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When we talk and think about the base of the Democratic party, we tend to assume it is very, very liberal. The faces we associate with the party base are people like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
That’s totally wrong, argues Matt Bennett, a co-founder of “Third Way,” a center-left think tank.
“The numeric base of the party is moderate,” Bennett told me as part of my “Out of the Wilderness” series aimed at understanding what went wrong for Democrats in 2024 and how to fix it. “That's why we keep nominating people like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton [and] John Kerry.”
Bennett’s contention is that people — including plenty of Democrats — confuse the party’s activist wing with its actual base. The former is smaller and more liberal. The latter is larger and much more moderate.
Here’s Bennett explaining the difference:
So the activist core, the people that are most online, the people that show up at the oligarchy tour rallies, the people that organize and get out for the “No Kings” protests, those people are enormously important to Democrats. I am not denigrating our activist base. They're great. But they are a minority group. And what a whole bunch of commentators failed to see is that we were never going to nominate Bernie Sanders….
….When you think about a base, it's the base of what is a pyramid, right? And that means numerically it has to be bigger. And that is not the super engaged activist left. That is the moderate core of our party.
It’s a VERY different way of looking at the party — and one, I think, worth contemplating as Democrats try to sort out their next leader.
Bennett and I covered a whole bunch of other stuff too including:
Why Democrats in 2028 have to run against Washington “no matter what.”
How Donald Trump’s 1st term “radicalized” Democrats
How Democrats let themselves be cast as “weirdos” on cultural issues
Why left-wing populism is not the answer to right-wing populism
Want to hear more of my “Out of the Wilderness” conversations? I’ve talked to former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Sanders’ senior campaign aide Faiz Shakir, Democratic pollster John Anzalone and “Hopium Chronicles” author Simon Rosenberg among others.
