There’s a difference between being moderate and being complacent, at least according to Rep. Josh Harder.
“We have to be the party that is the angriest at the status quo,” said Harder, who serves as a vice chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.
As one of just 13 House Democrats who won last fall in a district carried by Donald Trump, Harder believes average Americans voted for change and ended up with chaos. The answer isn’t just to return things back to normal, the Californian argued, but to say, “Here’s where the government falls short, and here’s how we need to fix it.”
He wants Democrats to follow him in focusing on the cost of living and other “kitchen table” issues, which for the San Joaquin Valley representative includes water management. And he hopes colleagues of retirement age will treat the polite descriptor a bit more literally. “We have folks in Congress who haven’t changed a diaper in decades, or in some cases it feels like centuries,” the father of two said, adding that some were slow to respond to the baby formula shortage in 2022.
Harder sat down with Roll Call recently to discuss all that, plus his hatred of nutria, love of punk and indifference to the most important meal of the day.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: Water is a huge issue in your district. How do you approach that in Congress when most members from the East Coast don’t have a dog in the fight, for example, but Californians do?
A: There’s an old line in California: Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting. We’ve had water wars in California for 180 years and counting, and my goal is to move away from a zero-sum mentality.
A lot of projects are stealing from Peter to pay Paul and don’t create a new gallon of water for anyone in the state. They just take it from districts like mine and ship it down south. We’re trying to move that focus toward projects like desalination, which San Diego has, but it needs to be cheaper and more extensive. We’ve got to move to better water storage, better groundwater recharge — in other words, projects that make more available water for everybody.
Q: This is your fourth term, but you’re still one of the younger members of Congress at 38. The median age in the House is 57. Should more of your older colleagues be thinking about retirement, especially since Democrats lost ground with Gen Z in the last election?
A: I think we need leadership that matches our voters and the people we actually represent, and all too often right now that doesn’t exist. We have folks in Congress who haven’t changed a diaper in decades, or in some cases it feels like centuries. I remember when there was a baby formula shortage during COVID, I felt that I was probably the first person on Capitol Hill to understand, because my wife needed baby formula and we went to five different grocery stores and couldn’t find it anywhere.
We still haven’t gotten to the root cause of that, which is trying to fix why the market is so concentrated for baby formula and other baby products in the U.S. So I’m very concerned that could happen again, but we made it a major priority in our office.
Q: You flipped your district from red to blue in 2018, and you’re now on the leadership team for the New Dems, as vice chair for member services. How do you respond to people who say Democrats, and moderates in particular, lack a vision for the nation, beyond not being Trump? That your anti-chaos message is just about preserving the status quo?
A: We have to be the party that is the angriest at the status quo. And I think where we might go wrong, looking at all the disruption we’ve seen over the last few months, is trying to point to Elon Musk and DOGE and saying, “Actually, everything was perfect a couple months ago.” That’s absolutely not true. That’s not how the voters feel, and that’s not how we as Democrats should approach things.
Every moment of successful leadership in our party over the last three decades has come from a place of saying, “Here’s where the government falls short, and here’s how we need to fix it.” That was how Bill Clinton ran, that was how Barack Obama ran: the party of change and the party of government reform.
Q: What does that look like at the moment?
A: We need to find a way to not just have knee-jerk opposition to all the bad things that this administration may be doing, but instead say, “Look, it’s taken us 15 years to replace a bridge in my district. We don’t have enough housing, and we’re not moving forward on the most important problem to most families, which is the cost of living. We have a government that is stagnant and isn’t moving fast enough to address the everyday needs of most Americans.” That’s the message.
Trump won my district. I won in a Trump seat, one of not many across the country to do that, because we prioritized those kitchen table issues, and we showed folks that anger at how the government was falling short for them.
A lot of my district is on Medi-Cal, so when you talk about taking $880 billion out of a program [like Medicaid] that is essential for their daily lives, it’s an existential threat. Going forward we have to make sure we are highlighting the issues that are most important to folks. That’s what we did in 2018, which is the year I came in, and we flipped about 40 seats across the country.
Q: Do you think 2026 will be another 2018?
A: Too early to say. It’s not automatic. Certainly, there’s a thermostatic shift because voters in this country are frustrated by what they’re seeing from both sides, and so they’re happy to vote for government reform and against whatever party happens to be in charge at the moment.
There’s an opportunity for us to regain that mantle in 2026, but if we want to have a more permanent success going forward, we need to think about the root causes of why people are so frustrated by their government in the first place.
Quick hits
Last book you read? “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Before that, “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant. I have two kids, so I think a lot about their potential.
Favorite thing displayed in your office? I have a picture of me in waders hunting nutria, an invasive species. There’s a lot of desk work in this job, so it’s fun to get outside and hunt some crazy swamp rats that are taking over our wetlands. It’s called the “Judas” nutria program, because you tag it and then it goes out and betrays its den.
Your least popular opinion? Skipping breakfast is good for you.
In politics, can the ends justify the means? You need to have some core principles and some guardrails that you’re never going to go across. But ultimately, we need to be more outcomes-driven.
One thing your friends know about you that your constituents don’t? My taste in music. A lot of ska and punk music that I grew up with is still really important to me. It’s certainly not what I play on the campaign trail, but if Green Day or The Offspring want to come out to Stockton, we’d welcome them anytime.
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