By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and co-author of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, announces that his
Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, is coming to an end. The end,
he reports, is because Democrats have minimal or no interest in his message that they need to move back to the center.
Currently, the desire for change
seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced
themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The
Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise,
always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has
neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our
appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now
tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a
limit! Hence: no money.
Teixeira walks through quite plausible explanation of
recent events and what is likely to occur in this year’s midterm elections.
Trump has made a variety of unpopular decisions; Democrats did well in 2025, are doing well in special elections, and
will probably have a good Election Day in November. This is all driven by
Democrats’ fury at Trump’s decisions in office and independents’ frustration
with a president who hasn’t delivered a more affordable cost of living, a
problem exacerbated by tariffs and a generally erratic and unpredictable set of
economic policies. If this comes to pass, Democrats will conclude that 2024 was
just an odd bout of temporary insanity on the part of the electorate, or a
reflection of the particular weaknesses of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ll
believe that they’re on a trajectory to win back the White House in 2028.
And then, at some point in 2027 or 2028, the electorate
will start to remember why they were willing to give Trump another chance in
the last presidential election. Add up the smug cultural elitism, the
distinctly minority position on trans issues, the persistent reluctance to
deport those who enter the country illegally, the absolute addiction to raising taxes, and the
high-profile failures of the blue-state model and blue cities from
California to Chicago to New York, and you see that the Democratic positions of
today aren’t all that different in their policy views from 2024, when they
proved capable of losing to Donald Trump again.
This doesn’t guarantee that in 2028 the Republican
nominee will win. But it does suggest that the next presidential race will pit
the GOP nominee with his flaws against a Democrat whose own flaws are likely to
remind the electorate of all those Biden and Harris flaws that they found so
intolerable.
Teixeira concludes:
Looking over this list of
problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to
terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These
haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much
of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.
It’s time—past time—for Democrats
to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions
are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them
to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right
populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.
Asking Democrats to give up the conceit that they are on
the right side of history is probably asking for the impossible.
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