Democrats should try to be competitive in all 50 states

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address in Washington, D.C. in 2009/Department of Defense

North Dakota is an obscure state. A rural, agricultural expanse sitting in the geographic center of the continent—about as “middle America” as it gets. Its cultural theme is reminiscent of the Dutton family in Yellowstone: ranching, farming, and small communities where tradition is prioritized.

The state has gone overwhelmingly Republican for a century. It voted for Donald Trump by massive margins in three consecutive elections. Because of that long-term support, you might assume nearly everyone there aligns with the national MAGA agenda, or at the very least never supports a Democrat initiative.

As always in American politics, the reality is much more complex.

Six in ten ND residents were born in the state. Over the last couple decades, their foreign-born population has surged at one of the fastest rates in the country, with many new arrivals coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

Since the pandemic, they’ve faced severe labor shortages. When Donald Trump began his plot of mass deportations around the country (particularly North Dakota’s neighbor Minnesota), state leaders backed a $12 million initiative to attract “New Americans”—immigrants and refugees—to live and work there.

At the same time, the state is on track to become one of the first in the country to achieve universal high-speed internet access, thanks in part to federal infrastructure investments passed under the Biden Admin. And since its agriculture sector, particularly soybean farmers, have been negatively affected by global tariffs and trade wars, the state’s leaders have to grapple with economic realities that don’t fit into the MAGA agenda.

North Dakota is heavily conservative, to be sure, but it is not ideologically uniform with the rest of the Republican base. Its policies, like those of any state, are shaped by practical needs and parochial concerns.

Democrats have largely stopped trying to compete in places like North Dakota. There are residents—and thus ideas—from middle America which have been almost entirely absent from national political conversations for decades.

That is a strategic failure.

A coalition of learners

I’ve been bugging readers for months about the bold idea of Democrats building large, durable majorities. To achieve that, they simply cannot afford to write off entire states. They must compete everywhere. They must learn how to pursue progressive policy in ways that considers how change is actually experienced by those impacted by it.

In a place like New York City, constant influx, diversity, and cultural evolution are part of the baseline. Big changes are expected. And for many progressives living there, it even feels too slow.

But in a place like Fargo, North Dakota, or in smaller towns across the country, those same shifts in advocacy and policy are more visible and more disruptive. That’s not to say people always perceive change as “bad”. It’s to say what feels incremental or too cautious in one place can feel sudden and overwhelming in another; it’s to say there isn’t only one kind of progress.

We don’t actually know, in advance, which policies will work—or how they will work. Public policy is inherently uncertain. Laws are, at their core, experiments. Even well-designed ideas can produce unexpected consequences once they interact with creative, unpredictable people. Outcomes diverge from intentions all the time. That’s what makes correction so important. It’s uncertainty, the inherent fallibility of people, that makes variation and diversity valuable. When different states and communities pursue change at different speeds and in different ways, they create a kind of distributed learning system. Some will succeed. Most will fail. Others will succeed in unpredicted ways, solving more problems than originally intended. Over time, those successes and failures can be observed, refined, and adapted elsewhere.

A political party that insists on uniformity everywhere cuts itself off from that process of error correction.

This is where Democrats, in particular, run into trouble. Too often, they present a single nationalized vision of a progressive platform and assume it can be applied everywhere at once. That every community faces the same problems at the same scale and with the same urgency. But as explained, policy that works in New York City may fail—or simply feel intolerable or too bold—in North Dakota because the underlying conditions are actually different.

Deviation used to be common

A smarter approach to electoral politics for Democrats would be to treat every state as a testing ground by allowing ideas to develop where they are most viable, studying the results, and expanding them where they succeed. The most progressive areas can take the biggest risks, while more moderate states evaluate what works and adapt accordingly.

A party that takes outcomes seriously cannot afford to treat ideology as a substitute for results.

Ezra Klein, for all his faults, has correctly argued that California is a state that should represent the strongest case for Democratic governance, but it often does the opposite. It has become a natural example critics point to as evidence that progressive policies are failing.

He later explained in an interview with The New Yorker that his attempts to push Democrats to listen to those critics by tolerating more internal ideological variation have been recently met with resistance, even though it used to be commonplace:

I covered the Affordable Care Act very closely. When that passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, and West Virginia. I think competing in these states has become, in many ways, unimaginable to Democrats…

Politics is about power. And I think people have missed this.

…I want to see real decisions being made to try to compete in Kansas and Missouri and Ohio and then in red states—meaning, redder than that. I’d like to see us running pro-life Democrats again. When Obamacare passed, about forty House Democrats were pro-life. People got very upset about that. I get why, but I think it’s worth thinking about this.

Take abortion as an example of what this variation looks like in practice. After the uprooting of Roe in 2022, the issue became more locally defined (that was actually the whole point of its overturn). Voters in Kansas and Montana supported abortion rights when it appeared on the ballot. Yet, abortion remains almost entirely banned in places like North Dakota and Florida.

Even within the Republican Party, this shift forced Donald Trump to move toward positions like supporting IVF and avoiding punitive measures against women seeking abortions, while largely downplaying the issue publicly. Many pro-lifers in his coalition were frustrated, but they continued to support the party because they recognized their position had become poisoned at the national level.

In other words: political expression of the pro-life position had to adjust to changing conditions.

Voters in every state hold mixed, often conflicting views. If Democrats want to compete in places like North Dakota, they will need candidates who can operate within those realities by recognizing that progress will not look identical everywhere, and that building a governing majority requires making room for disagreement within the coalition.

Ideally, someone like John Fetterman could raise reasonable objections to policies in states like California or Massachusetts without it being seen as a betrayal of Democratic values, but as a reflection of the real political and cultural constraints within their state. Democrats in Pennsylvania are progressive—but not in the same way, or to the same degree, as those in California. Litmus testing everyone in a diverse coalition by a single standard ignores those differences and prevents learning from each other’s mistakes.

How progress becomes tyranny

One problem I’ve had, and Democrats share, is to acknowledge that resistance to change is not always irrational. In places undergoing rapid, visible transformation, people may misdiagnose causes or propose flawed solutions—but the underlying perception that something significant is changing is real.

In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper argued that history is shaped by countless unforeseen developments, with complex causes and unpredictable consequences. For that reason, the central task of democratic institutions is not to impose a predetermined vision of the future, but to allow societies to learn—to avoid tyranny which prevents change.

That applies just as much within countries as it does between them. When people in certain communities feel that change is happening without their consent—too quickly, too visibly, and without regard for local conditions—it can feel, in a very real sense, tyrannical. They may not oppose change itself, but they resist the feeling that it is being decided for them, rather than with them.

But since change is the mechanism of progress, the solution cannot be stagnation.

As Matt Johnson argued in writing about the decline of open societies, “The defenders of the open society won’t shake the cynicism and complacency of their fellow citizens if they don’t figure out how to make a more inspiring case for democracy.”

The same is true at the domestic level. The defenders of progressive politics will not rebuild trust in conservative areas if they cannot make a more inspiring case for it across different kinds of communities. A party that can hold onto that distinction—committed to change, but flexible in its application—would be far better positioned to compete everywhere.

The lesson of North Dakota is not that Democrats need to abandon their principled support for change, or that Republican voters are uniquely resistant to it. It is that change is always experienced by individuals. A healthy democracy should not have entire regions written off as permanently red or permanently blue. When one party dominates a state completely, voters lose leverage—especially those in the minority. Politicians become less responsive. Over time, that weakens democracy itself. We should want every elected official to feel the fire that is public pressure. Whether that comes from those who voted for them or simply live in their district. Without a competitive opponent, officials are free to act in more partisan ways.

If Democrats want to be a truly national party again, they need to meet voters where they are by adapting how they pursue them. A party that is willing to move at different speeds, to test ideas, and to learn from its successes and failures will compete everywhere.