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How Today’s Democratic Soul-Searching Echoes the Clinton Era
Featuring Will Marshall
President of the Progressive Policy Institute
in CNN
Will Marshall, who has served as the Progressive Policy Institute’s president since its founding, says so many efforts are competing that none is likely to exert as much concentrated influence as the DLC did in its heyday. (The DLC itself officially closed its doors in 2011 but faded as a force in the party after Clinton left office 10 years earlier.) “If you wanted to show that you were a reform-minded Democrat, a modernizing Democrat, you joined up with the DLC and it was really the only enterprise dedicated to changing the party’s governing agenda,” Marshall said. “Now you have a slew of so-called centrist groups that are out there operating independently, and it’s all very disjointed.”
Marshall, like others I spoke with, sees another big obstacle for today’s efforts — these projects are primarily led by consultants and strategists. The DLC, he notes, was defined mostly by elected officials representing politically swing constituencies. That contrast, Marshall says, will make it harder to move these ideas into the party mainstream.
“We had a large cadre of credible Democratic figures-governors, senators, House members, state leaders-who embraced the mission of the new Democrats because they could feel the ground shaking under their feet,” Marshall said. Winning buy-in from large numbers of elected Democrats will be harder today, he says, “because the party is so shrunken, and the number of competitive seats is so shrunken, that the Democrats left standing are mostly safe.”
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Don't Miss Our Next PPI Event!
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Can Liberal Patriotism Save Britain From the National Populists?
By Claire Ainsley
Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal
for the Liberal Patriot
Under pressure from the national populists and a restless party, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come out fighting. His landmark speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week gave his premiership more definition than ever before, firmly in the mold of the modern liberal patriot.
It is political definition that has never been more needed. On the eve of its annual conference, Labour had been rattled by authoritative constituency-level polling showing that its landslide victory just a year ago would be wiped out by right-wing challenger party Reform UK, taking two-thirds of Labour’s MPs with it. 267 Labour MPs, many newly elected, would lose their seats. The British Conservatives would win just 45 constituencies. Reform UK would eat up former Labour and Tory support with 306 gains, putting leader Nigel Farage on course to be the next Prime Minister.
Of course there is no general election imminent, with the next national vote expected in four years, but together with internal rumblings about Starmer’s leadership, it set the backdrop for a bumpy few days at the Labour annual conference after a bumpier first year since Labour returned to power after fourteen years in opposition.
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Check Out Our "Back to School" Podcast Series!
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Staff Spotlight: Claire Ainsley
 Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal
Claire Ainsley is the Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute. Claire joined PPI in 2023. She served as Executive Director for Policy for Opposition Leader Keir Starmer from 2020-2022. Claire also served as the Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where she led JRF’s work on the social and political attitudes of people with low incomes. She is the author of “The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes,” which was published in May 2018.
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