Member Newsletter
For years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Tom Edsall, the one-time Washington Post reporter and author who now writes a weekly column about politics for the Times. The love/hate has a temporal dimension. When I was first getting interested in politics as a teen and young adult I was very taken with Edsall’s books. They were very smart and opened my thinking to new ways to approach political questions, particularly how to think about political economy. In recent years he almost always drives me to distraction. I can’t tell you whether he’s changed or I have or, more likely, we’re just no longer in sync. In the 21st century, Edsall seems always to approach big questions with the idea that regardless of the situation it must be a disaster for the Democratic Party.
In any case, I was reading his latest column, which ends up raising some interesting questions about the politics of liberalism and freedom, building off a column by Noah Smith. Edsall starts with a premise that I think is clearly true. Over the last fifteen years or so, many of the more active Democrats (“strong Democrats,” they’re called in this piece) have moved significantly to the left not only of the median voter but even of the median Democrat on issues tied to sexuality, immigration, race, etc. It’s worth noting that being to the left of the median voter doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And it goes without saying — though it remains curiously unsaid in these discussions — that the same is true of party activists on the right. Still, that can create electoral challenges that need to be managed. That’s what the whole Jentleson/Favreau conversation about “saying no” is about.
So far, so good.
Edsall starts from there and then proceeds to the usual structure of these columns which is to talk to and quote at length from various political scientists on the question at hand. By half way through the piece these folks have worked themselves up into such a lather about the party’s sharp move away from mainstream thinking, how it can break free of the grip of left-wing activists, how it may need a new Bill Clinton to do various “Sister Souljah moments,” that all hope seems to be lost. Not only is some decisive break necessary but, Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh chimes in to say, it may simply be hopeless and Democrats may simply lose forever because the grip of these people is so strong.
Another expert, from the activist group Third Way, which, name notwithstanding, has actually done a lot of good stuff during the Biden years, roundly declared that, “We already have plenty of data to conclude one thing: Voters of nearly every demographic and geography rejected what we had on offer.” What? This seems to be talking about a loss in which Democrats lost every demographic and regional group, which is not only absurd but factually incorrect. I think what she means is that Democrats lost ground with most definable subgroups. But these bouts of exuberant hyperbole are precisely how you get off track, how strong feelings spin up fictive realities.
Finally, Edsall brings in Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm that worked for the Harris campaign (and countless others) who finally notes the point that Democrats just lost a national election by about a point and a half, and outside of the presidential race actually did reasonably well. Clearly, Democrats need to do better, but Gourevitch makes the pretty obvious and I think salutary point that you need to consider pretty carefully which parts of your coalition you’re going to toss aside if you’re coalition is still around 50%. To quote Gourevitch …
The basic theory you are talking about — that the Democratic Party needs to move to the center on cultural issues and focus more on working-class economic issues in order to win back a more culturally conservative working class, which is mostly white though increasingly diverse. That theory is quite attractive, since it’s easy to look at the Democratic Party of the 1990s and the Democratic Party of today and see that is where the party lost votes.
But is the path forward the exact path we just came from? I am concerned about the parts of the Democratic coalition — which is still around 50 percent of the country — that we would have to throw under the bus to get there.
Thanks, Nick!
I mean, seriously, thank you! What the fuck?
I’m not crazy about the “throw under the bus” language because its very moralizing. And it’s not even the moral question, which is very real, that I’m most focused on here. I’m held up on the get-a-grip question.
I mean, perhaps it takes someone actually involved in politics rather than political science to make these really clear points. Political scientists, please don’t get on my case. I know there are a lot of really good ones. Maybe it’s just the ones Edsall seems to talk to. But this stuff really drives me nuts.
And it’s funny that it drives me nuts. Because I’m not a very ideological person. My default position is to want to get behind a series of popular positions and just run elections on that basis. Package the deliverables in really clear, easy-to-digest language. An election isn’t a wish list or a moral exercise. It’s an effort to get a majority of votes and get power. When “defund the police” language, if not actual policy positions, became the vogue in mid-2020, I was apoplectic. In my experience, no one outside of hyper-ideological spaces thinks like that. Most people even in the communities most victimized by police seldom want there to be no police. I don’t want to go too far off on this tangent. My point is that I should be a pretty receptive audience for a lot of this. But you just can’t be convincing talking straw men arguments or engaging in hyperbole.
My own sense of this is a bit different. We need to step back and think about the last decade as a whole. We’re coming off a decade of profound tumult. We could make the argument going back to 2001. But beginning in 2016, partly in response to the efflorescence of social democratic politics and then activism in response to Trumpism and then in reaction to the murder of George Floyd and the COVID pandemic generally you’ve had a series of genuinely transformative political moments that triggered whole waves of activism — some of it perhaps of an almost utopian character — and, in many cases, subsequent backlashes. Democrats have gotten caught up in some of that.
In many ways that’s what a lot of Harris’ 2019 positions were about. The irony was that most of those weren’t really her positions at all. If anything, her background in California politics, in law enforcement, was at least somewhat on the right of intra-Democratic politics. But she signed on to a lot of things, or flirted with them in her 2020 campaign. This was actually one of the reasons I had a skeptical view of her as a candidate prior to her becoming the nominee. At the start of the 2020 cycle I thought she was or might be the one. My skepticism wasn’t based on her taking more leftwing positions. It was based on her signing on to positions without thinking three or four steps down the line to the challenges those would create for her. That turned out to be a liability for her in 2024. Though I think the degree of liability is now being overstated. (I still believe, given the situation she inherited, she ran a close to flawless campaign.)
Going forward, Democrats need to keep their focus on a cluster of easy-to-understand issues that big majorities of the public support. They equally should be wary of distracting from those core issues by getting pulled into the minutiae of activist agendas. So, lesson learned. But that’s not the same as abandoning various people to hate campaigns or scapegoating them for a tough loss. For what it’s worth, I think the evidence that trans issues played a substantial role in Harris’ defeat is minimal at best. To a great degree, I think the takeaway from the 2024 campaign may simply be that Democrats were the incumbent party during a period of upheaval and economic hardship for much of the population and had a visibly aging incumbent president. It may be as simple as that. To the extent we’re trying to learn lessons from it, I would say that at least as important as managing the expectations of interest groups is learning to speak clearly about Democrats’ priorities — the concrete deliverables they’ll deliver if elected — to people who don’t come from the college educated milieus where the core of the Democratic Party currently resides.