Former proponents of an emerging Democratic majority now have doubts and are calling on Democrats to repent and change their ways. Will they listen?
Former proponents of an emerging Democratic majority now have doubts.
A rising chorus of voices within the Democratic Party is beginning to warn in earnest that Democrats face a real risk of losing ground with crucial voters over the next several years. This goes beyond the usual concern of a presidential party about impending midterms or worries about the dysfunction of the Biden administration and the Democratic caucus. Nor is it just left-leaning commentators’ customary paranoia (real or feigned) about Republicans’ finding illegitimate ways to subvert the will of the supposed permanent Democratic majority.
The doomsayers are, instead, warning that Democrats are in the process of losing voters that they cannot afford to lose, and that the people running the party are too out of touch with those voters to even see what the problem is. Two of the leading voices ringing alarm bells from within the commentariat are Ruy Teixeira and David Shor. They are not longtime contrarians; quite the opposite.
The Emerging Democratic Minority?
Ruy Teixeira is the co-author, with John Judis, of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. He is probably more responsible than anyone for the rise of smug Democratic projections that demography would sweep them into power and consign Republicans to the dustbin of history.
The trends that Teixeira and Judis spotted — the rising share of non-white voters, the left-leaning trend of college-educated white voters, especially in knowledge-economy jobs — were real enough, and the original book was more nuanced in how it presented them. But, as often happens when ideas escape from books into the political bloodstream, even the authors themselves got carried away. Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 ushered in a torrent of commentary about how Democratic hegemony was the wave of the future. In 2013, at the peak of that mania, Teixeira himself could be found pouring misplaced sneering scorn on Sean Trende’s “Missing White Voters” thesis, which was massively validated by the 2016 election.
In 2008, in an election amidst a financial crisis, Obama had long enough coattails to briefly give Democrats a 60–40 edge in the Senate. In 2012 Obama lost all sorts of groups that were previously regarded as the center of the electorate — voters over 30, independents, suburbanites, white women, white Catholics — but still swept to victory. It seemed that even when Republicans won the persuasion game with crucial swing-voter blocs, they would still get buried alive by the turnout of the dominant and rising Democratic coalition. There was even a spate of articles written in the Obama years on how the Midwest was a “blue wall” that gave Democrats an insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College, a theme that became such conventional wisdom that Nate Silver wrote a column in 2015 aimed at debunking it.
Belief in an emerging demographic hegemony for Democrats turned out to be terribly toxic for our politics. It drove the growing certitude of Democrats — especially their media, academic, and entertainment-industry wings, but also infecting their political class — that Republican voters had no concerns they needed treat as legitimate. As Republicans revived in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and the 2016 election, the resulting cognitive dissonance fed the Democratic theme that those election victories were also all illegitimate — it was collusion and hacking by Russians, you see, or voter suppression, or gerrymandering. Midterm elections are bad! The Electoral College is bad! The Senate is bad! Heads we won, tails the system is rigged and you cheated. On the Republican side, demography-is-destiny rhetoric fed paranoia about immigration and demographic change as well as darker fears that maybe those lopsided Democratic margins in historically corrupt cities were themselves the product of ballot-box stuffing.
The paranoiacs on both sides ignored the basic reality that the American two-party system is cyclical: Every coalition generates its own opposition, which eventually gains support from people alienated enough to abandon the winning party. This is especially pronounced after two-term presidencies.
Believers in Obama-era Democratic triumphalism also missed two important demographic realities. First, the Obama coalition still depended on a significant share of white voters without college degrees, especially in the Midwest/Rust Belt states of the “blue wall.” Obama may have been culturally out of sync with those voters, but he appealed to them with the rhetoric of anti-trade economic nationalism and anti–Wall Street economic populism. For a while they believed it.
Second, the keystone of the theory was the growth of the non-white vote. But black Americans, the most loyal Democratic voters, are not significantly growing as a share of the population. Obama was able to raise their share of the electorate by registration and turnout, and to a large extent, the change is permanent. But the main driver of the declining white-voter share of the electorate over the past 20 years, and projected over the next decade or so, is the booming Hispanic population. Too many people assumed that Hispanics would follow the voting patterns of black Americans — hence the common talk of “brown voters” or “people of color” that sought to fuse the disparate groups of black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American voters into a single anti-white bloc.
In fact, there were reasons all along — Trende, again, was projecting this stuff nearly a decade ago — to suspect that the experience of many Hispanic ethnic groups in America might be more similar to that of Irish and Italian immigrants, who provided the backbone of past Democratic coalitions when they were first- and second-generation outsiders, but who have become generally submerged into the political identity of white voters as they became more assimilated. That process has been a common American story, and if black Americans have often stood outside it, it is because of a distinct history not shared with immigrant groups.
Today, Teixeira’s triumphalism has turned to alarm. As he wrote in his Substack newsletter in late September:
There Just Aren’t Enough College-Educated Voters!
You Can Ignore the Working Class If You Like, But That Would Be Very, Very Unwise
The fact remains that noncollege voters far outnumber college voters. In the 2020 Catalist data, the tally was 63 percent noncollege/37 percent college. That means that any given shift among noncollege voters is significantly more consequential than a similarly-sized shift among college voters. This situation will continue for many election cycles, as the noncollege voter share is likely to decline only gradually. . . . Democratic complacency is [based on] the firm belief that Democrats’ working class problem is solely confined to whites and that white working class voters are so racist/reactionary that it is a badge of honor to ignore them. This is highly questionable as a matter of political strategy and arithmetic, given that they are 44 percent of voters and a lot more than that in key swing states and districts.
It gets worse, Teixeira writes, because the Democrats’ problem with non-college voters is not just confined to those icky white voters:
The perception that nonwhite working class voters are a lock for the Democrats is no longer tenable. In the 2020 election, working class nonwhites moved sharply toward Trump by 12 margin points, despite Democratic messaging that focused relentlessly on Trump’s animus toward nonwhites. According to Pew, Trump actually got 41 percent of the Hispanic working class vote in [2020]. Since 2012, running against Trump twice, Democrats have lost 18 points off of their margin among nonwhite working class voters . . . if both segments of the working class move in tandem against the Democrats, that will be a big, big problem that gains among college voters — even if they continue — may not solve.
Teixeira points the finger at the people who influence and run Democratic campaigns:
Liberal college graduates, especially liberal white college graduates, have gained a sort of hegemony in the nation’s elite media, foundations and NGOs, in academic and cultural institutions and in the staffing of the Democratic party’s infrastructure. This hegemony sets the tone for the Democratic party’s commitments and rhetoric on sociocultural issues.
But college graduates as a whole are not that liberal. For example, according to the 2020 exit poll, just one-quarter of white college graduates identified as liberal compared to 38 percent moderate and 37 percent conservative. It is likely that a good chunk of Democrats’ gains among this group in 2020 stemmed from distaste for Trump rather than underlying liberalism. As I have previously noted, the cultural left puts a ceiling on Democratic party support and it is possible that may apply as well to Democrats’ ability to keep growing support among college graduates.
Teixeira followed this up with a clarion warning about Hispanic voters in particular:
According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points. Moreover, Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Nevada (16 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points). . . . Biden carried Hispanic college voters by a whopping 39 points (69-30) compared to just 14 points (55-41) among the Hispanic working class. . . . Hispanic Trump voters were 81 percent working class and just 19 percent college-educated.
Why is this? Teixeira has some ideas, and they are exactly the sort of message that progressives are allergic to delivering, and that Joe Biden used to be more comfortable saying:
An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. In the VSG data, these voters agreed, by 9 points, that racial minorities have mostly fair opportunities to advance in America, by 11 points agreed that America is a fair society where everyone has a chance to get ahead and by 20 points agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”
They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.
As Teixeira concludes, “It is probable that Democrats will continue to have problems with this voter group until they base their appeals to this group on what these voters care about the most rather than what Democrats believe they should care about.”
Not So Shor
For David Shor, getting canceled inspired him to raise the alarm. As Ezra Klein tells it in a surprisingly sympathetic if somewhat incredulous New York Times profile (interviews have always been Klein’s strongest suit), Shor, by the age of 20, had a prime role running election models for the vaunted 2012 Obama campaign. He was a true believer, he was astonishingly accurate, and he understood at a granular level who voted for Obama that year.
In 2020 Shor was working for a Democratic data firm when he committed heresy: He pointed out in a tweet that historical precedent suggested that the George Floyd riots were not likely to be popular: “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” This was data analysis at its most clinical and dispassionate, but the angry online Left did not want to hear it, and they got Shor fired. As Klein observes:
For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.
The projections, for Democrats, are grisly:
Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing. We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.” In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate. But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. . . . If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.
Ezra Klein being Ezra Klein, he takes this largely as a lesson in how the Senate is a bad thing, but even Klein has to suspend his customary blind faith in the outputs of models in order to question Shor’s black box. And he acknowledges that some of Obama’s success was unique to Obama and unrepeatable. But the real driver of Klein’s takeaway from Shor’s message is similar to Teixeira’s:
[E]ducational polarization has risen sharply in recent years, particularly among white voters. Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend. There was a time when Democrats told themselves that this was a byproduct of becoming a more diverse party, as non-college white voters tend to be more racially reactionary. Then, in 2020, Democrats lost ground among Black and Latino voters, with the sharpest drops coming among non-college voters. . . . [E]ducational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how it’s formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss. A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.
Shor, like Teixeira, points the finger directly at the sorts of people who staff Democratic campaigns these days:
Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
Shor, like Teixeira, warns about woke obsessions driving away working-class Hispanics, a warning that Klein chokes on:
EquisLabs produced a huge study of Latinos in the 2020 elections, conducting over 40,000 interviews with voters across 12 states. It found that Democratic policies did alienate working-class voters but that it wasn’t “defund the police” that did it. “For many who had jobs, there was a calculation to not rock the boat, a fear Biden would come in and shut down the economy,” Carlos Odio, EquisLabs’ senior vice president, told me. “That’s the baseline shift.” EquisLabs’ research found support for other theories, too, including that some Latino voters worried that Democrats would be too soft on border security and that others feared socialism. . . . [Shor] pointed to a regression analysis by Alexander Agadjanian, a political science Ph.D. student, that used public data to show that pro-police views were unusually potent in increasing the probability that a voter would switch to Trump, though somewhat less so for Latinos than for white voters.
Shor’s prescription, enormously controversial with progressives who don’t want to hear it, is something he calls “popularism,” which is basically a Bill Clinton–style effort to find smaller and incremental policies that poll well, rather than the sorts of dramatic remake-the-country programs that appeal to the Elizabeth Warren–supporting pundits of the world, while changing the subject away from things that those pundits most love to discuss:
Hillary Clinton “lost because she raised the salience of immigration, when lots of voters in the Midwest disagreed with us on immigration,” Shor said. This is where popularism poses its most bitter choices: He and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration. He often brandishes a table showing that among voters who supported universal health care but opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, 60 percent voted for Obama in 2012 but 41 percent voted for Clinton in 2016. That difference, he noted, was more than enough to cost her the election.
Of course, Ezra Klein sees it as a “bitter choice” to stop talking so much about race.
The counter-theory to all this is that elections are won on base turnout, not persuasion. But even if you believe that, it still matters if people who used to be your base leave it. And the doomsayers have a stronger case in midterm elections; as CNN’s elections analyst Harry Enten details, there are fairly extensive data suggesting that moderate left-of-center voters are more likely to stay home in midterms than voters who are ideological progressives.
The warning signs are there, and the prophets of doom are calling on Democrats to repent and change their ways. Will they listen?