What the closure of The Liberal Patriot says about a party that can’t stop #Resisting.

This article by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin is cross posted from The Boston Globe:

John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira are the cofounders of The Liberal Patriot, an online political newsletter that was published from 2021 to early 2026.

After the 2024 election, there was a moment when Democrats seemed mildly reflective about their political situation. The reality was stark. After vanquishing Trump in 2020, the party had managed to squander unified control of government with acute policy failures on issues ranging from immigration and the COVID response to inflation and the overall economy. And Democrats compounded the problem with far-left positions on issues like crime, transgender rights, and race that turned off more voters than they attracted, contributing to a strong perception that the party was woefully out of touch with working- and middle-class values.

As much as voters did not like the prospect of a second Trump term, they despised the Biden and Harris administration even more, particularly after an aging President Biden’s highly visible decline. Subsequently, Democrats lost voters across the board in 2024, with notable declines among Black and Hispanic men (22-point and 19-point shifts to Republicans, respectively), lower-income voters (a 14-point shift to Republicans), 18- to 29-year-olds (also a 14-point shift to the right), and non-college educated voters (a 7-point shift). The only two demographic groups of note that moved toward Democrats in the last election were white women (a 1-point shift) and women 65 years or older (a 5-point shift).

The historic party of America’s working class had reduced itself to a caricature of decrepit leaders, policy incompetence, and cultural elitism disconnected from the economic needs and social desires of everyday families. You would think this situation would lead party officials to confront what went wrong and to go through a serious process of policy and political regeneration. You would be wrong. Although some party members considered the dire state of their brand and economic message among voters in the aftermath of their defeat, many party officials and activists downplayed the second loss to Trump as merely an inflation-related fluke outside their control.

The Democratic National Committee deep-sixed its official autopsy of the 2024 election, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party move forward. Democratic heads went firmly into the sand. “Resistance” mania took over the party as Democrats chose to unite around nonstop criticism of Trump rather than devise a popular vision for governing that could win back the working-class voters of all races they’d lost to the president. The left grew in confidence — or arrogance depending on your point of view — insisting that economic populism alone would win the day and that few changes if any were needed in the party’s social agenda on immigration, transgender rights, race, and crime. The left’s basic strategic goal remains dispensing with moderates, displacing the establishment, and bashing “billionaires” and Israel repeatedly — not reforming the party to make it more attractive to a broad swath of working Americans who hold more conservative cultural views.

Yet how can Democrats move forward and build a sustainable electoral majority if they won’t even try to understand or accept what they did wrong in the first place?

This is where our publication The Liberal Patriot (TLP) came in. Started at the beginning of the Biden administration, TLP sought to help the Democrats reform themselves to better reflect the interests and values of working-class Americans — the vast majority of voters in this country — and to reject the extreme ideas of the college-educated elites who had taken over the party in recent decades.

The Liberal Patriot warned Democrats about the political effects of their open asylum policies on immigration. We warned them about the negative consequences of spending gazillions of dollars on dubious social schemes like “net zero” climate mitigation and student debt relief. We warned them about the limitations of “Bidenomics” and the political dynamics of soaring inflation. We warned them about negative reactions to their extreme positions on transgender rights, including their support for biological males playing in female sports. And we warned them that young people and working-class voters of all races were turning from the party and toward Trump.

At every turn, party elites and activists rejected our analysis and counsel and instead chose to pretend as if nothing were wrong with the Democratic brand and its approach to elections and majoritarian politics. Others said our diagnosis of the party’s problems might be correct, but since we didn’t embrace a narrow vision of populism fervently enough, we were “old and out of touch.”

They believe that “thermostatic” opposition to Trump has put the party back in the driver’s seat and that the more “authentically” left its candidates behave, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the better the party can beat back the “fascists” and “authoritarians.”

The Liberal Patriot way of being “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” — or economically nationalist and culturally moderate — did not find many adherents in the Democratic Party. So we recently folded the publication after more than five years and nearly 1,500 newsletters published.

We have no regrets about the analysis and political advice we offered Democrats. We grounded it all in empirical facts about the electorate and commonsense policy solutions to help Democrats rebuild a truly working-class party. Maybe they just aren’t interested in this approach. That’s how politics often works out.

Democrats will almost surely win one or both branches of Congress this fall and then will face a monumental choice in 2028: Reform the party to garner a broad mandate from the center-left and center-right of the electorate or continue to resist the current government and attempt to turn hatred of Trump into an Electoral College victory. We believe reform is the only way to fix the long-term challenges facing Democrats and begin the arduous process of regaining the trust of American voters. But we’re also realists and recognize that this advice may go unheeded by an elite political class that too often values resistance and orthodoxy over reason and heterodoxy. Let’s hope that some 2028 candidates are at least open to reconsidering Democrats’ strategic and policy objectives, for the country needs two strong and viable political parties to best represent the diverse interests of Americans.