Democracy is diversity

It seems likely that, once all the votes are in, somewhere around 10 million Californians went to the polls on Tuesday. That’s well short of last year’s turnout of more than 16 million, but last year there were a lot of things on the ballot, including the election of the next president. This year, in many parts of the state, there was only one thing on the ballot: a ballot initiative that would redraw congressional districts. And two voters showed up for every three Californians who voted for president in 2024.

It’s because of how that 2024 presidential race turned out. Donald Trump won, as you probably heard, and returned to the White House seemingly hell-bent on reshaping the entire country to match his vision of a centrally White, centrally planned extension of the Trump Organization. Realizing that midterm elections often go badly for new presidents’ parties, Republican state legislators began trying to wring a few extra House seats out of Census data where they could in order to help cement that vision.

California’s Prop 50 was an explicit response to the GOP’s effort to game the rules rather than win votes. More broadly, it was an opportunity for Californians to take action in opposition to the Trump administration, and they were very clearly happy to do so.

By the time Prop 50’s passage was announced — immediately upon polls closing in the state on Tuesday night — it was already clear that the night would be a big one for Democrats and a bad one for Donald Trump. In Virginia, Democrats swept statewide elections and added double-digits to their legislative majority. An expected-to-be-close gubernatorial race in New Jersey wasn’t. Democrats held three Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania easily. It was already going so badly that Trump preemptively popped up on social media to insist that the fault lay everywhere but with him, a sure sign that it was his fault.

While the scale was surprising, the outcome wasn’t. One of the easiest-to-predict eventualities after Trump eked out his victory in 2024 was that the pendulum would swing the other way. It was inevitable that the narrative of Trump reshaping the electorate and blah blah blah would be rendered lame by a big Democratic night. This is how politics works: A thing happens and people draw sweeping assumptions and those assumptions then get swept away.

That said, while the night was a success for myriad Democratic candidates and issues, it’s not clear how much success it augurs for the Democratic Party. It is the party’s job, after all, to collect and retain power for its members and its candidates. As we have seen repeatedly in recent years, repeated moments of backlash against Trump have not necessarily meant increased aggregated power for the party.

This is clearly due in part to the fecklessness of the party’s leadership, which in turn is due (in part) to the way in which the American political terrain has shifted away from the dynamics to which these established figures had grown accustomed. They’ve been doing politics one way but politics has changed. Their values and policies align with young people, particularly young women, but young people are at best apathetic about committing to the party as an institution.

It very much doesn’t help when, for example, the top Democrats in the House and Senate refuse to treat the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary as legitimate. We get it; Zohran Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist, an outsider to the establishment. But he won an easy victory in the primary and built a campaign in which young New Yorkers in particular were institutionally invested. His victory on Tuesday — winning a majority of votes, with the largest vote total since the 1960s — didn’t see as big a margin as Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial win in Virginia, but she wasn’t running against two people, one of them the state’s former governor.

In his victory speech, Mamdani challenged the Democratic Party and its leadership.

“If tonight teaches us anything,” he said, “it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”

His latter point is obviously true. But it’s the highlighted part that’s interesting.

Mamdani is saying that the Democratic Party has been too timid. He’s echoing the argument that the party has tried too hard to triangulate its politics to public opinion, approaching campaigns the way a helicopter parent approaches a playground. He’s siding (as one would expect) with the left in the left-vs.-centrism bickering that’s consumed Democratic political discussions since 2024. Give or take a few decades.

One thing the results on Tuesday can show us, though, is that this is a false choice. Mamdani won while embracing left-wing policies and politics in New York City. Spanberger won while running a more moderate campaign in Virginia. Democrats won in a lot of places while running a lot of different campaigns. This was in part because, like in California, they provided an opportunity for voters to rebuke Trump. But they still won.

It is a reminder that democracy is centered on diversity. Democracy is the idea that people from various backgrounds can unite and decide on common leadership that represents them — meaning them in their town or their county or their state. Maybe the president isn’t someone you agree with or maybe your city councilman isn’t, but democracy provides the opportunity for everyone’s voice to be heard on the subject.

Particularly at the moment, this seems like a valuable idea for the Democratic Party itself to lean into. Trumpism is about homogeneity, about forcing Americans into his views and his systems. His panicky response to the results on Tuesday reinforces how uncomfortable he is with divergent viewpoints and centers of power. The Democratic Party could easily position itself as the home of diverse argument and diverse policy positions reflecting America’s diverse population — a rejection of the uniformity Trump wants to impose. It’s the party of Spanberger and Mamdani, not the party of Donald Trump and various Donald Trumps Jr.

The centrists will say that this is what they’ve been advocating all along: tailoring message to the electorate. But they often argue that point while conceding two inconcedable points.

The first is that this means the party should be willing to backtrack from or downplay support for civil rights if that support is politically fraught. But a party centered on America’s diversity needs to be predicated on bolstering and supporting rights for every American. You can’t be a party that stands for diverse voices and the party that agrees to allow some of those voices to be muffled.

The second unacceptable concession is that national rhetoric should drive candidate campaigns. It is true, as I’ve written, that political rhetoric at all levels of government is largely driven by national issues and debates. It is also true that the right has gotten very good at taking individuals with less-popular views and making them avatars for the left as a whole.

Democrats and the broader left have not yet figured out how to counter this (in part because some of their allies don’t always mind doing the same thing.) But this is precisely why the approach is unsustainable. You cannot pin your politics to a national conversation that your opponents control. Nor can you make political decisions that are eternally popular. Backing the Iraq invasion in 2003 or supporting trans rights in 2016 were positions that had become difficult to defend five years later. The altar of caution is unstable.

If, instead, your approach and your party’s approach is that you are a big tent that is centered on democracy and diversity? You have a built-in response to efforts to nationalize your views: That’s New York, not Richmond. Our community’s priorities and theirs are different. Our party provides the space for Americans to make different choices in different places. I and many other have observed that the Democratic Party, needing to win with diverse populations in diverse places, has to be a big-tent party. So why not center that at the heart of the party’s rhetoric?

You can see how such an approach would work on nights like Tuesday. How it did work, if tacitly. But it has a broader advantage, given that it reflects the promise and values of America itself — or at least of the America that we understood to exist until noon on Jan. 20.

Ten million Californians came out to stand up to Donald Trump. A million New Yorkers voted for Mamdani. Two million backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. Diverse candidates, diverse issues, overlapping but distinct priorities. It was a good night for big-D Democrats and for little-d democracy. Perhaps the party should sew those things together.

Photo: A polling place sign in Virginia. (Mrs. Gemstone/Flickr under Creative Commons license)