There’s been much debate recently among Democratic Party types about the relation of politicians to public opinion. Are they beholden to the static tyranny of the public’s position, as The New York Times editorial board’s recent piece suggests? Or are they persuasive virtuosos who compete to articulate their own vision? This latter view has many champions: academics, the Times’ own Jamelle Bouie and even the defeated vice-presidential candidate. 

The debate, ostensibly tactical, is largely split down ideological lines. Hewing closely to public opinion are Democratic moderates; those looking for a more expansive political vision are to their left. How Democrats respond in 2028 will largely depend on which of these sides wins out. And having a response that works, having one that maximizes the chance that the Democratic nominee beats the Republican nominee, is obviously the most important question. I think saying things that most Americans agree with is the better way to win. I think the data backs that up. 

But there’s also a deeper point, not just about the immediacies of American politics but the way democracies work more generally. If politics was about performing and persuading, the people wouldn’t really be in charge! We talk about political theater, but politics would be literal theater under the persuasion model. Voters would be members of the audience, clapping and cheering for the best performances but lacking the ability to change the course of the show. We’d have a society ruled by the most persuasive actor, or, worse, by the slickest used-car salesman.

That might seem possible in the age of Donald Trump. But it just doesn’t match the history of the past decade. He won in 2016 because, yes, people liked him more than Hillary Clinton. But they liked him because he moved right on immigration and left on entitlements, and Hillary Clinton ran to the left of Obama. In 2020, Joe Biden didn’t have a charisma advantage over Trump — the economy was tanking and people were tired of Trump’s chaos. In 2024, Trump won again after Biden had governed from the left on immigration and presided over a period of high inflation. To me, it seems like political life is dominated less by master manipulators than by the set of ideas Americans have about immigration and the economy. 

That political parties are beholden to the tyranny of public opinion isn’t a bad thing — it’s something to be optimistic about. Donald Trump doesn’t have some kind of black magic that makes him invincible. Democrats won’t need a once-in-a-lifetime, transcendently charismatic visionary. They can win again by saying things that more people believe in.

If the dominance of popular beliefs is then both an obvious byproduct of living in a democracy and something that those who oppose the current president should be happy about, why are certain left-leaning commentators — including those who have written in favor of “majoritarianism” — so opposed to it? The best answer is that those who adopt the persuasion model do so because they have policy preferences out of line with the majority of Americans. And so they take up ideas about how people are being misled about their self-interest. Instead of realizing their shared interests, the masses are plagued by false consciousness. This is the move that Marxists like Lukacs and Gramsci turned to when it became clear that the working classes of the world didn’t want to rise up in unison. If you define your politics as doing what is good for the many, but the many turn out not to like you very much, it’s easier to conclude that the masses have been misled by your evil opponents than it is to abandon all of your ideas about the world. It’s what you turn to when you’re losing and out of ideas.

Still, theories like this are made plausible by the slightly counterintuitive beliefs of the American people. Non-college voters, generally poorer than average, are less likely to back redistributive economic policies than the educated, upper-middle-class professionals on the other side of that redistribution. A multiracial, working-class coalition voted for the candidate who stripped poor Americans of their health coverage. It doesn’t feel like people are rationally pursuing their self-interest. And I don’t want to say that this idea is totally wrong. People form their beliefs about what’s best for them in the context of the news they consume. Media companies need to turn a profit, and stories about chaos on the border and migrant invasions get more eyeballs than ones about how the vast majority of undocumented immigrants work full-time and pay taxes. Certain right-wing social media tycoons boost some kinds of ideological content and not others. I’m happy to concede that.

But let’s assume the strongest version of this theory is true. Americans are pro-immigration socialists brainwashed by the capitalist media into believing that a better world is not possible and that migrants are the source of their problems. Even if this was the case, and it’s not, what do you plan to do about it? The people believe what they believe. Why would someone who runs on a platform of trying to convince people to believe something else outperform one who runs closer to what people actually think? It doesn’t make intuitive sense. 

There are indeed times when long-term, successful campaigns changed public opinion. But that’s exactly how public opinion changes: through long-term campaigns of persuasion, usually outside of government. Politics has a different function, and muddying the distinction between it and activism makes the job of winning elections much harder. 

Abraham Lincoln once told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio that “public opinion in this country is everything.” Jamelle Bouie himself recently wrote in reference to right-wing ideas about indoctrination on college campuses that people “come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it.” I would encourage the Democratic Party to recognize that — and act accordingly.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.