I am sympathetic to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s argument that the term “moderation” conceals more than it reveals and threatens to mislead party reformers who seek to strengthen the Democratic Party as a bulwark against autocracy. I fear, however, that much of their argument is open to the same criticism.

The authors lead off by intimating that Kamala Harris might have won with a less moderate campaign. Maybe so, but they offer no evidence. In reality, she lost for several reasons: because she was the successor to an unpopular president from whom she did nothing to separate herself; because the issue of reproductive rights, on which she bet heavily, receded in importance compared to the 2022 midterm elections; because the Biden administration was seen (rightly, in my view) as having botched the two issues—inflation and immigration—whose salience rose the most relative to 2020; because her campaign did not even try to counter Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” attack ad that served as effective synecdoche for a host of unpopular progressive stances on cultural issues; because Trump was seen as a stronger leader more likely to bring needed change and better equipped to handle a crisis; and finally, because messaging about democracy being “at risk” did not work the way her campaign expected. Some 73 percent of voters regarded democracy as “threatened,” but Trump beat Harris by 50 to 48 in this group. He did even better among the 4 in 10 voters who saw democracy as “very threatened,” carrying them by 52 to 47.

Could Harris have overcome the multiple handicaps with which she began? The most obvious road not taken was a bold step to distinguish herself from the president she served. Those with long memories will recall that after Vice President Hubert Humphrey broke with President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, he nearly erased the fifteen-point edge that Richard Nixon enjoyed in late September of 1968 and almost caught him at the finish line. Would a similar break—on immigration, say—have helped Harris? We will never know.

Bonica and Grumbach are critical of Harris’s “moderate, ‘kitchen table’ messaging,” which they regard as responsible for her defeat and the Republican trifecta. They apparently weren’t watching the same race as many of us. She ran as an unabashed advocate of abortion rights and denounced Trump as a threat to democracy from her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention to her closing argument in the waning days of the campaign. These aren’t what people usually mean by moderate, kitchen table issues.

In a similar vein, Bonica and Grumbach denounce “popularism,” which they equate with pandering. But this moralistic stance obscures an enduring problem of democratic politics. As they say, leaders are not entirely prisoners of public opinion. Bold leaders can help shape it—but only within limits. Our greatest presidents, including FDR and Lincoln, have been compelled to compromise with public sentiments with which they disagreed, even as they worked to alter these sentiments.

Nevertheless, Bonica and Grumbach charge, the moderation that popularists recommend “dampens enthusiasm, demobilizes or even alienates the base, and cedes the affective terrain to opponents who are happy to rile people up.” Really? Always? In 2020 Democrats turned away from Bernie Sanders toward Joe Biden as an experienced mainstream candidate who had the best chance of defeating Trump. The dampened, demoralized, alienated Democratic base responded with the highest turnout since 1900 and a record-shattering 81 million votes for their party’s candidate.

Bonica and Grumbach offer a complex statistical argument to the effect that in an era of high partisan polarization, moderation is far less effective than it once was. Perhaps so, but a strong case can be made that the electorate is less polarized than the parties. It has been a while since either political party nominated a candidate who put reducing polarization and fostering compromise at the heart of his governing agenda. After decades of nonstop political combat that has left the country’s problems unsolved, taking on this challenge would represent the kind of leadership that Bonica and Grumbach rightly praise.

They also argue that because swing voters have diminished as a share of the electorate, the time for moderation has passed; what really matters in contemporary elections is mobilization rather than persuasion. Democrats win, they say, when they turn out their troops. Perhaps. For decades, Democrats held the edge in party identification. But Republicans took the lead in 2022 and held it through 2024. Party registration saw seen a similar trend, with Republicans eroding or even reversing long-standing Democratic advantages in every state that registers voters by party.

The consequence became clear in the 2024 election. Trump won the national popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. But if every eligible voter had turned out, his margin would have roughly doubled. Here’s why: over the past two decades, Democrats have reversed Republicans’ longstanding edge among college graduates, who turn out in higher percentages than do non-college voters. The pool of nonvoters now tilts toward the kinds of voters who are harder to bring to the polls, and these voters are disproportionately Republican. In the wake of Trump’s unpopular performance during 2025, Democrats have regained the lead in party registration. But no one knows how long this edge will last, and it is an insecure foundation on which to build an enduring Democratic majority.

What to do? Bonica and Grumbach admit, refreshingly, than no one knows for sure. They recommend a bold strategy of reframing the map rather than continuing the grueling effort to gain small bits of territory on an “entrenched battlefield.” Citing a single survey mostly devoted to other issues, they recommend focusing on corruption as a promising possibility for doing this. They may be right. But this vehicle should be taken out for a test drive before a national candidate grabs the steering wheel. As with threats to democracy, the issue of corruption may divide the public in unexpected ways. Many Democrats believe that Trump is heading the most self-dealing administration in modern history, but it would be prudent to find out whether the public agrees—or can be persuaded to agree.

Similar concerns apply to Bonica and Grumbach’s second proposal, to build “anti-establishment credibility.” Democrats, they say, need to position themselves against the “real elites”—namely, billionaires and big corporations. Perhaps so. But many Americans see other kinds of people and institutions as the real elites, a fact that conservative populists have exploited successfully. Democrats cannot assume that the majority of the people will agree with them; they must persuade dubious voters that they have correctly identified the centers of power that most oppose the interests of average Americans.

Unless the public shifts radically between now and November, Democrats will take control of the House, bringing the legislative phase of the Trump presidency to an end and inaugurating a phase of investigations that will bring wrongdoing and policy failures into public view. This will not be enough, however, to shape a new agenda that can both win a national election and serve as a roadmap for effective governance.

I agree with Bonica and Grumbach that electoral victory is the best weapon against authoritarianism and that the real question is how best to secure victory. We also agree that whatever its merits, “moderation” is an inadequate guide. Voters care about multiple issues, so it is entirely possible that Democrats should move “left” on economic issues and “right” on other issues. Besides, populism cuts across the familiar left-right continuum. We seem to agree that Democrats should approach the future with an open mind about the best way forward. I hope we agree that public opinion is only partly malleable and that Democrats should take it seriously, not as a fixed constraint, but as part of a complex field within which they are compelled to operate.