloss is overseeing the group’s first efforts to develop a platform, raise money, recruit candidates to run in competitive seats, and influence the national Democratic conversation. He told the Globe that channeling resources to worthy candidates is a priority but argued that Democrats don’t lack money — they’re lacking ideas and effective ways to communicate them to the public. He wants his group to be a vehicle for Democrats to “take more risks and experiment more” with new forms of communication.

Success in the near term, Auchincloss said, would mean that in the 2028 presidential primary campaign environment, engaged voters and reporters would know “what it meant to be a Majority Democrat.”

“If I came and said, ‘I’m running on the Majority Democrat platform, I’m a Majority Dem’ — if that’s a relevant statement, that’s a success for our faction,” he said. “We have to make that a relevant statement.”