The Democrats Have Met the Enemy

And, unfortunately, it's them

If you have an opinion journalism diet that is anything like mine, you’ve probably seen a lot of pieces over the past several months debating what the Democratic Party needs to do to broaden its appeal, particularly in order to win races for the Senate in states where the party is currently not competitive. I’ve written repeatedly about the subject myself, going all the way back to the beginning of this Substack. In one corner are those who think Democrats need to develop a more forceful and coherent economic message that speaks to the interests of non-college-educated voters; in another corner are those who think Democrats need to move right on a host of cultural issues (crime and policing, immigration, gender ideology) in order to be seen as more in-tune with the values of non-college-educated voters; and a third group thinks Democrats need to do both. Timothy Shenk did a top-notch job articulating the “both” thesis in The New York Times earlier this week.

It’s a fundamentally straightforward debate, albeit with a variety of interesting nuances. If Democrats should moderate on cultural issues, for example, does that include trying to build a big tent on abortion, or should they enforce a uniformly liberal message on one of the few cultural issues that increasingly cuts their way? On immigration, is there a “pro-enforcement, pro-immigration” middle ground to be seized and run on, or should the goal simply be to diffuse the issue in order to change the subject? If Democrats need to focus on a winning economic message, how, if at all, should they talk about climate change given that any compelling economic agenda is going to have to aim for lower energy prices? And should the broader economic agenda be entirely consumer-welfare-focused (bring down prices and expand the safety net), or should it also focus on aggressive pursuit of antitrust, or expanding unionization and workplace democracy, or building a national industrial policy—all of which potentially conflict with each other and any of which would implicitly prioritize other economic goals over consumer welfare at least some of the time?

But while this debate is happening, certainly among commentators and to some extent among elected officials, it isn’t the knock-down drag-out fight that it ought to be given how dire the situation is. The reason, I think, is that there’s an elephant in the room that the whole debate aims to ignore. That elephant is the disconnect between what Democrats are telling each other they need to do and who Democrats actually are.

Consider this Yascha Mounk piece from Persuasion about how Democrats are lying to themselves about why the party is in such trouble. Mounk has a different perspective from Shenk; he thinks the Democrats need to adopt a principled moderate position on both cultural and economic matters, arguing that American politics still has a sensible center waiting to be seized and that moderating would enable Democrats to seize it. What stands in the way of the Democrats seizing it? Only that the people who fund, staff and lead the party are all out of touch with what ordinary Americans believe and want. That, in itself, is kind of an extraordinary admission—if you take away the donors, the staff and the leadership, who’s left to reform the party? Mounk’s answer, presumably, would be: the voters. Which voters, though?

Take a look at this famous scatter plot of the 2016 electorate:

The chart is usually used to demonstrate that most swing voters are left of center on economic issues and right of center on cultural issues, and that therefore this is where both parties should be hunting for a majority. Some also point out that the Republican electorate is more centrist on economic issues than their historic positioning would have suggested, something Donald Trump capitalized on in his first primary campaign when he promised to protect Medicare and Social Security from Paul Ryan-style cuts. It’s also reasonable to question the precise location of the center; maybe the economic “center” on that chart should be re-normed a couple of clicks to the left, sp that Republicans would more clearly occupy the upper-right quadrant and there would be more room to differentiate between the views of voters currently hugging the leftmost edge on economic questions.

But the most important thing to note about the chart, from the perspective of hypothesizing a shift in Democratic positioning, is that Democrats are very heavily clustered in the lower left corner, while Republicans are not similarly clustered in the upper right. Indeed, even if you moved the center of the chart to the left such that Republicans would appear more economically right-wing, it would still be true that the center of the cloud of Republican voters is closer to most swing voters than the center of the cloud of Democratic voters is. That asymmetry matters—a lot.

Matt Yglesias linked to that chart in a series of posts aiming to demonstrate, mathematically, how moderation of any kind, on either culture or economics, would increase the number of voters accessible to Democrats. Draw a line, and the more people you put on your side of it, the better your chances of winning—it’s simple arithmetic. But how, precisely, do you get people on your side of the line? Yglesias shouldn’t be drawing straight lines at all. He should be drawing circles. If you drew concentric circles around both the Democratic and Republican “cores,” which circle would have to be bigger to reach an electoral majority? The answer, clearly, is that the Democrats’ circle would have to be bigger. To capture the swing voters they need, then, Democrats have to reach further from their own center than Republicans do.

Even this understates the problem, though, because the core Democrats on that scatter plot are more densely packed while the Republican core is more diffuse. That means that, at least in 2016, like-minded liberal Democrats formed a larger and more cohesive bloc within the Democratic Party than any Republican equivalent group. The Democrats needed a larger circle to reach an electoral majority (particularly when you are talking about a Senate majority that skews considerably to the right of the country), but liberals needed a smaller circle to encompass a dominant faction within the party than their equivalent on the Republican side did. And while swing voters were situated relatively further from the Democratic center than from the Republican center, the disparity was even greater if you compare the relative distance from the edge of that majority core. That is the fundamental asymmetry between the parties: even if you ignore the big-dollar funders and the small-dollar donors and the activist “groups” and the consensus-minded electeds, the bulk of Democratic voters are further away from swing voters in their views than Republican voters are.

The data in question is obviously quite old; it would be very useful to see more up-to-date data from 2024 charted similarly. But I don’t think anyone should expect it to show that the Democratic base is more diverse, ideologically-speaking, than it was in 2016, or that liberals are less dominant than they were then, or that the Democratic center is closer now to people in the upper left quadrant than it was then. Of course, advocates of moderation—on culture, economics or both—have their data claiming that actual Democratic voters are more moderate than people think, and that they are eager to moderate to win. This poll from Third Way (which Yglesias recently touted), is a good example—but I’m not sure it proves what the pollsters claim it does.

According to that poll, the majority of Democrats are either liberal or further left (40% liberal, 11% progressive, 5% socialist, vs. 33% moderate and 5% conservative). A large minority in the party—far larger than the progressive and socialist segments—believes things like “billionaires shouldn’t exist” (36%) and “capitalism has failed” (39%). Majorities or near-majorities favor left-wing priorities like Medicare for All (52%), a Green New Deal (47%) and canceling student debt and making college free (50%). Are the swing voters in the upper left quadrant that far left on economic issues? The moderate lane on cultural issues, meanwhile, favors deporting convicted criminals and a path to citizenship for everyone else over decriminalizing the border and abolishing ICE, and favors hiring more cops over abolishing the police. That may look like moderation relative to where the left wing of the Democratic Party is. But does it look moderate to the folks in that upper-left quadrant—the ones who are right of center on cultural issues and left of center on economic issues—that Democrats need to win over?

I believe Democrats when they say they want to win, and are very prepared to support someone they consider moderate over someone who is a down-the-line progressive in order to do so. I believe them when they say they prefer compromise to failure. I’m just not convinced they know what that really looks like in practice, that it means moving the center of the party away from, well, the center of the party.

I’ve argued at times in the past that what Democrats may need is something like the treatment that the GOP got in 2015: a takeover by an outsider who, by running against the party establishment and winning, opens up space for a radical reshaping and rebranding of the party. The party seems primed for such a takeover; Democrats now hate their leadership as much as Republicans hated theirs in 2014. But Trump’s original win revealed the ways in which the GOP was out of step not only with the voting public at large but with its own voters. What if that isn’t true of Democrats? What if their primary beef with their leadership is just that they keep losing, but they want new leadership to win running mostly the same plays? In that case, what is an outsider going to come in and do, exactly? Convince that core that they need to believe different things than they actually do?

Maybe they could. Megan McArdle describes the “preference cascade” in public opinion against participation by transgender individuals in women’s sports as people realized that their opposition didn’t make them a beleaguered minority that had to keep their opinions to themselves so as not to be called bigots but were, in fact, the overwhelming majority. Maybe the same thing is true about a host of opinions that define that lower-left corner, and a sufficiently determined and charismatic conqueror could trigger a real sea-change not only in perceptions of the party, but in what its own members believe.

I doubt it, though. The transformation of working-class center-left parties into middle-class Brahmin-liberal parties dominated by educated professionals is a global phenomenon, reflecting real demographic and economic changes. The evolution of the Democratic Party is part of that phenomenon. And those changes have made those parties less electorally competitive around the world. You can buck that trend—Australia’s Labor Party has, Denmark’s Social Democrats have, Mexico’s Morena has, Brazil’s Workers Party has—but as Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer have demonstrated, neither left-wing radicalism nor moderation has always been enough to buck it. To buck it decisively, the Democrats may have to question something deeper than what they stand for or run on. They may have to question who they are.