What does this political moment in our country call for? The MAGA president and right-wing Supreme Court are shredding the Constitution at lightning speed, with the full acquiescence of President Donald Trump’s merry band of sycophants in Congress. Masked men are kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them to detention centers across the country, and deporting them to countries our State Department warns travelers not to visit. Meanwhile, protesters against this lawlessness are attacked by federal troops with “less-lethal” weapons.
An estimated 7 million peaceful protesters took to the streets on October 18, in the second-largest demonstration in US history (after the first Earth Day in 1970), demanding accountability and a return to democracy and the rule of law. In a system of government where citizens can only use the ballot box every two to six years to show how they feel about their electeds, that’s something you’d think would warrant journalistic attention.
Yet at the nation’s paper of record—whose headquarters sat literally a stone’s throw away from the New York City No Kings march route—the protest was deemed not important enough for a front-page story. Two small below-the-fold photos were offered instead (10/19/25), with the accompanying article buried on page 23.
It’s true that the New York Times has a history of downplaying protests (FAIR.org, 9/24/25, 9/12/25, 1/25/24). But it’s also true that it’s only certain kinds of protests that they downplay. When right-wingers under the banner of the Tea Party movement held in 2009 what the Times (9/12/09) described as “the largest rally against President [Barack] Obama since he took office,” they drew a crowd two orders of magnitude smaller than No Kings, but its coverage got the same placement from the paper: front-page photo, article inside. Just one month after the Tea Party rally, a major LGBTQ march of equal or possibly even double the size was not noted on the paper’s front page at all (Extra!, 12/09).
Will it be possible in 2026 for Democrats to win at the ballot box, regardless of ideology? That’s very much up for debate.
The Times isn’t exactly an outlier in that respect; nearly all corporate media have a long history of downplaying major protests over women’s rights, war, genocide, and the climate crisis, while offering much more ink and airtime to right-wing rallies like the Promise Keepers and the Tea Party.
But the Times deserves special attention—partly because it’s seen as the standard-bearing “liberal” newspaper in the country. And as the standard-bearer, it sees its role as establishing the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party, most notably by drawing the line in the sand on the left that the Democrats must not cross. And this in turn is why, two days after the massive pro-democracy marches, the New York Times editorial board published a forceful message of its own—not against fascism, but against progressivism.
‘The Center Is the Way to Win’
In both its news and opinion sections, year after year, the New York Times‘ mantra has been that for electoral success, Democrats have to move to the right, and any electoral losses must be caused by excessive progressivism (Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 5/27/15, 7/6/17, 11/14/19, 7/16/21). In a sprawling new iteration of this “move to the center” motto, the paper’s editorial board (10/20/25) announced: “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.”
The piece frames itself as talking to “partisans,” but it makes only the faintest nods to Republicans, and the last 2,000 of its 3,000-odd words are directly targeting Democrats. It opens:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
You could probably just stop right there, based on the absurdity of comparing the “extremes” of Trump’s unprecedented authoritarianism to democratic socialist Democrats. New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the highest-profile of the latter at the moment (and certainly top of mind for the city’s largest newspaper), has focused his campaign on freezing the rent, making city buses free, and adding 2% to the tax bills of the wealthiest 1%.
But even if you make it past that to the paper’s evidence for its centrism argument, it’s full of holes. The main argument is that “candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left.”
The centerpiece of their evidence is an analysis of swing districts where a Democratic congressional candidate won and former Vice President Kamala Harris lost. The Times looked at what PAC endorsements the winning candidate received, and came up with the result that all could be classified as moderates. “No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these,” the paper declared. It also says its analysis shows that “moderates” outperformed Harris, while “nonmoderates” underperformed. Ergo, moderation must be the key to success.
‘Zero Additional Seats’
The question of the impact of ideology on electoral outcomes is hotly debated among academics and pollsters. Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, who runs the site On Data and Democracy (10/20/25), ran the numbers and found that “even using the editorial’s own data, Democrats would have gained zero additional seats by running more moderates in competitive seats.”
Part of this is due to the fact that Democrats most often run right-leaning candidates in swing districts already. But there are other factors that are probably more important. Bonica’s own research has found that incumbency matters far more than “moderation” for election outcomes. Looking at a range of measures of ideology, rather than the Times‘ single indirect measure of PAC support, he found that
the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant. The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable 2-3 percentage points.
Using the most straightforward measure of all—voter perception of ideology—he found the benefit of moderation was exactly zero.
Bonica then analyzed every competitive district race from 2016-24, using the composite measure of ideology. “If every progressive candidate on the list had been replaced by a moderate in 2024,” he found, “the expected net change in Democratic seats would have been zero.”
The Times also argues that progressives “cannot point to a single member of Congress or governor from swing districts or states” who has won by “quietly retaining their unpopular positions and emphasizing economic issues.” Meanwhile, they say, look at Wisconsin, for instance, where Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers “won by running to the middle.”
But Bonica points out that in surveys, Baldwin was actually perceived by voters as “progressive.” Wisconsin Capital Times associate editor John Nichols (10/21/25) agrees, writing that Baldwin, the first openly LGBTQ member of the Senate, hardly ran to the middle, as the Times claimed, but defended trans rights (an issue Democrats are “out of step” on, according to the Times) and “borrowed heavily from a progressive populist tradition.” Baldwin and Evers, he wrote, were portrayed by their opponents as “radical.” It’s an example that undermines, rather than supports, the Times‘ argument, and also shows that defining and measuring ideology is a tricky thing—which the editors acknowledge, right before proclaiming that they possess the “true picture.”
‘Too Liberal, Too Judgmental’
But if the New York Times‘ evidence is hardly convincing, its diagnosis of why moderation wins is even less so. The piece insists that the main problem is that “many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental, and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it.”
The popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, the Times says, is simply too niche; their fans “are not nearly numerous enough to flip the places required to win the presidency and Congress.”
Legacy media regularly work to say this until people believe it; in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sanders won many early states, and not just deep blue ones, despite concerted media efforts to downplay and diminish his campaign (FAIR.org, 8/15/19, 1/28/20, 1/30/20, 5/1/20). When Joe Biden eventually overtook him, exit polls showed voters still preferred Sanders’ political position, suggesting they were responding not to Biden’s ideology, but to the incessant media narrative of his electability (FAIR.org, 3/16/20). According to a recent YouGov poll (4/16/25), Sanders is currently the most popular active politician in the country by a substantial margin.
NYT's Ideal Platform
Now, as then, the Times claims that moving to the center will make voters “see [Democrats] as credible.” What does that look like, concretely? The Times attempts to establish what moderation looks like in this crucial paragraph, which sets forth much of the paper’s own ideology in clear terms:
America still has a political center. Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big—and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend.
This is the ideal Democratic platform that Times envisions: an end to affirmative action, refusal to grant women full autonomy over their own bodies, policing trans kids’ participation in sports while their very existence is under attack. They want politicians who promise “robust policing” without the police brutality that accompanies it, who talk about curbs on corporate and billionaire power but won’t challenge capitalism, who express support for “strong public schools” while allowing private schools to siphon off the money needed to make those public schools strong.
In other words, they want Democrats to throw their core constituents under the bus while making vague, contradictory promises they can’t fulfill. This is the paper’s suggested path to credibility?
Captured by Elites
The example the Times offers of how moving to the center will make Democrats more “credible” and “effective” in confronting Trump is that “most voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies—and nonetheless trust his party on the issue more than they trust Democrats.” A more “moderate” position on immigration would make Democrats better able to “combat” him on the issue.
But when the Times itself calls Biden’s immigration policies “lax”—when they were far more cruel and draconian than any recent president besides Trump—and frames them as the other side of the extremist coin to Trump’s “cruel immigration enforcement,” it shapes that public perception. It’s hardly a surprise that many voters think the Democrats are “too liberal,” when that’s what all of the country’s biggest news outlets have hammered into their heads for decades.
In fact, a recent poll shows that the Times‘ advice is fundamentally self-defeating. The paper is correct that Democrats’ approval ratings are abysmal, and also that some polls show voters say Democrats are “too left wing and too focused on niche issues.” But those polls give respondents pre-written choices, suggesting to them what the appropriate answer might be, which can skew responses. What happens if you ask voters directly what they think about the party, and let them fill in the blanks themselves? A recent poll of Rust Belt (read: swing state) voters did just that, and analyzed the unprompted answers. Here’s what they found (Jacobin, 10/15/25):
Contrary to many analyses that have blamed Democrats for holding extreme positions on social and cultural issues that alienated swing voters, the dominant theme we observed was voters’ anger at the Democratic Party for failing to deliver. Among Democratic and independent respondents, the most common critique of the Democratic Party was its perceived inability to carry out policies that help ordinary people.
“Wokeness” or ideological extremism was a concern for only small minorities, even among independents (11%) and Republicans (19%). “The evidence suggests,” they wrote, that
most voters who hold negative views of the Democratic Party are motivated less by the culture war than by a broader judgment that the party is captured by elites and not delivering tangible gains for working people.
And what happens when you ask them directly about progressive policies? Turns out that, on many issues, voters are much more progressive than the Times would have readers believe. Polls regularly show large majorities in favor of a wealth tax, a $15 or higher minimum wage, and Medicare for All, all key progressive demands that corporate media regularly lambaste.
Anti-Democratic Power Grab
Equally important, the Times‘ argument imagines that a Democratic push to the center can overcome the structural obstacles to competitive elections that this authoritarian movement is rapidly laying down. Trump and his allies are working furiously to undermine election integrity for their own benefit, using a variety of strategies that the Brennan Center for Justice (8/3/25) details:
- Attempting to rewrite election rules to burden voters and usurp control of election systems;
- Targeting or threatening to target election officials and others who keep elections free and fair;
- Supporting people who undermine election administration; and
- Retreating from the federal government’s role of protecting voters and the election process.
GOP-controlled states are ramming through new gerrymandered maps at Trump’s behest to generate more safe seats. And the Voting Rights Act is currently before a Supreme Court that seems eager to eviscerate what little remains of it, which would allow further gerrymandering to give the GOP up to 19 more House seats.
Will it be possible in 2026 for Democrats to win at the ballot box, regardless of ideology? That’s very much up for debate. It certainly appears to be Trump’s goal to make it impossible, no matter how popular Democratic candidates might be.
Yet nowhere in its lengthy tirade against progressives does the Times mention this anti-democratic electoral power grab. It’s a key omission, and it brings us back to the paper’s downplaying of the No Kings protests. The Times in its editorial laments that Trump “threatens American democracy,” but it imagines the ship can be righted by retaking Congress with centrist Democrats.
If the Democrats have shown us anything under Trump 2.0, it’s that seeking to moderate and accommodate—as they did in confirming his extremist cabinet nominees and failing to block his first continuing resolution in the spring—only gives Trump and his enablers more power. Stopping the authoritarian machine is going to require all the levers of democracy that can be pulled—not just at the ballot box, but also on the streets.
