In his NYT opinion column, “Even If Democrats Can Move to the Center, It May Not Help,”  Thomas B. Edsall writes: “There is, in fact, evidence that when Democrats moderate, they actually lose ground…Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford who has also examined the effects of candidate ideology, wrote by email that his research in “The Electoral Consequences of Ideological Persuasion” shows that

even substantial ideological shifts toward the center yield remarkably modest electoral benefits. Specifically, if a Democratic candidate were to shift their position from the median of the Democratic Party to a position as centrist as Joe Manchin, they would gain only about 0.6 percentage points in vote share through persuasion effects alone.

That persuasion benefit, Bonica continued, “must be weighed against the potential negative effects on turnout.”…When both factors are taken into account, “Democrats have achieved their greatest electoral successes precisely in cycles (2008 and 2018) when they did not moderate relative to Republicans,” while “in cycles where Democrats ran more moderate candidates (like 2010 and 2014), their electoral performance was notably weaker.”…Bonica’s bottom line:

The empirical evidence is increasingly converging around a clear conclusion: There appears to be very little electoral advantage from running to the center in contemporary congressional elections.”

Edsall writes further, “On Feb. 2, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, posted their paper “Renewing the Democratic Party.” In it, they wrote that the party must undergo an ideological “revolution” to win back even marginal support from the working class, which, they wrote, believes

that the Democratic Party is dominated by elites whose privileges do not serve the common good and whose cultural views are far outside the mainstream and lack common sense.

They believe that educated professionals look down on them and that the professional class favors policies that give immigrants and minorities unfair advantages at their expense.

They believe that educational institutions preach a set of liberal values that are out of the mainstream and that parents, not schools, should be teaching values. They reject the assertion that slavery and discrimination have made it difficult for Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class and believe that Black Americans can and should rise “without special favors,” as other groups experiencing prejudice have done.

Also, “In an email responding to my queries, Galston provided anecdotal evidence that the Democratic Party is changing in a favorable direction:

The Democrats’ shattering defeat last November has convinced many actual and aspiring leaders that to be competitive in future elections, their party must change. This opened the door to new ways of thinking and challenges to the status quo.

Some of Galston’s examples:

• “The party’s designated responder to Trump’s speech, Senator Elissa Slotkin, delivered a calm and moderate message, which was well received by Democrats.

• “The party’s likely candidates for this year’s high-profile governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia are moderates with impeccable records of service to the country.

• “Most Democrats have abandoned the extreme 2020 ideas — defunding the police, eliminating ICE, etc. — that their eventual presidential nominee, Joe Biden, opposed during his successful primary campaign.

• “Gavin Newsom — up to now, no one’s idea of a moderate — just decided to break with party orthodoxy on the hottest of hot-button issues — transgender rights.

• “Most Democrats have come to understand that Biden’s approach to immigration was a political as well as policy failure and are open to a discussion of alternatives. In a recent Pew poll, 40 percent of Black Democrats and 43 percent of Asian Democrats supported increased efforts to deport people living illegally in the U.S.”

In addition, Edsall notes, “From a different vantage point, Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., wrote by email that he

would challenge the assumption that Democrats should be moving to the center. There is little evidence that running on progressive policies has hurt Democrats or, conversely, that abandoning those positions has been electorally profitable.

Continuing to protect the civil rights of all Americans while expanding economic opportunity is not just smart politics — it is the party’s duty to its core constituencies. But more important, in the current political moment, calls for Democratic centrism are a distraction.

American democracy is being systematically dismantled before our eyes by an administration that has no regard for the U.S. Constitution. Thus, we are no longer in an era of political competition between liberalism and conservatism, but between democratic values and authoritarianism. It is time for Democrats to steadfastly defend those values, which are so deeply cherished by most Americans.”

Moving to his conclusion, Edsall writes, “Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, replied to my inquiries by email, saying that he, too, would push back against the “twin premises that the Democrats need to moderate across the board as the Democratic Leadership Council did and that the prime reason they can’t is professional liberal voters.”…Democrats, Hacker acknowledged, “have certainly been out of step on some highly salient noneconomic issues — the border crisis chief among them — and they have correctly started moderating here already.”

Hacker emphasized the point, however, that

Democrats should also be embracing a more forthrightly left-populist stance on economics in response to the oligarchic takeover of American democracy. In short, the diagnosis for Democrats shouldn’t be moderation as such but a deeper embrace and prioritization of economic populism.

The biggest challenge, in Hacker’s view…is the longer-term party building that’s needed to address the party’s biggest problems, such as conservative dominance of social media platforms, poor governance in blue states and cities (which hurts the brand and causes voters to locate in more affordable precincts of red America), the party’s organizational weaknesses (which have a lot to do with the decline of its traditional mass base of organized labor) and the fact that Democrats are the party of government in an anti-system era.

The threat Trump poses, Hacker continued,

may create leverage for tackling these big problems without the internal pushback that has doomed such efforts in the past. Democrats have a chance to become the party of change, seeking to redemocratize the corrupt lawless system that Trump and Musk are creating.

For this to happen, there must be broader social mobilization, not just a Democratic elite response, and the party must revitalize its own aging leadership and adopt a strong, optimistic and economically forward-looking orientation. Very dark possibilities loom for Democrats — and democracy — otherwise.”