Are progressive groups sinking Democrats’ electoral chances? 

What ails the Democratic Party? Since Kamala Harris’s defeat, several Democrats and center-left commentators have pointed the finger at one culprit: “the groups.”

Specifically, they claim, progressive interest and activist groups have both moved too far left and grown far too influential in the Democratic coalition, pushing the party to adopt stances out of step with the median voter on a range of different issues. This, they say, has backfired electorally and will ultimately hurt the people the groups claim to want to help.

“Many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary,” former Democratic staffer Adam Jentleson wrote in the New York Times in November.

Other commentators — Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ruy Teixeira — have made similar points. Some, like Yglesias and Teixeira, have been criticizing the influence of such groups for years.

Yet this critique has been met with an impassioned backlash from progressives and leftists. Some, like Waleed Shahid, argue the blame is misplaced and the supposed power of these progressive groups has been exaggerated. “The Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces — corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants — whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans,” Shahid wrote for The Nation. 

Others argue that inflation — a global phenomenon — was the main reason for Harris’s defeat, so a groups-focused diagnosis misses the point. And yet others argue that progressive groups represent morally righteous causes that Democrats should not abandon — for instance, that moderation would amount to throwing marginalized groups “under the bus.” 

This debate is now in full swing.

“I’m quite comfortable — morally and politically — with the position that Dem presidential candidates shouldn’t let voters believe they want to defund the police, abolish ICE, decriminalize border crossings, or provide transition surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison,” Favreau recently posted on X.

In some ways, it’s a continuation of the debate over social justice politics and “wokeness” that has been raging for years. But it extends well beyond that — on climate change, economic policy, immigration, voting reforms, reproductive rights, child care, and many others, the influence of such nonprofit groups on Democrats’ strategic decisionmaking has been immense in recent years.

And yet there’s more to the story than just the groups. The bigger picture is that Democrats are reckoning with the apparent end of a years-long trend in which liberal college graduates’ opinions kept moving further left, a trend that influenced all actors in the party. 

The debate now is over whether and how Democrats should respond to electoral defeat — by moving to the center and trying to moderate their positions, sticking to their guns, or moving even further left.

But what happened, exactly, and how? And what are the implications for Democrats, as they search for a path back to electoral victory?

What are “the groups”?

When critics talk about “the groups,” they’re talking about a vast and complex tapestry of progressive nonprofit organizations focusing on a variety of issues. Some, like the Sunrise Movement, are relatively young. But others — the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign — have been around for decades.

Critiques of “the groups” are typically about progressive groups specifically, even though there have long been centrist and non-ideological interest groups that also influence the Democratic Party. Because, the critics assert, it’s the progressive groups that grew far more influential within the Democratic Party in recent years.

Back at the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, for instance, Democrats in both the White House and Congress had a sometimes-testy relationship with the activists his press secretary Robert Gibbs disparaged as being part of the “professional left.” On policy and political matters, Democrats took into account progressive groups’ demands, but they were typically guided by caution about what might be “too far” for the public to accept or what might alienate powerful business interests. (The Affordable Care Act and Democrats’ failed cap-and-trade bill were both crafted in close consultation with business interests.)

But with the rise of new protest movements and social media, and with establishment Democrats’ approach seemingly being discredited by Donald Trump’s 2016 win, progressive groups got more emboldened. New money from megadonors and flush foundations, as well as viral small donors, flowed into existing groups’ coffers and funded new ones. A new generation of activist staffers demanded bold action. The lines between groups focused on different causes started to blur as a practice of allyship emerged, particularly on social justice issues.

Democratic politicians responded in part by moving left. This was most on display in the 2020 presidential primary, when leading contenders — including Harris — endorsed positions that would have seemed unthinkably radical to Democrats just a few years earlier, like banning fracking and decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing.

One example that’s become emblematic of this trend is an ACLU questionnaire to which Harris responded that she’d support “gender transition care” for federal inmates and immigration detainees, a position Trump blasted in attack ads this year. (When Elizabeth Warren first ran for office in 2012 and was asked about this, she quipped that she didn’t think it would be a good use of taxpayer money — but by 2019, she announced her full-throated support of such surgeries, in what advocates interpreted as an attempt to box in Harris.)

Beyond the 2020 primary, there was a broader trend of Democrats starting to view progressive advocacy groups as central to the party’s policymaking and strategic calculations. By the 2020s, Klein observed, a “culture of how you make policy” and “who you listen to had emerged” inside the Democratic Party. On one issue he covered, permitting reform for clean energy projects, Hill staffers “would explain to me that if you couldn’t get” environmental justice groups on board, “they couldn’t move forward with this at all.” Klein continued:

And I would say, “Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?” And there was never an answer. It was just a coalitional decision that had been made in the culture of the way the Democratic Party now made policy.

In my own reporting — on issues like voting rights and economic policy — I have noticed a similar shift in how Democratic staffers now talk about “the groups” (a term such staffers often use in such vague fashion). On many issues, these nonprofits became arguably the key constituency the Democratic Party was focused on pleasing. 

In addition to inflation, polls showed that voters were particularly unhappy with the Biden administration’s record on unauthorized immigration — an issue where Democrats had moved significantly to the left in recent years after pressure from activists and their own staffers. Faced with public discontent amid surging border crossing numbers, Biden eventually advanced sharply restrictionist policies through executive action — but not until 2024, when it was too late to change voter perceptions. 

Now, viewed from the perspective of progressive activists, this is nonsense: They think Democrats tell them no all the time. On certain issues — most notably the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza — they’re correct. Most Democrats never went so far as to back “defunding the police.” And the further left the group, the less likely it is that Democrats fully embraced their agenda.

Yet relative to the early Obama era baseline, the party has indeed shifted left on a whole range of economic and cultural issues. This was indeed partly due to the hard work and tireless advocacy of the groups — but not entirely.

The Democratic Party’s transformation wasn’t just about the groups

The broader reason why Democrats’ leftward shift happened remains somewhat mysterious.

Yglesias has argued that the rise of the groups is mostly a story of “astroturf” — that big donors and foundations funded phony “grassroots” movement organizations that convinced both Democratic politicians and the media to take them seriously, even though they spoke for no one but their donors. But that doesn’t explain the leftward shift in long-established groups like the ACLU. 

Klein discussed several possibilities for why Democrats adopted a culture of deference to the groups, including a mistaken belief that those groups could deliver them votes (for instance, the argument that Latino voters generally wanted the lenient policies toward unauthorized immigrants demanded by advocacy groups), a revolving door between progressive nonprofits and Democratic staff jobs, and the rise of social media (which made the perceived backlash when politicians defied the groups more intense).

All of these may be part of the story, but I do think there’s a risk of overstating the groups’ actual power and centrality to events.

As Benjy Sarlin wrote at Semafor, in Democrats’ 2020 primary, it was often specific candidates who chose to box out their opponents by running to the left, and they were doing so because they believed it would be politically beneficial to them. Sarlin also reminds us that “Abolish ICE” briefly caught on not because of any “group” — the slogan was coined by an up-and-coming Democratic consultant who was chasing influence and social media clout. 

Since the election, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and commentator Aaron Rupar have both opined that Democrats had gotten on the wrong side of public opinion on the issues of trans athletes or bathrooms. Both have gotten impassioned pushback; a top aide to Moulton resigned, Rupar faced social media criticism and apologized. But this pushback wasn’t because of the groups. It was because of genuinely held beliefs in progressive circles that trans women are women, that that’s an issue of fundamental rights, and that any concession to public opinion on this matter is poor allyship and throwing a marginalized group under the bus.  

The groups themselves were also responsive to social media pressure. One low-stakes but illustrative example: In 2017, the ACLU tweeted a picture of a (white) toddler with an American flag, captioned, “This is the future that ACLU members want.” Outraged respondents from progressive Twitter deemed that a white supremacist image. The ACLU then praised the critics for reminding them “that white supremacy is everywhere.” Such incidents were quite common at that time.

The larger dynamic is: In the second Obama term and the first Trump term, the groups moved left, but they were responding to donors who had shifted left. Those donors were trying to channel the energy and passion of activists who had shifted left. Those activists got favorable coverage from media outlets that had shifted left. Those media outlets were chasing traffic and ratings from an audience that seemed to have shifted left (while being sensitive to social media criticism from that audience). And Democratic politicians were gauging all this and shifting left.

So in my view, the best overarching explanation is simply that opinion among liberal college grads (who overwhelmingly populate the institutions listed above) shifted left in the 2010s. Every actor was chasing incentives that resulted from this leftward shift, whether it be money, clicks, or social approval. The groups are merely a part of this larger story — they may have helped exacerbate the leftward shift, but they also reflected it. 

Of course, that poses the larger question of why that leftward shift happened. There are various potential causes, including post-Great Recession disappointment, disillusionment with the Democratic establishment reflected in Bernie Sanders’s rise and deepening after Trump’s victory, social media exposing liberals to new ideas like the Great Awokening and making activists more influential, and the rise of “movement”-style thinking. There was a widespread belief that the old consensus had failed and bold new progressive ideas were necessary. And, while Trump was in power, there seemed to be no negative consequences to moving left — internal Democratic tensions and misgivings were subordinated to the task of stopping Trump.

What comes next?

What does seem clear is that, for the time being at least, the leftward shift has stopped since Biden took office. A backlash to progressive activists’ preferred policies on several issues, including criminal justice and immigration, is in full swing. 

And, of course, Harris lost. How much blame, if any, “the groups” should get for that has become a matter of intense debate. Progressive group defenders point out that Harris tried to pivot to the center and that the Biden administration’s record on inflation and immigration were her two biggest vulnerabilities. The groups’ critics say Harris’s group-influenced positions from the 2020 primary weighed her down, and Democrats ran into political trouble on inflation and immigration in part because of the groups’ bad advice.

How the Democratic world — its groups, donors, activists, media outlets, staffers, and politicians — responds to all this is yet to be seen.

There are past models. In the 1980s, after the landslide defeats of three successive Democratic presidential nominees, various reform factions tried to moderate the party, arguing that they’d gotten out of touch with the median voter and were too beholden to “special interests.” Some called for moderation on cultural issues, others for new pro-growth and pro-business policies. Bill Clinton became affiliated with these reformers, and won the presidency in 1992.

In contrast, the model of Democrats between 2004 (when John Kerry lost) to 2008 (when Obama won big) may suggest a sweeping overhaul of the party’s positions isn’t necessary. After all, Harris came pretty close to winning. Perhaps Trump will govern poorly and Democrats will return to power having changed little, avoiding a wrenching internal coalitional conflict. And perhaps the apparent end of the leftward opinion shift among liberal college graduates will be enough to effectively weaken the power of the groups.

Another model, oddly enough, is Trump. Before his rise, the Republican Party was tethered to an unpopular “free market” economic agenda involving Medicare cuts and free trade pushed by donor-financed advocacy groups. In 2016, Trump distanced himself from that agenda, and in doing so revealed those groups had little actual power. However, Trump also hugged other groups in the GOP coalition even tighter — promising, for instance, to pick his Supreme Court appointees from a Federalist Society list. Then, in 2024, it was the anti-abortion groups that looked to be a political millstone for Trump — so he distanced himself from them.

For Democrats now, there are some nascent attempts to challenge the group-dominated status quo. Yglesias recently pitched a new agenda for “Common Sense Democrats” that involves moderating on several issues. Klein has been more focused on how to make Democratic governance work better, and says his critique is more about the party’s “broader culture of coalitional cowardice” rather than “an anti-left-wing view.” 

Yet others are skeptical of how much Democrats will — and should – change. “Democrats declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups can’t and likely won’t happen,” the commentator Michael A. Cohen (not Trump’s former lawyer) wrote on Substack. “For better or worse, these groups are the modern Democratic Party. If Democrats hope to retake political power in Washington, they must ensure that these groups are enthusiastic, mobilized, and remain firmly ensconced in the Democrats’ corner.”

Indeed, the politics of the war in Gaza may be a cautionary tale in this regard. Biden and Harris ignored progressive groups by remaining supportive of Israel — but as a result, Harris faced regular criticism from activists and negative coverage throughout the campaign. The groups might not be so effective at winning Democrats votes — but they still might be able to drive some away.