What history says about a split Democratic party

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Julian Zelizer** (0:06)
It's harder to communicate, it's harder to get out of message, but this is the playing field both parties have. So Democrats have to figure out how to navigate in this particular atmosphere, and it can be done as President Trump has shown.

**Chris Bentley** (0:20)
Disarray, schmissarray. Nothing unites a coalition like a common enemy.
It's Tuesday, August 4th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says President Trump's second term in the White House has cemented his status as the most consequential figure of our lifetimes.

**Maggie Haberman** (0:56)
His shamelessness has always been his superpower, and that goes back long before he was in politics.

**Chris Bentley** (1:01)
That's coming up at about 10 minutes. But first, it is election day in five states, including Michigan, where establishment-backed Congresswoman Haley Stevens and progressive newcomer Abdul Al Sayed are fighting for the Democratic nomination for Senate, and also for the direction of the Democratic Party. But our next guest writes that whoever wins the primary, their next goal should be to broaden their coalition.
Princeton's Julian Zelizer is a presidential historian, and he tells Scott Tong that history has two powerful examples of presidents who overcame deep divisions in their parties to govern decisively. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 30s, and Ronald Reagan in the 80s.

**Julian Zelizer** (1:46)
It was a deeply divided party in the 1930s. You had conservative Southern Democrats who were the powerhouses in Congress, were very conservative on race relations, on unionization, and on many government issues. And then you had a growing cohort of Northern Democrats, such as Senator Wagner of New York, who were very liberal and wanted to expand government and were really the architects of programs like Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. And so this was a big tension, bigger than in many ways that party faces today that FDR had to navigate.

**Scott Tong** (2:23)
And so what did he do? How did he overcome this, build the coalition?

**Julian Zelizer** (2:28)
Part one was him. I mean, it was a kind of act of successful leadership that he became a unifying presence. But then he found issues that both coalitions could agree on and economic security was one of the biggest, that the government would help alleviate some of the drastic swings that people saw in the depression that come with a capitalist economy.

**Scott Tong** (2:52)
Right, so he found kind of a common issue there. Let's talk about Reagan. Post Watergate, of course, the Republican Party had a lot of image rebuilding to do. His coalition, as you're right, included conservative Democrats. What issues did Reagan confront? And I guess, as you argue, confront well.

**Julian Zelizer** (3:11)
Yeah, I mean, his coalition was also just a total mess in 1980 There are so many different factions. So again, like FDR, he became a unifying presence. But two issues in particular. One, tax cuts, and he built on momentum from a movement in California to cut property taxes, to translate that at the national level. And then anti-communism. He called for a more robust, aggressive response to the Soviet Union. And those two issues overcame all the divisions that existed between an evangelical conservative and a deregulating business leader who had nothing else in common.

**Scott Tong** (3:51)
So if one of the lessons here is good politicians, party leaders can find where the Venn diagrams overlap and build coalitions there.
Does that mean there's a cost of coalition? That is, you might have to jettison an issue that is just too divisive in your party?

**Julian Zelizer** (4:09)
There is. And I point that out that it's a high cost. And certainly in the 1930s, not dealing with race earlier on was tremendously damaging.
On the other hand, FDR built a coalition that provided a social safety net to all Americans that was very valuable. So that's the kind of trade-off Democrats have to figure out today. But the cost of not doing that could be continued power for the MAGA Republican coalition.

**Scott Tong** (4:42)
Well, let's talk about today and the Republican Party. Are you seeing the Trump coalition being challenged, divided, say, over this next war we're in?

**Julian Zelizer** (4:53)
I think divided is too strong a word so far. I mean, I think there's tension and I think there's uneasiness. But you look at the polls and President Trump still has very strong standing in the Republican Party and he just flex that muscle in the primary. So there's potential for fragmentation, but I still think it's pretty early in that process.