Jake Auchincloss

This should be a season of electoral hope for Democrats. Donald Trump’s disapproval ratings are reaching new highs. The war with Iran is overwhelmingly unpopular. As of early May, Polymarket gives the party a 51 percent chance of winning the Senate and an 83 percent chance of taking the House.

But Americans still harbor deep doubts about Democrats: A recent Pew survey shows only 39 percent have a favorable view of the party, against 59 percent who don’t. And Democrats are deeply divided about whether to steer centerward or move further left.

Jake Auchincloss — it’s pronounced AW-kin-kloss — is one of the most thoughtful voices in this conversation. The 38-year-old Harvard and M.I.T. graduate and Afghan war veteran, where he served as a Marine officer, is now in his third term as the representative from Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District, which stretches from the wealthy Boston suburb of Newton to the working-class city of Fall River.

Politically, he’s often described as moderate, even somewhat right-leaning when it comes to fraught issues like Israel. But as he made clear over two in-depth interviews with me, his thinking is not neatly categorizable on a simple centrist-to-progressive x-axis.

Auchincloss is also the inaugural chair of Majority Democrats, an ideas shop and political action committee whose guiding conviction is that it is not sufficient for the Democratic Party to be anti-Trump, much as that may help its candidates in the midterms. It also must be a party that reaches beyond its core — and often highly ideological — constituencies.

Among Majority Democrats’ founding members are Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia; Mikie Sherrill, the governor of New Jersey; Ruben Gallego, the senator from Arizona; and Elissa Slotkin, the senator from Michigan.

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