Dems' Credibility Gap Is A 2028 Opportunity

There is a huge 2028 lane for the Democratic candidate who breaks the omertà and declares that we're done with a party that hasn't been serious about delivering.

Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

The Democratic Party’s biggest political problem is its credibility gap. Voters may generally agree with many of its stated positions, but many do not believe the party will actually deliver — or even try to deliver — what it promises during elections.

A recent CNN poll shows less than 1 in 5 Americans now thinks the Democratic Party is an organization that can “get things done.” A Pew poll found a quarter of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters believe their party lacks a coherent message, is out of touch with voters, or has not kept its promises when its been given power.

Democratic elites have spent a year debating policy agendas. Should the party be more economically populist and center anti-corruption as a priority? Should the party be more friendly to billionaires who can bankroll their campaigns? Should the party position itself as more culturally conservative? These questions are important, but they seem to ignore the deeper problem of credibility — specifically, that no matter what Democrats decide they want to try to be at any given moment, lots of people think they are eternally and completely full of shit.

But this problem could become a huge opportunity for a shrewd 2028 candidate.

There exists a viable 2028 Democratic primary lane for a candidate who acknowledges that — as we experience the self-implosion of the Affordable Care Act’s promises and the decimation of the social safety net — lots of voters don’t think Democrats have ever delivered anything big, transformative and materially substantial in their entire lives, and certainly nothing nearly as far-reaching as what the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party delivered.¹

This candidate would further acknowledge that lots of voters — rightly — sense that Democrats haven’t even tried to deliver on their promises, and that those promises were all a duplicitous bait and switch in a grand game of Pretend Powerlessness — a game in which the Democrats absolutely had the power to do plenty of things they promised voters, but they simply refused.

This candidate would not just acknowledge this credibility gap, but define their candidacy as the antidote to it.

This candidate would lambaste the chasm between the party’s perennial hope-and-change rhetoric and its more-of-the-same policy — and declare that their prospective presidency will be different. It will judged on whether or not it delivered specific concrete things to the population.

This candidate who declares that we’re done with a fake party that has never in our lifetime been serious about delivering and who asserts that it’s time for a party that actually delivers on exactly what its campaigning on — this is a candidate who will be viciously attacked for admitting the obvious truth, who will be cast as a pariah for saying impolite things, and who will therefore have a good shot to win and change the paradigm. Why? Because the mere act of speaking such taboo truths will appear especially risky and courageous and create credibility.

We haven’t seen this candidate in our lifetimes, because — even among its most cantankerous faction — Democrats’ religion is the omertà of party loyalty, and that religion’s canon is a Democratic version of Reagan’s 11th Commandment. This mythical candidate would have to break that commandment, and give voice to the fact that the party’s past three presidents not only failed to deliver on their promises, but in many cases, actively sabotaged those promises.

In doing that, those presidents shredded the social contract between Democratic leaders and voters, rendering the party’s promises today as eyeroll-eliciting punchlines. Few really believe them because they made similar promises before and nothing came of it. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on me — fool me twice, shame on you.

Are there any leaders in the Democratic Party — or at least adjacent to it — willing to say any of this? It’s hard to say because the party is populated by lots of cowards. If there are such leaders willing to take this Bulworth lane and walk into the fire, do party powerbrokers still have enough juice to stop them? Possibly. And if they defied those powerbrokers, could someone saying these things break through voters’ understandable cynicism and despondence? I genuinely don’t know, because all the betrayals have already done so much damage to Americans’ ability to believe in anything.

But if a candidate can credibly articulate this message — and convincingly embody it in their campaign and in their agenda — that person will have a generational chance to not just compete in the presidential primary but alter the entire political ecosystem.

1. You can of course disagree and argue that this view is wrong — and you can certainly point to something like the American Rescue Plan that really did (momentarily) deliver for the working class in a real way. The indisputable point here, however, is that few Americans perceive the modern post-New Deal Democratic Party as an institution that has consistently delivered significant positive, tangible change for themselves and their families.