Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach have an important message: it’s even worse than we think. Polarization has turned politics into a forever war between red and blue America, partisanship now counts for more than candidate quality, and the entire system is losing legitimacy with wide swaths of the public. Given all this, it’s hard to say what’s less surprising—that voters keep demanding change, or that neither party has a plausible strategy for building the kind of lasting majority that could deliver it.

Just consider the track record of the Democratic Party. Since 1996, no Democratic presidential candidate has earned less than 48 percent of the vote, and only one—Barack Obama in 2008—has gone much beyond 51 percent. That’s thirty years of stalemate, with no end in sight.

At least, that’s how the story appears. Take a closer look at the party coalitions, though, and it becomes obvious that big shifts are underway. Over this same time period Democrats have posted major gains with educated voters in cities and suburbs, while Republicans have won over major sections of the working class, including significant numbers of minority voters.

Whether Republicans will hold onto these advances is an open question after a year of Trump working overtime to drive away the young and nonwhite voters who pushed him over the top in 2024. But the transformation over the decades has been large enough to fuel a legitimate debate about whether we’re living through a realignment. Scholars Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol have gone to the grassroots, documenting the breakdown of the Democratic coalition in western Pennsylvania. The Center for Working-Class Politics has produced a barrage of reports investigating the attitudes of working-class voters across the United States, mixing quantitative and qualitative investigations to explain an upheaval decades in the making. A litany of studies have placed this change in a global context, including Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the growing divide between “Brahmin Left” and “Merchant Right” across almost two dozen Western democracies. The list could go on (and on, and on).

Although Bonica and Grumbach have tough words for popularists, it should be acknowledged that some of their favorite targets—Matt Yglesias, Ruy Teixeira, David Leonhardt (of the New York Times’s editorial board)—take Democratic struggles with working-class voters seriously. And it’s striking to see the question missing in action from Bonica and Grumbach’s diagnosis. Of course, no essay can cover everything; “why didn’t you talk about X?” is the cheapest form of criticism. In this case, though, I think it speaks to an underlying difference in how to think about democracy that’s worth underlining.

Bonica and Grumbach seem to be of two minds on the subject. They start out on an idealistic note, knocking the Democratic consultant class for treating voters like consumers rather than citizens. But their approach quickly becomes more jaded. People, it turns out, are just waiting to follow the leader. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels put the case well in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists: “the political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent.” Forget about approaching voters as citizens or even as consumers; they are lab rats who can’t even be trusted to hold onto their cheese.

The sour attitude doesn’t mean this picture’s wrong. There’s an extensive literature in political science making the case, along with, as Bonica and Grumbach note, a tradition of hostility to mob rule in political theory that stretches back to the ancient Greeks. But those political theorists tended to be forthright about their scorn for democracy, and I have a hard time seeing how this way of thinking can sustain a meaningful defense of popular self-government. If democracy is worth cherishing—and I think it is—we need to give the demos more credit.

Do partisans alter their positions to line up with their team? Absolutely. It’s why, for instance, so many of the people who cast a ballot for Mitt Romney in 2012 showed up for Donald Trump four years later. But what about the people who switched from Romney to Hillary Clinton or from Obama to Trump? There were a lot of them in 2016, and even more have moved from one party to the other in the last eight years. Those changes happen to line up with how voters see the world. According to estimates from Simon Bazelon, Democratic support from Latino voters dipped just two percentage points for liberals between 2012 and 2024, but it fell twelve for moderates and fourteen for conservatives. The gap is even larger among African Americans: two points for liberals, twelve for moderates, and an astonishing thirty-nine for conservatives.

This raises the question of how to get these voters—or enough replacements to piece together a majority—back into the Democratic column. Bonica and Grumbach tackle the subject with an impressive balance of clarity and humility, acknowledging that nobody really knows what to do while putting forward ideas of their own: building anti-establishment credibility, turning out the base, and a full-throated campaign against corruption.

All of these seem like worthy goals to me, as far as they go. But if Bonica and Grumbach are right that “nonvoters likely leaned slightly toward Trump over Harris,” then mobilizing the base won’t get the job done. The tent really does need to get bigger, and that means persuading more people—ideally, lots and lots of them—to get inside. Given that views of the national parties now dictate the terms of local elections, this in turn entails a sweeping effort to redefine what it means to be a Democrat. Tapping into populist resentment of elites should be part of this effort, but it needs to be supported by a concrete program for improving daily life. Americans don’t just want the system to work—they want it to work for them (even, yes, at the kitchen table).

I suspect voters will be more inclined to believe that Democrats have changed if they believe the party is in step with their values. People do indeed change their mind over the long run. I know I have, and I bet you have too. I’d also bet that you don’t like the idea of a politician treating your views as an obstacle to overcome or a distraction they can get past by talking more loudly about something else.

What would this kind of campaign look like? A hard-charging populist effort laser-focused on pocketbook politics that picks its other battles wisely. To my mind, this is a fair description of the Trump campaign in 2024, when he ran as president of the grocery store while dragging Republicans closer to the center on abortion. Yes, he did so while stoking racial grievance and whipping up virulent anti-immigrant sentiment. But he recognized the strategic wisdom in raising the salience of some issues while lowering the salience of others in order to build a winning coalition—from a purely electoral viewpoint, he picked his battles wisely. We can say much the same about Zohran Mamdani cornering the market on affordability while reaching for the middle ground on issues like criminal justice and dancing on the grave of Andrew Cuomo’s political career.

Those two races are studies in how to win elections, and they have a broader lesson to teach progressives: if we want to save democracy, first we have to believe in it.