William M. Daley was White House Chief of Staff for President Obama and is on the Board of Trustees of Third Way, where Jonathan Cowan serves as President and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky serves as Vice President for Social Policy & Politics.

Politics is polarized and a full-throated, angry populism seems to be burning all of the oxygen in the 2016 race. On the right, Donald Trump’s campaign is feeding on rage directed at government, immigrants, and a perceived loss of status in a quickly changing country. On the left, populist standard-bearer Bernie Sanders is packing auditoriums with vitriolic speeches about a “rigged” economic system and the greed of the 1 percent.

Populism can certainly build crowds and sell hats, but can it deliver electoral victories? We’ll leave the GOP to its intramural squabble. We’re focused on whether it could build Democrats majorities up and down the ballot.


We think the answer is “no.” Over the past few years, Third Way has conducted a number of polls, including one covering 1,500 voters, held 15 focus groups with moderate and liberal voters in blue and purple states, and pored over hundreds of public polls and Census demographic figures.

Our findings show that Sanders-style populism actually misdiagnoses voter sentiment in this unique American moment. Whatever you think about left-wing populism as a serious governing agenda—and we have real doubts about that as well—as a political strategy it is doomed to fail. Understanding why isn’t just an explanation of why Bernie Sanders is going to come up short; it’s crucial to crafting a message and agenda with which Democrats can win sustained majorities.

Mistaking Voter Anger

Liberal populists say there is one main reason the middle class is angry: the economic deck is stacked against them. They note that income inequality has hit an all-time high and argue that we now live in a country where, unless you are born wealthy, it’s nearly impossible to succeed. They say that’s because corporations, Wall Street, and the 1 percent have rigged the system to benefit only themselves at the expense of all others. If you believe in this worldview as a political strategy, you’re betting that voters will rise up against the plutocrats, demand larger government, and support policies that result in unprecedented wealth redistribution. This change would constitute, according to Senator Sanders himself, “a political revolution.”

But from what we’ve seen in our data, that revolution isn’t coming. That’s not because voters aren’t angry—they are. In fact, in our research, voter anger was dialed up to 11. But it wasn’t a rigged economy they were frothing over. It was politicians, government, campaigns, and Congress that they viewed with contempt. “The political system is rigged,” said a Democratic primary voter in Pittsburgh. And insofar as voters saw a stacked deck in America, the crooked dealer was Washington. “The U.S. Constitution is the most beautiful document ever written, but politics keeps it from working,” lamented another Democratic primary voter from Denver. This sentiment was everywhere in our focus groups.

Pew’s latest poll about attitudes toward government underscores the disgust: 74% of voters said most elected officials put their own interests ahead of the country’s. Just 19% of voters said “government is run for the benefit of all” vs. 76% who said it’s for “a few big interests.” They see politicians as the riggers of the system, not the unriggers who can solve it. They blame Washington for creating the loopholes, not the “special interests” for taking advantage of them.

That’s very different from Sanders’s message that the “millionaires and billionaires” are rigging the economy and massive government expansion is the solution. Given this background of disgust toward government, our research showed that a populist message actually turned off many voters, because it reminded them of what they hated about Washington. When we showed them verbatim examples of prominent Democrats invoking a “stacked deck,” an Iowa Democrat said, “It is really divisive.” “I don’t want to say dirty, but it’s just a lot more accusative,” said another. “It clearly panders to the lowest denominator,” a Las Vegas Democrat said.

This confusion between anger towards politicians and anger towards the wealthy also explains why a liberal populist message misses how voters feel about their own stake in the economy. An October Wall Street Journal poll found that 54% of voters feel the “economic and political systems in the country are stacked against people like me.” But if you split apart the “political” and the “economic” elements, you get a different picture. In our polling around the economy last year, just 30% said that “the deck is stacked against people like me,” compared to 67% who said that statement didn’t apply to them. Among liberals and moderates, an even higher 69% disagreed that the economic deck was stacked against them personally. If all politics is personal, it’s clear that most of the voters who Democrats rely on to win don’t feel personally victimized in the way that the populists contend. In fact, overall they believe in the American economic system, and they see themselves as among the “haves” (not the “have nots”) within it.

So there is anger out there, but it’s directed at Washington, not so much at the 1%. And while rage is a powerful force in politics, its implications are starkly different for each party. For Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and the anti-government Tea Partiers, fomenting hatred of government may, unfortunately, be a winning political strategy. But Democrats are the party of government, both in voters’ minds and our own. So by stoking this anti-government anger and feeding the populist fire, Democrats could in time be burning down our own house.

Missing the Economic Mark

Misunderstanding the target of voter ire leads to completely whiffing on the biggest economic concern voters say they face in their day-to-day lives: vast economic change. And their main emotion about the economy is anxiety, not anger.

“We have a new economy. Things are different and changed and so should the mindsets of individuals, companies, and government,” said a swing voter from the Northeast. “Our leaders should focus on preparing Americans,” said a male Virginia moderate. “With the economy being more global we have to change our model quite a bit,” said a male swing voter from the Northeast. “My husband is unemployed. There doesn't seem to be a place in the economy for him,” said one female swing voter.

So what are middle-class voters looking for in an economic platform? An agenda that makes these huge, scary economic forces work for the middle class, not against them. When Kodak went under, 145,000 jobs disappeared—not because of unfairness but because we take pictures on our iPhones. Airbnb was just a twinkle in someone’s eye five years ago. Next year, it will serve more visitors than the entire Hilton chain but employ fewer people than North Dakota has hotel desk clerks. Borders Books has all but disappeared because of the Kindle; 300,000 sales jobs have vanished thanks to Amazon. People live in this world; they’re part of it, and they know it’s not because a handful of rich guys are pulling the strings.



Since that is the world voters see, the main populist economic ideas seem aimed at the wrong targets and tethered to a different time. Expand Social Security for everyone? That would cost trillions and confer a huge share of its benefits to wealthy, married senior couples. Single-payer health care? That comes with a $15 trillion price tag, a giant increase in middle class taxes, and another huge government program. Doubling the minimum wage to $15? All Democrats want to raise it, but a bump of nearly $8 nationwide would cost far too many jobs. All told, core populist policies would increase taxes on someone earning $60,000 by over five thousand dollars. And not a single one of these ideas addresses the middle class anxieties that are driven by the modern economy.

That’s why populist economic policies may poll well in the abstract, but most voters feel they do little to address their own concerns. In our focus groups, they felt that the populist proposals simply were not relevant to their own lives. Over and over, we heard variations on this: “Democrats are for the poor; Republicans are for the rich. No one fights for the middle class.” And tellingly, though every voter in our groups supported raising the minimum wage, not a single one thought it would directly help them or their family.

If voters believe the biggest challenge they face is navigating a new economy, then Democrats must have an agenda to meet that challenge. Voters know we can’t go back to the way things were. As one female swing voter from the Northeast said it, “I do not think we will ever ‘recover’ to the same place or economy we were before.” A male swing voter from Virginia described it this way: “The printing industry is not going to be what it’s going to be anymore, and soon everybody starts moving towards something else, transitioning towards something else, the better it’s going to be.”

American voters see a brave new economic world. They want a real path to the skills, jobs, and wages they need to succeed, and a modern set of policy ideas made for this irreversible age of globalization and technological change.

Misreading the Electoral Map

If Democrats want to win governing majorities up and down the ballot, we’re going to need a very different political strategy than what populists advocate. An increasingly leftward-leaning Democratic Party is in free-fall. From a combined 343 House, Senate, and gubernatorial seats at the start of 2009, Democrats now hold 252. Our 18 governors are the second fewest for Democrats since 1922. At 188 House seats, Democrats have to go back to 1931 to find a time when we held fewer. Democrats’ 46 Senate seats (including two Independents who caucus as Democrats) are just one better than that same historic nadir. As for the self-described “party of the middle class,” Democrats have lost middle-income voters in three consecutive election cycles and by an average of seven points and a cumulative total of more than 20 million votes.

No one should solely blame the populist left for Democrats’ demise. There was the slow and painful economic recovery, misinformation about Obamacare, and a series of miscues that called into question government’s efficacy. There is also irrational hostility to President Obama in parts of the country. But in each election cycle since our apex in 2008, commentators, pundits, and advocates remarked upon the Party’s move to the left and the ascendancy of an economically populist Democratic base. And here we are—at a low point for Democrats in the modern era.

The latest Democratic excuse is midterm elections turnout. “Republicans win when there is low turnout, and that is what happened in November,” said Senator Sanders in the latest debate. Never mind that Democrats won the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms, or that not every election is topped with a presidential ticket. Nonetheless, let’s put the base strategy to the test.

There are 159 House Districts that the non-partisan Cook Report defines as reliably blue and 186 that are reliably red. Democrats hold all but two of the blue seats; Republican hold all but two of the red seats. A turn-out-the-base strategy would yield just two more seats for each side if employed to maximum effect.

The game, then, is in the 90 “purple” districts—those that hew closer to the political average and occasionally change from one party to the other. To take back the majority, Democrats need to hold the 29 purple seats they currently have and win half of the 61 seats now occupied by Republicans.

Can Democrats win these 30 new purple House seats simply by turning out Obama’s “rising American electorate” of non-white voters, Millennials, and single women? Unfortunately, that coalition is overrepresented in blue regions of the country and underrepresented in the purple.

In blue House districts, 55% of voters are non-white. In purple districts, that number is just 30%. Purple district residents are less likely to be single women; they’re also nearly 3½ years older on average than those in blue districts. So if Democrats can’t find a way to win majorities of non-base voters in those purple districts, as we did in 2006 and 2008, we will never regain the House majority.

In the Senate, Republicans start with a big advantage. If they win all of the seats in states that vote at least five points more Republican than the rest of the country, they start with 46, just five short of a majority; to win a majority we must capture 22 of the 28 seats in the states the Cook Report calls purple. (Democrats currently hold 17.) And because of the ideological breakdown of voters in purple states, where self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals, a Democrat must tally nearly seven of ten moderates to win.

When you add it all up, if Democrats are to regain and hold our majorities, they need to win in purple states and districts—and win big. That means going well beyond the activist base and persuading large numbers of moderates and Independents to vote Democratic.

To do this means embracing the idea of Democrats as a big-tent party, a vision that our leaders followed to victory in 2006 and 2008 but that some in the Party have since rejected in favor of ideological purity. The Sanders message may capture a share of the zeitgeist and excite a portion of the base, but it misses this forest for the trees. The populists are correct that voters are angry, but they focus on the wrong voter rage. They are spot on about a struggling middle class, but they’re offering an agenda that middle-class voters don’t recognize as something that speaks to them. And while our era of polarization obviously demands new electoral strategies, their approach simply can’t build sustainable Democratic majorities at the levels below the presidency. Ultimately, populism is simply not a formula for winning and governing in the 21st century.