This past September, The New York Times political pundit Ezra Klein stated in an interview that, in the face of such serious political alarm, Democrats should run more anti-abortion candidates. According to his logic, the Democratic Party needs to win in more contentious states like Kansas or Missouri if it is ever to overpower the current wave of MAGA conservatism. To do that, it must be willing to compromise on its position on abortion, with the ends justifying the means.
Klein received pushback, but many other center-left or liberal pundits voiced their support of this strategy, seeing it as the only way forward for the party. The argument may appear to have some surface-level validity: Abortion is an extremely contentious, morally divisive issue. In Christian stronghold states, changing that one platform issue could work and ultimately win more Democratic seats in the face of an increasingly authoritarian government.
What Klein and those who agree with him seem to forget is that this would never work in practice. In fact, in the years following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many states that voted for President Donald Trump in this past election also voted to maintain abortion rights. Support for abortion is prevalent across party lines to the point that there would be a very limited audience, if any, for a anti-abortion Democratic candidate.
Arguments like these also hint at a larger trend within the Democratic Party: fatalism surrounding the party’s stance on culturally relevant topics. Some believe that Democrats are inherently out of touch, running radically further left on issues like abortion or transgender rights, and should adjust accordingly or risk political failure. Ideas such as this seem to lose sight of what the party is meant to represent: its constituents. One out of four women will have an abortion, and over 2 million U.S. adults identify as transgender. At a certain point, the Democratic Party needs to have principles that it is willing to stand by, otherwise it serves no purpose. If the party continues to run moderates in the hopes of winning more seats, there will not be enough of a difference between the Republican and Democratic platforms to properly serve the American people.
That doesn’t mean the Democratic Party should just roll over and accept defeat against Republicans, and we have seen time and time again that Democrats do not have to compromise party values in order to win votes. The past Texas primary election yielded a win to grassroots politician James Talarico, who is both openly Christian and a supporter of abortion rights. He started out his political career running for the Texas House, and successfully won a seat in an area that voted overwhelmingly for Trump just two years earlier. We saw a similar phenomenon in the mayoral election upset in New York City, where progressive Zohran Mamdani won in neighborhoods that had just voted for Trump. Both ran on a platform emphasizing affordability, and neither compromised their stances on abortion or the LGBTQ+ community in order to gain success.
Claims that the Democratic Party is out of touch are not completely misguided, as demonstrated by the 2024 election defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who was criticized for her lack of discussion on key issues like the economy or Palestine. But restricting healthcare access for women or the LGBTQ+ community is not the solution to defeating authoritarianism. The Democratic Party has a duty to maintain its commitments to said groups, as well as an obligation to understand what actually matters to the American people at the end of the day. Restricting abortion access will not improve the quality of life for the voters that the party is attempting to win over, but lessened economic hardship for working-class Americans would.
Polls are showing James Talarico narrowly leading his Republican opponents in the upcoming Senate race, although the future is obviously unclear. There is no easy solution to winning more Democratic seats, but the way forward definitely isn’t tossing aside the marginalized groups the Democratic Party has previously represented. Its platform is meant to be distinct from that of the Republicans, and Talarico’s recent win paves a way forward: a path where Democrats can both maintain their values and succeed.
