‘Make Politics Boring Again’
· The Atlantic
If you’re a Democrat looking for razzle-dazzle in your politicians, Representative Jake Auchincloss might disappoint you. During an October swing through South Carolina, Auchincloss told a group of military veterans, “I think we have to make politics boring again,” drawing more nods and chuckles than whoops of approval.
At times the 38-year-old Auchincloss, young and ambitious though he is, seems to embody the change that he seeks in the world. Spend enough time with him, as I did over the past several months, and you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the evils of “cost disease” (and why inflation is worst in industries such as health care and education), the travails of family-owned pharmacies, and the importance of tutoring in public schools. You’ll be bombarded by an impressive and occasionally overwhelming array of statistics and factoids. (Did you know that Auchincloss’s highly engaged constituents in Massachusetts send him three times as much mail as in the average congressional district? I do now.) You might even start talking like you received a business degree from MIT, where taxes are called levies and everything is either “upstream” of this or “downstream” of that.
Visit umafrika.club for more information.
Most of all, you will discover that Auchincloss has plenty of serious ideas about how the Democratic Party can earn back the trust of voters and use government to improve the lives of Americans. What he does not have right now is an obvious place to go with all of them. “The liberals need a new lion,” Auchincloss told me.
Lest we get ahead of ourselves: Auchincloss will not be that lion—at least not yet. He is not running for president; he’s not even all that popular within his own caucus, having irritated colleagues with his willingness to criticize his party. But Auchincloss, who was registered as a Republican not that long ago, wants to have a say in who gets the Democratic presidential nomination and the platform that he or she campaigns on. To that end, he and the group he chairs, Majority Democrats, have summoned the many party leaders who are eyeing White House bids to Denver on Thursday for a postelection conference appropriately titled What’s Next.
Auchincloss has found plenty to criticize in a party that lost two elections to Donald Trump, and even as it became clear that Democrats would do well last week, he did not view the elections as evidence that the party had repaired a damaged brand. “There’s not a line out the door for the Democratic Party,” he said. He wants prospective candidates to speak to a party base that he defined as “a morally serious, market-oriented, exhausted majority of Americans who feel increasingly orphaned by both parties.” After Democrats did better than just about anyone—not least Auchincloss—expected, I asked him whether he wished to revise his assessment. He said he did not, although he admitted that, at least at the polls, “there probably was a line out the door for Democrats on Tuesday.”
[Read: The simple message that produced a Democratic landslide]
Auchincloss’s pitch for 2028 aspirants to make the trip to his Denver confab was hardly subtle, and even a bit presumptuous coming from a third-term House member with few concrete accomplishments to his name: One press release quoted Auchincloss as saying the event was an opportunity “to debate a vision for the Democratic Party. Politicians who believe they have that vision should be on that stage.” A significant number of high-profile Democrats answered his call, among them Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Raphael Warnock, and Cory Booker.
Auchincloss has his own vision for “a new American dream,” one that weaves together plans to help young people, families, and retirees, and is concise enough to fit in a 30-second ad, if not on a bumper sticker. Democrats, he said, should ensure that people have “an excellent education by 18 years old, a home of your own by 30, and a dignified retirement by 65.” He’s trying to find a path for liberals between the ascendant populist left on one side and the sclerotic party establishment on the other. “The core question I get is, like, Jake, what else is there?” he said. “That is my work.”
Auchincloss does not rattle easily. He’s a frequent guest on Fox News and a regular visitor to American Legion halls in his district, where he enjoys arguing over politics with older and mostly conservative war veterans who believe that the Democratic Party is full of criminal-coddling Communists. (Sample question: “Are you a member of DSA?”) Auchincloss does not think highly of the many Democrats who curse in public, and aides tell me he doesn’t even do so in private.
That’s not the only fad in Democratic politics that annoys Auchincloss. Graham Platner was another. Auchincloss was dismissive of the progressive Maine oyster farmer long before a sexual-assault allegation forced Platner to drop his bid for Senate in July. (Platner denied the allegation.) Auchincloss called on Platner to withdraw soon after it was revealed that he had a tattoo resembling a Nazi-era Totenkopf. Platner survived that and other scandals, but even when he faced only token opposition in the Democratic primary, Auchincloss publicly urged Mainers to vote for someone else. The comments sparked a brief firestorm, as Platner backers accused Auchincloss of essentially endorsing Senator Susan Collins in a race that could have preserved a Republican majority. (Auchincloss then made clear that he was not backing Collins, who lost her race to Troy Jackson last week.) “Character matters,” Auchincloss said. “Republicans decided it doesn’t,” he continued, citing Trump and the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton, who lost a Texas U.S. Senate race, as examples. The Democrats who triumphed last week, he said, validated that belief.
Yet Auchincloss’s visceral distaste for Platner extends beyond scandals and leads into a debate that could complicate his own political future. Democrats gravitated toward Platner’s candidacy because they thought that he offered voters the authenticity they craved—a gruff but charismatic working-class populist, and a first-time candidate for office. In their view, that he had slipped up in the past—some non-PC Reddit posts, a problematic tattoo—made him only more real and relatable. Auchincloss believes that was all wrong, and not just because Platner’s story was not as bootstrap as his campaign made it seem.
Some of the candidates whom Majority Democrats—along with its allied organization, the Bench—helped to recruit this year cut a similar profile. They came from working-class backgrounds and were new to elective politics. But when I asked Auchincloss about the voters’ apparent desire for candidates who didn’t look like they were born in a suit and hadn’t spent years preparing to run for office, he became as animated as I’d ever seen him. “I find that to be so condescending to the working class,” Auchincloss replied, “this snickering elitist attitude that somehow if you’re going to appeal to the working class, you need a lot of tattoos and you need to be a bigot.”
“Bigotry right now in the Democratic Party is not with the working class,” he continued. “It is in faculty lounges in my alma mater after October 7, for example.” (Auchincloss received an undergraduate degree from Harvard.) “I just find that whole vein so grating,” he said.
Auchincloss did not enter the world, so far as I could discern, wearing a suit and tie. But he is the first to acknowledge that he has led a privileged life. (“I was born on easy street,” he said.) His father, Hugh Auchincloss Jr., is a prominent immunologist who succeeded Anthony Fauci to become the acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Biden administration. His mother, Laurie Glimcher, for years led the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The branches of Auchincloss’s family tree include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gore Vidal.
The route that took Auchincloss to Congress by the age of 32—elite schools, military service, a campaign partially funded by his parents—was smooth and almost Kennedy-esque. (The previous representative of Massachusetts’s Fourth District was, in fact, Joe Kennedy III.) Growing up in the Boston suburbs, Auchincloss was “very interested in U.S. history and very patriotic,” a close friend since childhood, Dani Kirsztajn, told me. Joining the Marine Corps in the early 2010s, when the nation was mired in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was not a typical move for a Harvard graduate from a wealthy New England family. Auchincloss drew inspiration from his grandfather on his mother’s side, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants who enlisted in the Marines during World War II. The military sent his grandfather to college instead of combat, and he ended up pioneering the development of prosthetic limbs. But Auchincloss also told me that in joining the Marines, he had simply “wanted to do something challenging.” It felt to him “like the hardest path I could choose at that point.”
Auchincloss was deployed to Afghanistan and then to Panama, ultimately earning a promotion to major. After returning home in 2014, he worked for the campaign of Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican who became Massachusetts governor. Auchincloss even registered as a Republican so that he could vote for Baker at the party convention. While getting his MBA, Auchincloss won a seat on Newton’s city council and then ran for Kennedy’s House seat in 2020, which Kennedy had vacated to mount an ill-fated bid for Senate. Auchincloss’s opponents complained about his GOP past (he called himself an “Obama-Baker voter”). Reporters dredged up old social-media posts in which he seemed to defend the burning of the Quran and criticized the city of Cambridge for “taking PC too far” by changing the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. (Auchincloss has come around on Indigenous Peoples’ Day and said that his Quran comment was “a stupid remark by a snarky 22-year-old.”)
[Read: Pete Buttigieg in the wilderness]
Auchincloss won the crowded 2020 primary by just over 2,000 votes and has not had a difficult election since. When he arrived in Washington, he found a roommate in Representative Jared Golden of Maine, another Marine Corps veteran with a young family in the Democratic caucus. The two quickly became friends, often debating issues such as trade policy over their morning coffee. “I like that he’s a nerdy policy wonk,” Golden told me. “But then he’s also pretty savvy when it comes to the politics” of an issue. During Auchincloss’s first years in Congress, Golden said, he was not afraid to butt heads with committee chairs and other older Democrats who did not take kindly to a young, new member pushing his way into negotiations over major legislation. “There’s no doubt that it’s ruffled some feathers,” Golden said.
Auchincloss is earnest almost to a fault. A few people described him to me as self-serious and even cutthroat, occasionally acting, in the words of one Democrat, “like he was playing a character on House of Cards.” It might not help that, but for the patch of thinning hair at the front of his head, Auchincloss could pass for a teenager. A different Democrat compared him unfavorably to Representative Seth Moulton, another ambitious and relatively young military veteran who clashed with progressives in Massachusetts. “Moulton was the least-popular member of the Massachusetts delegation,” this Democrat told me, “until Jake showed up.” When I repeated that to Auchincloss, he replied: “Politics is a brass-knuckle business. I’m happy that people who support me are willing to go on the record, and the people who don’t want to stay on background.”
Auchincloss can be hard to place on the traditional political spectrum, which he sees as a point of pride. When I was speaking with one of his close House allies, Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan, she casually referred to him as a centrist. And when you hear Auchincloss criticize Democrats for backing “catastrophic” school closures during the pandemic, ignoring voter concerns about the porous southern border, or downplaying the rise in crime during the same period, he sounds like he’s aiming for the political middle. He told me, for example, that he still supports Charlie Baker, who left office in 2023.
But the policies that Auchincloss is passionate about are not necessarily moderate. He’s in favor of sharply increasing taxes on inheritance, and he said he’s not opposed in principle to a wealth tax—a proposal long associated with the senior senator in his home state, Elizabeth Warren. Auchincloss has denounced the big social-media companies for “attention-fracking our youth.” He wants to tax them, too, and use the money to pay for tutoring every child in America as a way of closing gaps in literacy and math. (Auchincloss said that the only social-media site he regularly uses is LinkedIn.)
Auchincloss has become perhaps the biggest congressional champion of independent pharmacies, which are fighting to survive against behemoths such as CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, and the big insurers. He’s introduced several bills aimed at helping family pharmacies and lowering drug prices, building a coalition that has included the fiercely partisan GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, and the far-left Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. “It’s quite simply small business versus big insurance,” Auchincloss told a group of mostly small-town pharmacists that he had convened in South Carolina. He talked to them about the difference between an economy that works “like Legos,” which rewards diligence and rule following, instead of like Monopoly, in which dominant players hoard property and take over the game. “You,” he told the pharmacists, “are at the vanguard of an economy that works like Legos, the kind of economy that we want to build.”
[Read: The unlikeliest Democratic win of all]
Yet if Auchincloss’s anti-monopoly stance might make Bernie Sanders proud, he’s not sold on the most far-reaching progressive priorities. I struggled to pin him down, for example, on Medicare for All. Majority Democrats is backing a narrower plan that would create a public option for health insurance but stop short of single-payer health care. Auchincloss wants to have a different debate altogether. Democrats, he told me, too often want to argue about who pays the bill for health care—patients, insurers, the government—instead of trying to lower the bill itself. “This is a really critical area of differentiation between my wing and the left,” he said. “What I reject is the concept that Medicare for All is the big idea, and being against Medicare for All is a smaller idea. The big idea from Americans is lower premiums—lower the bill for health care.”
His argument notwithstanding, some progressives are likely to make support for Medicare for All a litmus test for Democrats aspiring to party leadership, whether in Congress or the White House. “I close no doors on solutions,” Auchincloss said of Medicare for All when I pressed him again, “but my focus is on the things that we can do right now to lower prices.”
Such hedging is one reason progressives remain suspicious of Auchincloss and Majority Democrats, which draws funding from wealthy donors who are opposed to some of the expensive, transformational proposals that progressives run on. “Nothing against Jake Auchincloss, but he does not have the standing or reputation to be telling the Democratic Party to trim its sails at this moment when people are angry and want big solutions,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me.
Majority Democrats and the Bench helped recruit and fund some of the midterm campaign’s breakout stars, including James Talarico and Bobby Pulido in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. They did suffer defeats; some of their candidates lost primary races to more progressive Democrats who went on to prevail in the general election. “Voters agreed with us in opposing Trump,” Auchincloss told me after the election. “They are still waiting to be enlisted in what we are for, and that project remains in front of us.” In the near term, he said, Democrats should use their new majorities in Congress to “end the war, repeal the tariffs, and prosecute Pete Hegseth,” before turning to “sensible, fast-acting fixes” on health care and immigration. “We got a permission slip on Election Day,” Auchincloss said, “and we should read it as a chance to show voters that we get it.”
Few people who know Auchincloss doubt that his ambitions extend well beyond a House seat in Massachusetts. He considered challenging Senator Ed Markey this year but passed on the race—a decision that looks smart, considering the 80-year-old incumbent defeated Moulton in a primary by nearly 30 points. Massachusetts Democrats expect Auchincloss to run for governor in 2030, but that election is a long way off, and he’d likely have plenty of competition within the party. The size and breadth of the Democrats’ House majority could open up new opportunities for him to advance in Congress, or he could contend for a Cabinet post should the party retake the presidency in 2028.
For now, Auchincloss insists that he just wants to have a voice, and to help bring his party fully back to power. But at a moment when the party is teeming with Democrats who want to lead it, even that dream might be a lot to ask.