There is an exhausting amount of commentary right now about what went wrong for Democrats in the recent presidential election. I’ve already given my basic analysis, but I want to add one point that I think is crucial when we are considering how politicians ought to act: we have to be careful that discussions on how to successfully win elections do not solely focus on how to win elections. We also have to grapple with the difficult question of when it is necessary to take principled stances that might have short-term political costs.

Those of us on the left, for instance, frequently make the argument that progressive ideas are popular. And they are! People want substantially increased minimum wages, a national healthcare system, a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants rather than mass deportation, a federal job guarantee, and major government policies to address climate change. More Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza than approve of them. It’s fair to say, then, that when Democrats run away from progressive policies, they are not helping themselves electorally, which is why this magazine has consistently argued that the “Bernie Sanders agenda” is a better bet than Clintonism. We have also argued that because the Democratic Party is beholden to a donor class that does not want many of these progressive policies, Democrats often end up running campaigns that are more likely to lose. For instance, Donald Trump may well be right that if Hillary Clinton had picked Bernie Sanders as her running mate, Trump would have struggled to win. But that was never seriously considered, in part because Sanders’s social democratic agenda (free healthcare, free college) horrifies and scandalizes rich Democrats. 

All of this analysis is accurate, but it leaves something out, which is that we have to be very careful when arguing that politicians should adopt the positions that help them win elections. That can sound completely unobjectionable, especially given that in a democracy, politicians are supposed to carry out the will of the people. But what does it mean for issues where what’s right is not popular?

Consider, for instance, the civil rights movement. The Freedom Riders were not popular. The majority of Americans, in 1964, felt that Black people should stop their demonstrations, because they had “made their point.” 

Today, I think it’s clear that the public was wrong to say that Black people ought to have stopped conducting demonstrations aimed at “achiev[ing] better jobs, better housing, and better schooling.” And we would look back at a politician who had said civil rights demonstrations should stop as being on “the wrong side of history.”

Said politician might well have argued that their job as a public servant was to follow, not to lead, and they were simply expressing the will of their constituents. But on issues of clear right and wrong, a politician has an obligation to be more than just a vessel for what comes out of public opinion polls. They also have to be a leader, willing to take actions they believe in and committed to persuading the public to follow them.

That can sound somewhat anti-democratic, because it suggests that political elites should ignore the popular will when they disagree with it and should simply impose their own preferences. But, first, the public should still be allowed the ultimate authority. If a politician makes an unpopular decision, they can be thrown out of office, and they have to abide by the public’s decision. Ultimately, if they take an unpopular position, their job is to convince the public to follow them, and if they can’t, then they’re not going to successfully bring about an enduring policy shift. 

Sometimes we see government officials taking stances that are controversial, and the public coming around once they see the results in action. For instance, a majority of the public opposed mandatory seatbelt laws when they were first being introduced. Their proponents persisted, and eventually seatbelt laws commanded major public support and changed people’s practices. Good leaders have sometimes had to take difficult but morally correct stances. John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois at the time of the Haymarket Affair, was viciously denounced for pardoning three of those convicted in the bombing, and for siding with Pullman workers during the Pullman strike. These stances may have cost him his political career, but he chose to put justice above reelection. By contrast, Bill Clinton once did precisely the opposite: he oversaw the execution of a mentally disabled Black man because he needed to look tough on crime. Clinton won the presidential election and successfully neutralized Republican attacks, but I would argue that he lost his soul in the process (if he still had a soul by that point). So the question of what a political party or elected official should or shouldn’t do—or, by extension, what policies they should promote—is not necessarily a question of what is popular or what will ensure they win or keep their position.

Yet some are arguing just that—that Democrats should essentially do what’s popular. In other words, Democrats should not embrace positions that are “opposed by the electoral majority.” Jon Favreau of the popular Pod Save America podcast recently said:: 

Dems should resist any group or special interest that pressures them to take positions opposed by the electoral majority essential to win, whether that’s big corporations, rich donors, nonprofits, whoever. This isn’t about blaming specific groups for defeat - it’s about what’s required to win.

Favreau was echoing the position of Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for senator John Fetterman. Jentleson recently wrote in the New York Times that politicians must declare “independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win,” because “collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.” Jentleson cites groups like the ACLU, the Sunrise Movement, and the Working Families Party. Ignoring their priorities “will make the groups mad, and that’s OK,” but they are “accustomed to enjoying access without holding themselves accountable,” and Democrats must instead “ruthlessly [prioritize] winning.” 

As an example of a bad, unpopular policy that Democrats should not support, Jentleson cites the decriminalization of border crossings. Favreau agrees, saying that “in the future, Democrats should not be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, or if they've taken that position in the past, they should explicitly say they were wrong about that.” Note that neither Jentleson nor Favreau makes a principled argument in favor of the use of criminal penalties for unauthorized border crossings. In fact, perhaps they’d argue that while they personally believe crossing a border without authorization shouldn’t be a criminal offense, they’re simply making concessions to political reality.

But this both overlooks the role of political leaders in influencing public opinion and encourages us to set aside issues of basic justice. We should decriminalize border crossings. Crossing a border is a victimless act, and for most of American history you could simply cross the border by crossing a street, without even being asked for ID. My friend Ron Purser recalls that even in the 1970s, he once hopped over the Rio Grande to have lunch in Mexico and then came back without ever checking in with a government agent. As the Bipartisan Policy Center explains, the public doesn’t really understand the issue of decriminalization well, because they don’t realize that decriminalizing border crossings doesn’t mean that anyone is allowed to cross the border, it just means that crossing the border is dealt with through civil law rather than criminal punishment. So Jentleson and Favreau are arguing that leaders should follow public opinion polls even when those polls are based on confusion. Instead, these commentators should pick the morally correct stance and endeavor to explain to the public why they hold it. 

Jentleson tries to cast his position as populist—we’ve got to listen to the people, not those college-educated elites who run the interest groups. But once we think about specific cases, it becomes clear that this simple stance leads to objectionable results. Same-sex marriage was once quite unpopular. Was it right for politicians who believed in it to conceal that belief, or to pretend they opposed it? Democratic politicians were cowards on this, refusing to endorse basic equal civil rights because they thought it was a political risk. Surely we could have used more politicians who were willing to be in favor of LGBTQ rights even when it wasn’t popular. 

Climate change isn’t a very high priority for voters right now. But I’d argue that that’s because the worst consequences are in the future, and voters simply don’t know what they’re facing. They’re not well-educated on the issue and they are misled by a barrage of propaganda. Politicians might respond to apparent voter apathy by ignoring the climate crisis, but I would argue that this is unconscionable: it is the job of a leader, especially in an emergency, to help the public understand the emergency and to act to stop it. Just because people don’t realize the peril they’re in, doesn’t mean your job is to help make it worse. 

Or take the war in Gaza. We on the left can make a quite persuasive argument that Kamala Harris made an electoral mistake by failing to break from Biden’s policy of letting Israel commit war crimes without accountability. She clearly drove away large numbers of Arab Americans in Michigan who were furious over the Biden administration’s policy, to the point where may were willing to vote for Donald Trump, whose Middle East policy will probably actually be much worse for Palestinians. But importantly, even if Michigan did not have an Arab American population, or was not a swing state, it would still have been wrong for Harris to support the Biden policy. The war on Gaza is an unconscionable crime against humanity. The case for opposing it is not based on some amoral electoral calculus.

These issues are tricky, because if you don’t get into office, you can’t use the levers of power to accomplish policy changes, so I’m not saying that one must never make political calculations or compromises. I am saying, however, that the philosophy known as “popularism,” which argues that politicians should advocate what is popular and not what is not, sounds good until you think about hard cases in which what’s right and what’s popular are in tension. On immigration, for instance, public opinion has been turning against immigrants in the last few years, and I would argue that that is in part because people have been fed a relentless stream of anti-immigrant lies by demagogues like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. The strict “popularist” may say, well, the public is anti-immigrant so I will be too, but I think we actually need to try to change public opinion on this issue. If the other side’s politicians try to change the public’s views, but our side only responds to the public’s views, we are consigning ourselves to an endless rightward political drift. It is the job of political leaders to tell the truth, even when those truths are unpopular, and while it would be foolish not to run on ideas that are both popular and good (such as free healthcare), the fact that a majority support a position in a public opinion poll can never be the end of our analysis. We also have to do the hard work of thinking about what justice requires and to strike the careful balance between deference to popular preferences and upholding the principles that we think ultimately best serve humanity.