These contributions confirm the broad basis for strategic unity that exists today in the Democratic Party and indicate the contours of a new synthesis that could help define and focus the party for the years ahead. At the same time, the contributions highlight several challenges this new synthesis will have to confront to maximize its political effectiveness.

The Basis for Unity

The old debates between "populists" and "New Democrats" have clearly run out of gas. Most of our contributors have been associated in the past with one side or another of this debate. But it is striking how little appetite there seems to be for re-fighting those old battles. Nobody seems much interested in drawing lines in the sand that will differentiate real Democrats from those who would ruin the party and/or betray its principles.

Instead, contributors have focused their attention on providing concrete suggestions on where and how the party can focus its energies to be more effective. Most, if not all, of these suggestions should meet with broad approval across the Democratic Party. They include the following:

1.  Make Elections Fair and Clean. If electoral reform had predated, rather than postdated, the 2000 election, Al Gore probably would have won that election, a change in outcome whose significance would be hard to overestimate. And the persistence of voting irregularities in the 2004 election, as Donna Brazile reminds us, shows that we are not out of the woods yet. The country gains as a whole when electoral reform is effective, but so does the Democratic Party, given the type of voters that tend to be disenfranchised by a poorly-running system.

2.  Support and Promote Unions. Union household voters have been a consistently strong constituency for Democrats and the 2004 election was no exception. These voters supported Kerry by 59-40. Moreover, they made up an impressive 24 percent of the voting pool.

A careful look at data from different sources suggests that this latter figure has remained fairly stable for the last couple of decades. Given that union density has been declining, simply keeping the proportion of union household voters at around a quarter of the electorate must be reckoned a significant accomplishment.

However, there is clearly little potential here for growth of the union vote, since it is already so highly mobilized. But if union density starts to rise again, then increases in the union vote might indeed be possible. That is one among many reasons why, as Harold Meyerson argues, Democrats should strongly support labor law reform, including especially the Employees' Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to join unions without fear of being fired.

3.  Catch the Demographic Wave. John Wilhelm rightly stresses the centrality of maintaining strong Democratic support among the burgeoning Hispanic population. Only 2 percent of voters in early 1990's, they are now somewhere in the 6-8 percent range and within ten years may be approaching blacks as a proportion of actual voters.

But Hispanics have famously been more volatile than blacks in their support for Democrats. In the 2004 election, it was initially reported that they gave Bush 44 percent of their vote. However, that initial exit poll figure is now widely acknowledged to have been flawed and the generally accepted estimate is that Kerry carried Hispanics by a 58-40 margin. Still, that represents a significant improvement of 5 points in Bush's support among Hispanics over 2000 and a substantial compression of the Democratic margin among this group.

However, it is worth noting that, if you compare the two Bush elections of 2000 and 2004 to the two Reagan elections of 1980 and 1984, the average level of Hispanic support for the Democrats in the Bush elections has actually been slightly higher than in the Reagan elections. And in the next election following Reagan's relatively good performances among Hispanics - 1988-the Hispanic presidential vote moved sharply Democratic, to 69-30.

The potential for such a surge is well-illustrated by the most recent national poll of Hispanics, conducted by the Latino Coalition, a conservative group close to the GOP. In this poll, Democrats have a stunning 61 percent to 21 percent lead over the GOP among Hispanic registered voters, which translates into a 50-point lead (75 percent to 25 percent) among those who express a preference. By way of comparison to the last two off-year elections, 2002 and 1998, Democrats carried the Congressional vote among Hispanics by 24 and 26 points, respectively.

The new poll also finds Democrats with a 35-point lead (58 percent to 23 percent) in party identification among voters. Also among voters, Democrats have huge leads over Republicans as the party better able to handle a wide variety of issues: being in touch with the Hispanic community (+41 points); providing affordable health care (+40); improving the economy (+31); improving education (+30); and representing your views on immigration (+29). The one exception to this pattern is on "keeping America safe and fighting terrorism," where the parties are dead-even. And even here, this tie is a sharp decline from Bush's 13- 14 point lead over Kerry on this issue before and during the 2004 election.

These are promising data. And it seems likely that the current battles over immigration are only serving to alienate Latinos even further from the Republican Party. But, as Wilhelm emphasizes, nothing should be taken for granted. Democrats should and must work hard to convert this potential support into actual support.

4.  Get Back to Competence and Reforming Government. As Elaine Kamarck puts it, it's time to give competence another try and make Democrats the party of "government that works". Will Marshall and Bob Borosage also stress the need to identify Democrats with the cause of political reform. This does not seem arguable at this point, given the performance of the Bush administration and the distaste with which voters now regard it. Voters are looking for change and Democrats must provide it.

Over the longer term, the ability of Democrats to promote the kind of programs they believe in, even if they are electorally successful, very much depends on building the belief among voters that government can, in fact, be competent and work well. Otherwise, voters will fear that, even with the best intentions, Democrats will wind up wasting their money.

5.  Change the Map. As Jerome Armstrong argues, Democrats must jettison the battleground state mentality and replace it with a "mapchanger attitude", where Democrats look beyond the most immediately competitive states and districts and seek to run Democrats - and build the party - everywhere. That will, over time, put more and more of the country in play and allow for the building of substantial Democratic majorities, rather than razor-thin victories based on swinging a few battleground states. Such an approach, Armstrong further argues, necessitates a break with the business as usual attitude of the party establishment, where the allocation of party resources to the same old consultants running the same old races in the same old states continues despite the obvious failure of such a strategy in recent election cycles.

Will Marshall also argues for changing the map by, as he puts it, "raiding the red zone" - the South, Mountain West, Great Plains and lower Midwest. In his view, that translates into going after persuadable voters throughout the country, rather than being satisfied with mobilizing the Democratic base, which tends to be concentrated in the blue zone.

6.  Go After Moderate and Independent Voters. As Marshall stresses, there is no way a serious majority Democratic coalition can be built in this country without substantially improved performance among moderate and independent voters. For example, Kerry won independent voters by a point and moderate voters by 9 points. That obviously wasn't enough. A serious Democratic majority - barring radical changes in turnout by partisanship and/or ideology - needs a 5-10 point margin among independents and a 15-25 point margin among moderates. The mathematical underpinnings of this point do not seem particularly debatable, even if the methodology for reaching such voters is.

7.  Give Voters Clear and Big Choices. Several contributors, including Borosage, Marshall, and particularly Baer/Cherny, stress the need for Democrats to pose clear, big choices to voters and to know what they stand for. As Baer/Cherny put it, Democrats need to go beyond their focus on swing voters to develop the "swing ideas" that can remake the American political landscape and move a majority of voters into the Democratic camp.

Baer and Cherny note that Democrats need a coherent public philosophy to underpin the development of swing ideas and an infrastructure committed to the development of such ideas. A focus on the short-term and the elusive quality of "electability" - still a party obsession - will undercut the long-term project of majority-building.

I think these seven goals should meet with broad agreement within the Democratic Party. Of course, there's plenty of disagreement about how to pursue these seven goals, but surely that's an improvement over trying to read the faction you don't like out of the party.

The Challenges

This "new synthesis" is a good start. But how can it be deepened to provide a strategic framework capable of powering a new Democratic majority? To my mind, this involves addressing challenges that have arisen in three big areas. In each case, Democrats need to adapt to big changes that have profoundly altered the terrain on which the party operates. And, in each case, Democrats need to avoid twin temptations. One is to focus on inoculating themselves against public doubts that have emerged about the Democrats in that area. The other is to rely on mobilizing the faithful by sounding traditional Democratic themes in that area. Neither, in this era of rapid change, is likely to work.

The Economic Challenge

Harold Meyerson well captures the nature of this challenge. Globalization and technological change really have undercut the basis for broadly-shared and fairly rapidly advancing prosperity. Prosperity is now not so broadly shared, advances far less rapidly for most and is fraught with considerably more uncertainty - from trying to find and keep "good" jobs to coping with health care, retirement and education expenses.

It's a different economic world out there and, so far, as Meyerson reminds us, "there's not a political tendency on the planet that has much in the way of plausible notions as to how to preserve mass prosperity in the advanced economies in the face of the new global realities". Certainly, Democrats have some reasonable ideas - fundamental health care reform and energy independence, for starters - but it that really enough? Probably not, and that's where our thinking needs to start.

The Foreign Policy Challenge

On September 11, 2001, Americans were forced to confront, in the most unpleasant possible way, new global realities that pose new threats to America's national security and call for a new international order to confront those threats. The Bush administration's approach to these threats has proven ineffective and Americans are looking for an alternative. But Democrats have yet to coalesce around a clear alternative approach and, until they do, voters will have difficulty coalescing around the Democratic Party. In this area, voters definitely want to know what they're buying.

The Cultural Challenge

Social change is making our society more diverse both racially and in terms of family structure, more gender-equal, more tolerant of homosexuality, more secular and much more. Modernity is here and Democrats are its party. That's not likely to change anytime soon.

But social change has its dark side as well and Democrats have done a poor job explaining to voters what they propose to do to protect and stabilize family life and promote strong communities as social change proceeds. This issue cannot be elided if Democrats hope to win an adequate number of more tradition-minded voters - especially white working class voters - to their side.

Meeting these challenges will, I suspect, depend importantly on goal 7 above: "Give voters clear and big choices", especially on the need to articulate a clear public philosophy. From that, answers to the three challenges may flow. My nomination for a public philosophy, explained in my paper with John Halpin "The Politics of Definition" and in Michael Tomasky's "A Party in Search of a Notion", is a focus on the common good. And in my paper with Halpin, we do make a beginning attempt to use the common good framework to formulate responses to all three of these challenges. I refer you to the paper for details.

The debate on this and other nominations for the Democrats' road forward has already begun. May the debate continue and deepen. That's what this magazine is all about.

Ruy Teixeira is a joint fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation. He is the author of five books - including The Emerging Democratic Majority (with John Judis) - and over 100 articles - including the recent series, "The Politics of Definition", with John Halpin.