Trump continued to hit Democrats in his speech to Congress with the same set of issues he used to beat them in 2024: immigration and the border, inflation, wokeness, and gender ideology, especially involving children.

Democrats didn’t deliver a unified countermessage on Tuesday night, and the length of Trump’s speech pushed their party response by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) late into the evening. 

The furious progressive response to Third Way’s proposed road map to recovery suggests many Democrats are not ready for the tack to the center led by Bill Clinton after the party lost three straight presidential elections by Electoral College (and in two cases, popular vote) landslides.

At the same time, the emergence of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) as an influential figure in the party indicates that some Democratic elected officials believe their leftward lurch hurt them with the voters.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign leaves ambiguous what ailed Democrats last year. Was it the progressive baggage from her time in California politics and her failed 2019 presidential campaign that cost her at the ballot box? Or did walking back many of those positions, either directly or through campaign staffers speaking to the press anonymously, and cozying up to the Cheneys diminish liberal turnout?

Similarly, former President Joe Biden avoided the progressive fever that hit the rest of the 2020 Democratic field while going on to win both the nomination and the election. Once in the White House, however, he made overtures to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and was increasingly guided by a left-wing staff that moved him away from the center. 

In some areas, like the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, the answer is likely both. Biden and Harris accommodated their party’s leftward drift enough to alienate some supporters of Israel without actually mollifying progressive, Muslim, or Arab American voters, especially in the battleground states. By contrast, Trump was able to triangulate more effectively.

There was little sign of any recalibrating by Democrats on biological men participating in women’s sports, liberal immigration policies incentivizing a run on the border, or reaching much beyond the college-educated suburban professionals they have attracted during the Trump era while working-class voters abandoned them in droves.

Even Bill Clinton needed the 1994 midterm elections, during which Republicans won their first House majority in four decades, to complete his shift to the center. That’s when Clinton really got serious about welfare reform, tax cuts, and balancing the budget. He triangulated between more liberal congressional Democrats and his GOP opponents to win reelection in 1996.

Since intense partisan political polarization set in around 2000, Clintonian transformations have not always been necessary to return from the electoral wilderness. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was partly an attempt to distance himself from the more sharply antigovernment congressional Republicans of the 1990s, but it took years, plus losses in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, for the GOP to decline to his decline in popularity.

In safe red states, some Republicans run like it is still 2004 to this day. This faction has remained well-represented in the party’s congressional leadership teams.

Democrats didn’t really change positions on policy areas that fueled their losses to Bush. While some centrist and socially conservative candidates were recruited for particular races, Democrats as a whole continued to move left, especially on cultural issues. Democrats still won back the House when the public turned against the Iraq War and other Bush-era GOP excesses in 2006, electing a San Francisco liberal to lead them as speaker.

Fast forward to 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president and Democrats grabbed huge majorities in Congress. For a time, Democrats held 60 Senate seats, enough to break any Republican-led filibuster. 

When that proved short-lived and Republicans gained 63 House seats in 2010, Obama didn’t move to the center to win reelection two years later. While Biden avoided going woke in the 2020 Democratic primaries, he didn’t really abandon much of Obama’s agenda during Trump’s first term — other than disastrously concluding the 44th president was too tough on immigration and the border.

It turned out that if voters wanted a reprieve from the party in power after Iraq, the Great Recession, Obamacare, the pandemic, or inflation running at a 41-year high, they had no alternative but to turn to the party out of power.

Democrats are hoping Trump’s tariffs, spending cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, and general tumultuous nature alienate and exhaust enough voters to give them a new lease on life. It hasn’t happened yet, with Trump still above water in the RealClearPolitics average of his job approval ratings, albeit with significant variation among individual polls. But Harris managed to win 48.3% of the vote, so a shift wouldn’t need to be huge.

‘SHELL-SHOCKED’ DEMOCRATS STRUGGLE TO MOUNT A RESISTANCE TO TRUMP

After initial tests in Virginia, currently a GOP-run state full of DOGE-wary federal workers, and New Jersey, a blue state that came surprisingly close to going red last year and in 2021, Democrats should be favored to do well in the 2026 midterm elections.

But there are no guarantees. Republicans thought the same thing in 2022, and while they won the House, they underperformed “red wave” expectations.