After a brutal shellacking in the 2024 elections, Democrats are deeply divided over how to chart a path back to power. Some party veterans say it’s time to return to the centrist strategy that helped Bill Clinton capture the White House in 1992—while others are pushing further left than ever before.

The internal feud is now front and center as the party gropes for leadership heading into the 2026 midterms and beyond. According to a New York Times report, many Democrats are eyeing the Clinton-era model: win back middle-class voters with kitchen-table issues and distance the party from its fringe obsessions with race and identity politics.

Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt said the lesson from the ’90s still holds true: “We thought the party was moving too far to the left.” That move back to the middle helped Clinton win two terms and pass bipartisan reforms—including the landmark “welfare to work” law. Gephardt, like others in the Democratic Leadership Council at the time, helped craft a center-left coalition that could actually win elections.

Centrist think tanks like Third Way echo that call today. Co-founder Matt Bennett told the Times that Clinton’s Democrats didn’t live in fear of their radical base, unlike today’s leaders. “They didn’t fear the left in the way that current politicians do,” he said.

But the activist class has other ideas.

Socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis are now celebrated by the party’s grassroots. Mamdani is even being touted as a future party leader. Meanwhile, Democratic megadonor Seth London has warned that the current obsession with “group-based identity politics” is alienating everyday Americans. His advice? Bring back the American Dream by focusing on tangible results, not virtue signaling.

Even Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, a moderate by most standards, concedes that the party has lost its way—but he’s not convinced centrism is the solution. Instead, Bennet wants a new vision that actually resonates with the middle class, warning that Clinton’s compromises ended up hurting the very voters Democrats claim to champion.

The tension is clear: Clinton’s model once worked, but it might not survive the party’s modern identity crisis.

As new figures like Mamdani and El-Sayed rise to national prominence, Democrats must choose between ideological purity and political reality. Clinton’s legacy proved that moderation could win—but whether today’s Democrats are ready to admit that remains to be seen.