Welcome to What’s Left! I’m Amy Hoggart, a writer/comedian with the ideals of a radical but the risk-aversion of a moderate. Each week, I interview someone interesting about their personal politics and the state of the left today.
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Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic strategist and political commentator who has worked in national politics since the early 1990s, including serving as communications director for the Democratic National Committee after Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory. He later founded the New Democrat Network, which he led for nearly three decades, and has advised campaigns, elected officials and party leaders throughout his career. Today, he writes and organises through his Substack, Hopium, where he shares political analysis and mobilises a grassroots community focused on strengthening democracy and electing Democratic candidates.
Welcome, Simon! If there were a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re a total centrist, -100, a complete fascist, and +100, a radical, where would you put yourself?
I probably fall somewhere in a band, because I don’t think it’s that simple: it really depends on the issue. We all have our own unique take on the world.
But if = is centrist, then I’d say I’m somewhere between -5 and -10 on one end, and maybe +30 and +40 on the other. Ideologically, I’m probably more of a liberal than a progressive, which comes from being a “child of Clinton” back in 1992.
That said, one of the reasons I was excited to do this conversation is that I think that, right now, our personal ideology is less important than building a strong, unified community that can take power away from MAGA.
It’s actually been refreshing for me not to feel like I’m constantly a combatant in ideological wars. I’ve enjoyed working with people across the spectrum.
I also try to ground my work in data, which I don’t see as ideological. In a moment full of misinformation, gaslighting and manipulation, staying anchored in what’s actually true is incredibly important.
That makes sense and I appreciate your love of data. Like a lot of people, I found your work through “Election Twitter” in 2022. You were one of the only people offering optimism with numbers to back it up, and you turned out to be right!
What people saw from me on “Election Twitter” in 2022 was really just that: sharing basic data, trying to push back against all the noise and bluster in the discourse. That’s still what I try to do every day. I give people a sense of where things actually stand, because it’s very hard to stay grounded in the current information environment.
So yes, I have my own views, but I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m comfortable working with people of all ideological stripes. And I think that coalition mindset is essential, because one of the main tactics of leaders like Trump or Orbán is to divide the opposition so they can hold power without majority support.
If we don’t hang together, we hang separately. That’s the reality.
I think you’re my 70th guest, and you’re the first person to ever give a minus number, which is interesting. That really is quite a broad ideological range. When I started these interviews after the 2024 election, it felt like the infighting between the centre and the far left was out of control. What do you think about that infighting? And how do you deal with it while still trying to bring people together?
I think we have to adopt a mindset where we remember that our real opponent is Trump and MAGA. We’re all playing different positions on the same team, that’s how I see it. I don’t have to agree with someone to respect them, work with them or be part of a shared effort to take back power from authoritarian forces.
Because of how the American system works—we’re not a parliamentary democracy—we have to build our coalition before the election. We need to reach 50% of the vote, which means bringing together a wide range of people.
And I actually think internal debate is healthy. It’s a sign of a functioning party. I often say we should aim for consensus, not unity. Unity is static; consensus is dynamic. It evolves and adapts, and it allows for differences.
In a democracy, reconciling those differences is the whole point. Congress itself was designed for that purpose: to bring together people with different views and work toward common solutions. Where it becomes a problem is when debate turns into factionalism, when people dig in and start treating each other as the enemy. That’s what we have to avoid.
That’s why I like the term “pro-democracy movement.” It’s inclusive and not overly ideological. It allows people like Stuart Stevens, AOC and me to all be part of the same effort. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. We need a majority, and that requires bringing people in, not pushing them out.
And look, I get it, this is easier said than done. It’s like any relationship; people get frustrated, annoyed, emotional. But we don’t really have the luxury of that right now. We need to argue, make our case and stay passionate. But ultimately, we also need to come together and win.
So I guess my follow-up question would be this: if the Democrats become a very broad church, then what do they actually stand for? Is it just being pro-democracy? Because I remember in the run-up to the 2024 election when Harris was campaigning with Liz Cheney, and it really upset a lot of people on the left. I worry that it lost her votes. I guess I’m saying that I still want to know what a party is and what you’re actually voting for, rather than just “we’re not those guys.” What would you say to that?
Well, I think there are two founding principles of the modern Democratic Party, and those are opportunity and freedom.
Freedom, to me, is really the foundational value. It goes back to FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech in January 1941, where he articulated a vision of a world based on freedom rather than dominion, autocracy, or oligarchy. That vision shaped not just America but much of the world for decades.
In my view, that vision carried us forward until very recently—until Donald Trump’s second term—when America is no longer as committed to that same global agenda. Trump represents something very different. He’s a man of dominion, not freedom. He seeks control over people, institutions, and even other countries, rather than expanding liberty.
The second core value is opportunity: the idea that everyone should have a chance to get ahead, not just a select few. That’s a deeply universal value.
And I would say, in defence of the party, that the system built on those principles over the past 80 years has created more opportunity for more people than any other system in human history. If you look at the data, it’s remarkable: extreme poverty has fallen dramatically even as the global population has grown; literacy rates have tripled since 1945; life expectancy has increased by more than 20 years; and more people have lived under democratic systems than ever before.
There has never been a better time to be alive, broadly speaking, than in this modern era shaped by those values. When I think about the Democratic Party, that legacy is what inspires me. I genuinely believe that no political force in history has done more good for more people. And I think that’s something we should be proud of and willing to defend.
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It’s really refreshing talking to someone so optimistic. I always ask people whether or not they’re optimistic, but I don’t think I need to bother asking you! Is your optimism natural or do you have to cultivate it for your work?
I don’t think there’s any other way to be in politics full-time other than to be optimistic. Because what you’re trying to do in politics is you’re trying to make things better and to improve people’s lives. And that requires hope and optimism, right? It means that if I do the work, I can make things better. And that’s a very optimistic faith, which I think the centre-left or liberalism is.
My very first kind of major political boss was the man from Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton, which is kind of the most ridiculous thing. But he believed that optimism was a superpower and I agree with him.
But the second thing I would say is that there is also something strategic about hope. In this time in history, it’s very easy to get down, it’s very easy to recoil and be disgusted and angry. But I don’t think we can win that way.
I have come to believe in my professional work that part of the whole strategy of MAGA is to pump negative sentiment into our discourse every day. It’s a negative sentiment machine. They want us to feel bad about our leaders, our country, our institutions and each other. And so one of the ways that we defeat MAGA is by putting positive sentiment into the world.
In the 2028 election, we’re going to need to articulate our own version of greatness. And our understanding about what makes America great is very, very different from theirs.
Sorry in advance because this is such a British question, but do you worry about America’s reputation? Because my end, it really has taken quite a battering lately.
Oh yeah. And for good reason, by the way.
I feel like in Europe, there’s a real wariness now. We’ve been totally dependent on America for so long and now we’re going to have to figure out how not to be. So your allies are essentially tiptoeing away. Do you think those relationships can be repaired? And how fussed are you about that?
I think it’s a new reality that we have to manage and understand. The relationship that Europe and the UK had with the United States may never be the same. And that’s okay if we acknowledge that and then forge a new, different relationship. One where Europe and the UK are more independent of the United States.
This is going to be costly for the U.S. It’s going to cost us prosperity and money because people in Europe and around the world will probably be less excited about buying American products and things.
So we have a lot of work to do to get to the other side of this. But I think what’s exciting about all of that—and this gets back to Simon the Optimist—is that it means that something new has to be built. And that’s exciting both for Europe and the UK and for the United States. That rather than feeling that instead of maintaining an old order that was built under very different circumstances 80 years ago, we get to go build a new thing together.
Hopefully that new thing will be better than what we had, and certainly, it will be different.
You mentioned that you’re sometimes slightly on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Do you have any secret conservative beliefs?
I think that sometimes, on national security issues, I perhaps end up slightly more conservative. I see myself as a muscular liberal in sort of the FDR tradition. I’m probably a little bit more pro-market and I’m also a globalist, which these days puts me even more to the right.
I think that historically, I’ve perhaps been a raging centrist on economic and national security issues and probably much more left on social issues.
When I ran for chair of the Democratic Party in 2005, I was the most pro-choice candidate on the whole stage. And in terms of policy work, I’ve been a leading advocate for immigration reform in America. In some circles, that pushes me very far to the left.
And that’s why I sort of presented to you a very broad spectrum, because I think some of my beliefs probably fall right in the centre, and then some of them fall—in current understanding of the Democratic Party—far more left than that.
The next two years of the Democratic Party is going to be one of just incredibly vigorous debate about everything we’re talking about today: about our future, our role in the world, how we all get along, opportunity--all these things. And I welcome it. It’s going to be exciting and a lot of fun.
You’re the most optimistic person I’ve ever interviewed. It feels a bit like therapy, but I guess in reverse because I’m asking the questions and you’re answering.
You know, Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic referred to me as the therapist of the Democratic Party.
I totally agree with him there. I’m trying to get the left to pick the piss out of itself a bit more. Could you make up a marginalised community that you belong to?
Baseball nerds.
Are you guys discriminated against?
Probably not. I don’t think so.
Wait, I actually think you are.
You think I am?
Yes, because the costumes the players wear are so silly.
Yeah, I guess people think baseball players are not athletic and they just sit around and it’s boring. I get it.
Sorry that you said you weren’t discriminated against and so I stepped in and suggested that you are. Ok, here’s my last question: what action would you recommend to someone who wants to get more involved?
The most important thing is to do the thing that you enjoy the most, because then you’ll do more of it. Some people like to phone bank. Some people like to canvass. Some people like to hold signs. Some people like to go on the internet and fight with people, or give money or write postcards.
Everyone has their own way in. The most important thing is that you have to do something. Because one person doing something is ok, but 10 million people taking action every day starts to become a very big movement that can change the future.
We have a country to save and elections to win together.
Thank you so much for your time, Simon.
No, thank you for just being open to platforming different voices, because, as we discussed, learning how to be in community with others who are not like us is really kind of the core activity of a democracy.
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