Dems turn left, and voters off
As the Democratic Party has embraced an increasingly progressive platform, more and more voters are jumping off. Have the Dems lost their way, again?
Back in 2008, comedian Chris Rock joked that George Bush had screwed up so badly he made it possible for even a black man to become president. We might rewrite the joke in 2024 that Democrats screwed up so badly they made it possible for even Donald Trump to be president, again.
“In private meetings and at public events,” write New York Times reporters Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein, “elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.”
While “elected Democrats” might have no “shared understanding of why they lost the election,” it appears the voters do. Approval ratings for the Democratic Party are at an all time low say some pollsters. Long-time Democratic voters, including union members, are abandoning the party, and Democrats are fighting amongst themselves to apportion blame and shape the party’s post-Biden-Trump future.
According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, only “31 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, while 57 percent have an unfavorable opinion.” This, says Quinnipiac, “is the highest percentage of voters having an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party since the Quinnipiac University Poll began asking this question.”
It’s certainly no surprise that 90% of Republicans hold a unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. What is surprising is that nearly 8 out of 10 independent voters do as well. That should be cause for concern—panic even—among Democrats. But why do so many voters, especially independents, have such an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party?
It’s probably because voters believe Democrats are focusing on the wrong issues. “Many Americans,” says a New York Times poll, “say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.”
When the Times asked Americans to identify the issues they think are most important to the Democratic Party, they most often mentioned abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change. But when asked to name the issues most important to them, they cited the economy, inflation, health care and immigration. “The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years,” the Times notes, “ranked much lower.” You can see the disconnect, though apparently many Democratic office-seekers and consultants did not.
During the recent campaign—especially the Harris campaign—many Democrats strove, obsessively, to portray Trump as a fascist and as an existential threat to democracy, while ignoring other issues, like the economy and immigration. It was the cornerstone of their campaign, though even among Democrat voters this was barely a top five concern. It didn't crack the top 10 for independents, who Dems needed to woo if they were to win.
“Democrats,” wrote Democratic consultant James Carville in a New York Times guest essay, “have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain, or else caring too much about other things instead.”
Maybe it’s time, demographer and liberal political commentator Ruy Teixeira argues, that the Democratic party begins to retreat from modern progressivism’s nearly exclusive focus on culture issues. “Conspicuously missing,” complains Teixeira in a post published on the blog The Liberal Patriot, is “any hint Democrats might need to actually change their position on any ‘culture war’ issue. Instead, the strategy is to change the subject immediately.”
A revealing, and troubling for Democrats, example of this is an election post-mortem given by four of Kamala Harris’ top campaign advisors—Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter—on the left leaning podcast “Pod Save America.”
Over a meandering hour and a half interview there were several recurring themes. The campaign didn’t have enough time to fully and properly define Harris. Harris was entangled with an unpopular President and was unwilling to distance herself from him. Oh, and of course, blame the voters. “There was a lot of Trump-nesia out there,” according to Stephanie Cutter, “People didn’t remember the four years of the Trump administration that badly.” It was a master class in gaslighting.
Newton’s Third Law states that for each action, there is an equal, or opposite, reaction. And what’s true in physics is often true in politics as well. As the Democratic Party has shifted further left, they have pushed many voters to the right.
Since Obama’s last election in 2012, voters across much of the nation have been drifting towards the political right. This is especially true for states in the eastern half of the United States, many of which had been part of the Democrats “blue wall.” Turns out the wall has come tumbling down.
Take a look at the graphics below. Almost every state east of the eastern border of state boundaries running from North Dakota all the way down to Texas, with the exceptions of Georgia, Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts, have shifted rightwards since 2012. That’s 26 of 30 states.
While traditionally deep blue states like New York, or California, haven’t gone red—they are becoming less blue. In New York, for example—a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1—the current Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, barely squeaked by in 2022. In 2024 Kamala Harris garnered only 54% of the vote, compared to Obama’s 66% in 2012.
Despite numerous warning signs, national Democrats don’t seem to be paying attention. Only last week, in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s disappointing showing (to Democrats, at least) in this year’s presidential and congressional elections, national Democrats met to elect new leaders and to start plotting the party’s future direction.
Ken Martin, the head of Minnesota’s Democratic Party, and a protege of Minnesota’s Governor (and most recently the Democrat’s Vice-Presidential candidate), Tim Walz, was elected as the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) new leader. Despite the party’s losing the presidency, the Senate, and failing to turn the House, Martin has argued that Democrats did not need to change their message to voters. “Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” he is quoted as saying. “We got the right message.” Apparently he hasn’t been getting the message—at least not the one the voters were sending.
If you’ve seen the Geico commercial spoofing horror movies and the poor decision-making of victims, it’s a “let’s hide behind the chainsaws” moment.
If that weren’t enough, national Democrats doubled down, electing the 24 year old Parkland shooting survivor and gun violence activist David Hogg as their Vice-Chair. Hogg has, among other things, called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), defunding the police, and has described the NRA as a “terrorist organization.”
But it’s more than messaging that needs to change if Democrats are going to stop hemorrhaging voters, especially left and center-leaning independents. About one-third of the national electorate describes themselves as “independents.” You can’t win a national election without doing at least one of two things—or both. You need to get more of your core party voters to vote, and you need to outperform the other party with independent voters. Democrats failed at both this past election, paving the way for Trump, the Sequel.
Some prominent Democrats are pushing back. “We need deep changes and hard conversations, not nibbling around the margins,” Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat from New York, recently said.
Democrats have been here before. In 1989 the Democratic Party faced a similar reckoning. From 1968 to 1988 the Democratic candidate for President (Jimmy Carter in 1976) won only once in six tries. Much like today, Democrats were in disarray.
In a paper titled “The Politics of Evasion” that became the playbook for the party’s post-Reagan revival, William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote that “Too many Americans have come to see the [Democratic] party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security.” The party, they argued, had “embraced a politics of evasion…that ignored electoral reality and impeded needed change.”
That was 1989. In 2022, they issued a renewed, yet eerily similar, warning. “In recent years,” they wrote, “a substantial portion of the Democratic Party has convinced itself that Americans are ready for a political revolution that transforms every aspect of their lives. This assumption has crashed into a stubborn reality: Most Americans want evolutionary, not revolutionary, change.”
The party’s number one priority, they argued, must be to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump. “We fear that the Democratic Party is not positioning itself to fulfill this duty. Once again, it is in the grip of myths that block progress toward victory; it does not recognize the new realities that shape American politics; and it has barely begun to develop an agenda on cultural issues that a majority of Americans can support. This triple failure is what we call the new politics of evasion, the refusal to confront the unyielding arithmetic of electoral success.”
Too many Democrats have fooled themselves, they argue, that a progressive majority is emerging. “The progressive cultural agenda does not enjoy majority support and weakens Democrats’ electoral prospects whenever it is seen as the dominant force within the party,” they wrote.
So where do Democrats turn now? Will the Democratic establishment remain blind to the irony that in Donald Trump, the billionaire, they have created a working class hero? Will they continue to live in, as Galston and Kamarck claimed, a “cultural bubble” defined by education, income, and geography? Can the Democratic Party be saved from itself?
It’s one thing to claim the moral high ground, but another to give voters the impression, real or imagined, that you are looking down at them. “There’s none so blind,” goes the proverb, “as those who will not see.” So, I guess, we’ll just have to see.