Member Newsletter
Because these thoughts are provisional and in process, I’ve decided to package them seriatim, as a list of ideas, possibilities, counters and so forth.
- One of the shortfalls of the recriminationfests that come after a big political defeat is that the people getting the most attention are usually those shouting loudest and making the most totalizing claims. But there are important caveats and qualifiers to keep in mind. One is that anything obvious, sure-fire and without real costs would have been tried already. There’s no silver-bullet solution. This is just common sense, perhaps even conventional wisdom. At worst, it can be used to stifle new thinking or taking new chances. That’s another important pitfall. But it’s still true.
- I’ve been arguing pretty strenuously against getting taken in by these Trump world claims of some overwhelming victory or mandate. Trump is now under 50% of the popular vote. The difference between being a few hundredths of a point over or under that threshold is from one vantage point arbitrary. But among other things, 50% is a statistical benchmark that anchors the larger reality: it can’t be a popular mandate if you didn’t even get most people to choose you. The same goes for winning by about 1.5 percentage points. Horseshoes and hand grenades and all that. But it’s relevant in two ways. First, all the brouhaha about overwhelming mandates is meant to demoralize an opposition. It’s a kind of con. But also, you don’t want to go into full baby-and-the-bath-water mode if you lose by a little over a single percentage point. And your coalition is hardly hopeless if you get between 48% and 49% of the vote in a bad year.
- There’s almost universal agreement that Democrats’ big challenge coming out of 2024 is rebuilding support among working class/non-college voters. But we need to remember that those lost voters have been almost (depends on how you interpret the data) made up with educated and more affluent suburbanites. So the question isn’t how you gain back non-college voters. It’s how you gain them back without losing those new suburbanites. Nothing works in a perfectly thermostatic fashion. But there is clearly a fairly direct relationship between these gains and losses. To the extent you’re just trading back and forth, what’s the point? What’s more, this is the Democrats’ current coalition and it got to be that way for a reason. Trying to make some dramatic, panicked shift is just as likely to fail in its aim and lose or demoralize existing voters.
- Which brings me to another topic. We’re big fans of Adam Jentleson, former top hill staffer and Democratic operative/activist. He got a lot of attention over the weekend for this Times column, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?,” which argues generally that Democrats need to stop allowing activist groups to lock them into positions which are out of step or even toxic to a majority of voters. In general, I agree with Adam’s argument, though there are some qualifiers I’ll address in another post. But it’s a different, subsidiary point he makes that resonated with me even more. He talked about “supermajority thinking.” He defines this as beginning with the thought exercise of how you would build not just a majority but a realigning supermajority. You then reason back from that goal to how you would get there. He notes that Trump’s effort to appeal to minority voters, or at least to cut into those constituencies, was an example of that. He obviously didn’t succeed in any game-changing or realigning way. But it’s an example.
On this point, Adam is 100% right. A political party does need to be thinking about and planning for, setting a goal of, a realigning majority. And you’re far more likely to get to a solid majority if that is the goal, albeit an elusive one. Which brings me to my real point. There’s a strong whiff in a lot of Democratic post-mortems that Democrats don’t so much need new leaders or strategies as new voters. There is something between contempt and indifference toward the voters Democrats currently have, the folks who even in a bad year got them just shy of 49% of the electorate. That attitude is not only unlovely but deeply self-defeating. It’s both naive and silly to think that parties can simply remake the demography of their coalition at will. It’s voters who choose parties in the main, not vice versa. But the reality is that college and non-college voters think, speak and live in the world in pretty different ways. - Democrats need to be able to communicate and engage non-college voters better than they do today. They need to be, in a word, bilingual. Not in the sense of literal languages — English, Spanish, Chinese — but bilingual in the political languages different parts of the electorate speak in. I use this metaphor because lots of the suggestions and strategies I’ve heard from Democrats in the last two weeks don’t take enough cognizance of the fact that the ways of talking and thinking politically that have non-college voters tuning out are in many cases precisely the ones that have more educated voters tuning in. So it’s really not as simple as “stop talking in the dumb bad way” or “stop being in the liberal bubble.” It’s not as simple as that. And in any case, that’s a sneering and denigrating way of talking about many current Democrats. But it takes some understanding that different groups think and speak in different ways, have different ways of approaching what is important to them about politics. To a great degree I think the failing for Democrats is to think they can speak in that single language and make up the difference with other communities just by supporting programs that are in those people’s interests — or what they perceive to be in their interests. But that’s never going to quite work.
- This is one of the reasons why I think a lot of the right/left discussions of what Democrats need to do misses the point. The biggest challenges don’t really fall on any kind of obvious left/right spectrum or, to put it more specifically, within any framework of moving to the left or the center. It’s more these things that are actually kind of complicated — engaging different portions of the electorate in different ways, finding some ways to meet both groups where they are, making sure those different ways aren’t too much of a channel conflict.
- There are clearly a lot of Democrats or non-conservatives who don’t like the fact that the modern Democratic Party is basically the party of the educated and those with more cosmopolitan or pluralistic thinking. They’d like it to be a working-class party. That’s a perfectly fine sentiment. Part of me may even agree with it. But it’s the wrong way to approach any election at any point in the conceivable future. Not because it’s wrong in itself but because it radically mistakes how parties operate and parties’ ability to swap one group of voters for another. It just doesn’t work that way. If you basically support the policies of the current Democratic Party more than that of the Trump Republican Party, these are the voters who are into that: the current coalition. Maybe you don’t agree with all the policies. And that’s fine. That’s changeable. And, as I’ve noted here, it’s critical to expand that coalition with the kind of supermajority thinking Jentleson advocates. But to think you can just change the demographic basis of a whole political party with some really clever strategy is a fantasy. And it’s a sure path to twiddling your thumbs or trolling on social media until the next election, in which you’ll also prove irrelevant.