Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why Are Democrats More United? The Voters Did It

The Democratic Party is more unified these days than it was in the past—and is certainly less openly divided than the Republicans, who just took five days to select a Speaker of the House. The main reason for this newfound internal harmony is the evolving behavior of the American electorate: the moderate/conservative dissident bloc of Democrats representing rural constituencies has mostly disappeared from office, replaced by more ideologically orthodox Democrats from the suburbs. This change has made party leaders' job easier and has eased the chronic factionalism that is now more evident on the Republican side of the aisle, as I explain further in my latest column for Bloomberg Opinion.

In the 2020 Elections, Partisan Stability Defeats Expectations of Change

Imagine someone who set off into the Siberian wilderness right after the 2018 midterms, didn't experience any of the 2020 campaign, and returned to civilization today to see the outcome of last week's election. This person would come back to the following results: 

• A close national presidential contest decided by crucial victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

• A set of Senate races that almost perfectly mirrored the presidential results in each state, with the lone exception of Republican moderate Susan Collins outrunning the rest of her party's candidates in Maine.

• A mostly incumbent-friendly set of House elections, with a few of the 2018 Democratic wave's biggest upset winners—Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico—unable to defend their Republican-leaning seats when facing a presidential-year electorate.

• A continuation of the ongoing pro-Democratic shift in the nation's largest metropolitan areas, pushing former "red states" Arizona and Georgia into full partisan competitiveness and reducing the size of the Republican statewide advantage in Texas.

• A partially countervailing solidification of Republican electoral strength in small towns and rural areas nearly everywhere in the country except New England, keeping key states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania highly competitive while shifting Ohio and Iowa further toward the GOP.

If this person were a Democrat, he or she might be perfectly content with an election in which Donald Trump was defeated and Nancy Pelosi's House majority remained intact. Or maybe there would be some dismay that the popular repudiation of Trump was not strong enough to deliver Democrats an outright national landslide that handed the party clear control of the Senate. Likewise, a Republican supporter might mourn Trump's defeat—or conclude that, under the circumstances, the outcome could have been even worse. 

But there would be no reason for our returning wanderer to be surprised about any of the major results of the 2020 election. The outcome represents a doggedly consistent continuation of the basic electoral fundamentals of the last decade or more: closely-matched popular support for each party, severe and growing geographic polarization, rampant straight-ticket voting, and important Republican structural advantages in the electoral college and congressional apportionment, especially in the Senate.

Those advantages meant that Biden's victory over Donald Trump was in fact very narrow; a shift of 1 percent of the vote in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona would have re-elected Trump despite Biden's comfortable lead in the national popular vote. But they also increase the magnitude of Biden's achievement: the defeat of an elected incumbent president for only the fourth time in the last century, and the ejection of a party from control of the White House after just four years in power for only the second time since 1896. And the pro-Republican tilt of our electoral institutions helps to explain why Democrats were unable to grow their margin in the House of Representatives or win a majority in the Senate, which wound up tempering some party members' delight in the election results.

That disappointment was mostly a testament to the power of pre-election polling to sway expectations. Thanks to overly rosy survey results, optimistic Democrats had visions of revolutionary success dancing in their heads: Senate victories in Montana, Kansas, and even South Carolina; breakthroughs in House races in Indiana and Missouri; even Texas turning "blue" for the first time in 44 years. This wasn't just partisan daydreaming; Republican operatives told journalists that their own private polls were as potentially devastating to their party as the publicly-released data.

There's a lesson here beyond the obvious need to re-evaluate the trustworthiness of polling methodology and forecasting models. For all the ways in which American politics seems to have entered a period of rapid and disorienting change, the partisan preferences of the electorate have only become more and more entrenched over time. Events and developments that might seem inevitably transformative, from Trump's election to the COVID epidemic to piles of small-dollar donations raised by congressional candidates from Maine to Alaska, have repeatedly proven to have only minor effects on the voting choices of citizens loyally committed to their existing partisan teams. If we simply assume that this electoral stability will prevail until proven otherwise, we are much less likely to be surprised by what we see.

Democrats Don't Need Unity to Win Elections: New Op-Ed in the New York Times

In every election year that I can remember, media pundits have spent a lot of time worrying (or crowing) that the Democratic Party is sabotaging its chances of victory. And, of course, 2018 is no different. As Matt Grossmann and I write today in the New York Times, Democratic disunity isn't an electoral disadvantage—though the developments of 2018 point toward serious future internal fights over which policy issues should receive top priority once the party regains power in 2020 or beyond.

Want to Influence the Democratic Party? Try Joining the Democratic Party

While I was on vacation last week, my friend and colleague Sarah Reckhow sent me this story about a new website and self-described "political network" called Win the Future. Win the Future (WTF for short) is co-founded by two Silicon Valley moguls (Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Mark Pincus of Zynga, the parent company of the online games Farmville and Words with Friends). Frustrated with the Democratic Party for imperfectly representing their political preferences, Hoffman and Pincus are attempting to build a mass membership (or at least mass participation) organization via the Internet that will be devoted to "empower[ing] all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda." Reading between the lines of their rhetoric, they want to push Democratic officials to shift further leftward on immigration and social issues while talking more about impeaching Donald Trump, but they are simultaneously rather less sympathetic than the current party leadership to the interests and power of labor unions and free-trade skeptics.

Two weeks out of town left me less attentive than usual to day-to-day social media trends, so I missed whatever reaction the unveiling of WTF provoked among expert observers of the political world. But I think I can guess. Starting with the name itself, the WTF initiative is marinated in tech-hype buzzword-speak. It trades mostly in overfamiliar platitudes (Up with giving a voice to the people! Down with career politicians!). The mechanisms by which its influence is to be amassed and deployed are described in a vague manner, with the following exception: it is clear that the organization will solicit direct cash contributions, which it will then use to rent advertising space on billboards (?!?). The political judgment on display is appropriately summarized by the revelation that one of the ideas for achieving a national party "revolution" involves encouraging the singer of a '90s-era power-pop band to mount an electoral challenge to popular California senator Dianne Feinstein.

In all likelihood, WTF will eventually pass into the same obscurity that has befallen most awkward mashups between politics and the tech sector. But its supposed purpose rests on an assumption that is much more widespread and longer-lived, and that promises to endure whether or not Hoffman and Pincus realize their particular organizational vision. This perspective views political parties in their current form as controlled by unaccountable politicians and other elites to such an extent that they are virtually impermeable to the influence of interested citizens—thus necessitating fundamental and even "revolutionary" measures in order to restore their democratic legitimacy.

Yet there are plenty of ways that parties are open to mass participation. Any eligible voter is able to take part in the process of selecting a major party's nominees for nearly all elected offices, including the presidency. Regular Americans can, and often do, work on behalf of favored candidates' campaigns and provide them with financial contributions. City, town, or county Democratic and Republican committees and clubs are usually quite welcoming to citizens who wish to commit themselves to becoming active in party affairs. Within the broader networks of both major parties sit a number of well-established interest groups—NARAL, the NRA, the League of Conservation Voters—that themselves solicit public membership and support, and that exert considerable power over the politicians of the party with which they are aligned.

Contrary to myth, politicians are quite sensitive to the wishes of party members, and there are plenty of historical examples of elected officials changing their policy positions in response to pressure from active factions and interest groups within their party. The success of the modern conservative movement in gaining control of the Republican Party is a textbook case—conservatives sought to dominate the organizational apparatus and nomination process of the GOP, compelling ambitious Republican politicians to satisfy the preferences of these activists in order to advance their own careers.

It takes a certain degree of credulity to believe that the parties' policy adoption process is currently walled off from the interested citizen by the machinations of self-dealing operators but could be cracked wide open with a dot-com address, some Twitter polls, and a few strategically-located billboards. Aside from the obvious superficial appeal of a pitch that taking over a major national institution is something that could be done from the comfort of a lunch-hour smartphone session, this thinking draws on a tendency that is more common on the American left than on the right: a certain ambivalence about partisan politics and a reluctance to engage with the electoral process from within a major party, even as one holds strong opinions about what that party should, or should not, stand for.

One example of this mentality dates from the 2016 presidential nomination contest, when some Bernie Sanders supporters argued that voters who refused to officially register as Democrats should still be granted the right to participate in Democratic primaries (a few even went so far as to assert that state primaries that excluded independents amounted to a form of "voter suppression"). Whether or not it's presumptuous to claim the right to influence party affairs without actually belonging to the party, it's—more importantly—fatally flawed tactical thinking. As conservatives have historically understood better than the American left, no idiosyncratic quirk exempts political parties from the general rule within human institutions that demands are more likely to be addressed when they come from inside the tent.

This isn't the first time that Silicon Valley types have demonstrated that success and smarts in other fields doesn't necessarily translate into a high political IQ. But taking the time and effort to gain an understanding of the actual operation of party organizations isn't only valuable for learning how best to achieve one's own political goals. It also reveals that party leaders who aren't already doing what you want are not necessarily being "unrepresentative," but may instead be doing a perfectly good job of representing the preferences of others who are more invested in the party cause.

In Philadelphia, the Democrats Define Their Coalition

For as long as I can remember, the two parties have each tended to rely on a favorite theme when attacking each other: the Republicans accuse the Democrats of adhering to an extreme ideology, while the Democrats accuse the Republicans of supporting extreme policies. As Matt Grossmann and I explain in our forthcoming book, there are good strategic reasons for each side to adopt its favored strategy; most Americans lean to the political right in general terms but hold left-of-center views on specific issues, so politicians respond by attempting to shift the public debate of the campaign onto turf that favors their own partisan interest.

Four years ago, the party conventions followed this pattern closely. The Republicans spent an entire evening at their 2012 convention in Tampa portraying Barack Obama as a big-government collectivist who was instinctively hostile to the private sector and individual entrepreneurship. The best-received speech of the Democratic convention in Charlotte, Bill Clinton's "explainer-in-chief" address nominating Barack Obama for a second presidential term, methodically criticized Romney's positions on a number of specific policy questions as unacceptably hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans.

But the events of 2016 have prompted both sides to rewrite their playbooks a little. There was still a fair amount of traditional conservative rhetoric at the Republican convention last week—particularly visible in the speeches of Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence—but Donald Trump's acceptance address, like his campaign up to this point, relied on themes of American nationalism more than the limited-government principles ordinarily emphasized by Republican candidates, and his chief line of attack against the Democratic opposition was not that it was excessively liberal in a philosophical sense but that it was unacceptably permissive in the face of terrorism and lawlessness. Republican criticisms of Hillary Clinton, while numerous, primarily focused on the topics of the events in Benghazi and her private email server, and thus questioned her honesty, competence, and devotion to American interests more than her supposed leftism.

For Democrats, Trump's nomination presented its own novel challenge. As usual, the party's national convention this week promoted its own extensive set of policy positions, but Democrats' normal practice of characterizing Republican policies as extreme by comparison was frustrated by the fact that Trump, though he has expressed support for nearly all of the usual Republican domestic policy agenda, has not made limited government a defining theme of his campaign. Democrats who normally delight in presenting themselves as the defenders of popular entitlement programs and opponents of "giveaways" to corporations and the wealthy seem to have concluded that Trump's own personal attributes represent better attack fodder than his policy positions (such as they are). They repeatedly characterized Trump as inexperienced, ill-tempered, and divisive, with Barack Obama even referring to the Republican nominee as a "homegrown demagogue."

Most strikingly, the Democratic Party's essential nature as a coalition of social groups was on display to an unprecedented extent in Philadelphia. The Black Lives Matter cause and the Mothers of the Movement were given prominent platforms and expressions of support. Undocumented Latino immigrants spoke on Clinton's behalf, and a number of speakers, including the party's vice presidential nominee, punctuated their remarks with Spanish words and phrases. Other groups that received explicit representation from the convention stage included Asian Americans, Native Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, transgender people, Muslims, union members, and people with disabilities. Clinton's status as the first female major-party presidential nominee and potential first female president was celebrated repeatedly during the convention proceedings—including via a video effect on Tuesday night in which a mosaic of (male) presidential portraits broke apart with the sound of shattering glass to reveal Clinton's face as she appeared live from a remote location to greet the delegates.

For much of the last few decades—especially the 1990s, when the current nominee's husband was the national leader of the party—Democrats tempered such tributes to social diversity with other gestures meant to reassure white southerners, businesspeople, and blue-collar cultural moderates that the party spoke for them too. Today, due to a combination of demographic trends, geographic realignment, and Trump's own behavior, Democratic leaders no longer feel the need to place much emphasis on courting these other voters. By nominating Trump, the Republican Party has bet heavily on a campaign message tailored to appeal primarily to middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American whites. Democrats have opted to make a different wager of their own: that the voters who will feel left out of Trump's vision for America not only represent a rainbow coalition of social groups but also a national electoral majority that can carry Clinton to victory in November.

Bernie Sanders and the Search for a Liberal Party

Jamelle Bouie of Slate has published a well-argued and beautifully-written piece placing the Bernie Sanders campaign in the larger context of Democratic Party politics past and present. While the headline ("There Is No Bernie Sanders Movement") will undoubtedly provoke complaints among some Sanders fans, the article itself is complimentary of Sanders, who has exceeded most expectations and demonstrated that a campaign devoted to purist liberalism can attract significant popular support. At the same time, the delegate arithmetic is clear: Sanders will not win the Democratic presidential nomination, and it is worth considering why his political message ultimately found a limited appeal even among the Democratic primary electorate.

Bouie's main conclusion, with which I concur unreservedly, is that committed liberals remain a minority within the Democratic Party. "The broad point," he writes, "is that a 'political revolution' can’t rest on a call for clean government and ideological rigor—the crux of Sanders’ general argument. The Democratic Party isn’t yet an ideological party, and many of its voters don’t put ideology or good-government reform at the top of their lists." From the standpoint of accumulating delegates, Sanders's fate was sealed by his inability to convince a greater share of African-Americans and other racial minorities that he would better represent their views and interests than would Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party is a group coalition, and Sanders was unable to build a broad enough alliance of groups within the party to overtake Clinton in the national delegate count.

The pattern of a liberal insurgent losing a Democratic nomination race to a more moderate, transactional rival is a common one; Sanders's counterparts in previous years include Howard Dean (2004), Bill Bradley (2000), and Jerry Brown (1992). Because Sanders outperformed these predecessors, Bouie suggests that his campaign could serve as the foundation for the rise of a new liberal movement that might succeed down the road in capturing control of the Democratic Party, just as the modern conservative movement identified with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan became the dominant faction of the Republican Party by the 1980s. In my view, however, this remains an unlikely development. Among the reasons why:

1. It's unclear how much of Sanders's electoral success is a product of Hillary Clinton's specific weaknesses. In particular, his overwhelming margins among young voters might have been attenuated had he been facing a more conventional Democratic opponent, or opponents, who could also claim to be a fresh political face and who remained free of the baggage left by the Clintonist compromises of the 1990s and early 2000s. If Sanders were running against some combination of Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Amy Klobuchar, would voters under the age of 35 appear equally enthusiastic about the prospect of implementing socialism as the defining creed of the Democratic Party?

2. Because Sanders is not himself a Democrat, he is not in a position after the election to lead an internal faction of Democratic politicians and activists dedicated to remaking the party as a vehicle of the liberal cause—and it is unclear who else within the party has the national standing and influence to do so on his behalf. Elizabeth Warren is the most likely figure, although it is unclear whether she wishes to play such a role. Sanders disproportionately receives support from voters who are not themselves Democratic identifiers; why would we expect these voters not only to join the Democratic Party but also to become active within its ranks if their political hero has never done the same?

3. The American left, such as it is, has long had an ambivalent relationship with electoral politics in general and Democratic Party politics in particular. While the conservative movement threw itself into gaining root-and-branch control of the Republican organizational apparatus and using it to persuade and mobilize voters on behalf of conservative candidates, there has been no sustained counterpart to these efforts on the left; leftists often prefer other forms of protest such as marches, occupations, boycotts, and internet activism. (To take a recent example, compare the Tea Party movement to the Occupy movement. One side emphasized engagement in partisan politics and electoral participation on behalf of a policy agenda, the other did not. Which approach was more successful?) The current activity on behalf of the Sanders campaign will not be sustained past the end of his candidacy if his supporters view his defeat as signaling the futility of electoral mobilization rather than as a promising start upon which to build a sustainable movement.

4. The final triumph of the conservative movement within the Republican Party did not occur until Ronald Reagan demonstrated that a conservative candidate could win a national election, thus removing the strongest remaining justification for the existence of moderate Republicanism. It is unclear at best whether a Sanders-style liberal is electable; Bouie notes that left-wing Democrats are rarely elected statewide even at the sub-presidential level outside of the Northeast and coastal West. 

Even if a future Sandersesque candidate manages to win the Democratic nomination, a general-election defeat would only reinforce the instincts of many party actors that purist liberalism is, regardless of its other merits, ballot-box poison in the United States. As a result, non-purist Democrats would gain substantial justification for their efforts to swing the party back toward the center (as previously occurred in the mid-1970s and early 1990s).

5. Finally, it is unclear whether Sanders-style liberalism would be successful as a governing strategy even if granted officeholding power by the American electorate. Sanders is less interested than most Democrats in conceding ground to expert-dominated technocracy or the constraints of political pragmatism, which allows him to propose a bold legislative agenda and make campaign promises that remain appealingly unrestrained by the disappointing limitations of practicality. Once the election is over, however, the concrete demands of Democratic constituencies will not be satisfied by mere symbolic measures. Sanders's single-payer health care plan, for example, may be more ideologically pure than Obama's comparatively kludgy Affordable Care Act, but if he can't get it passed—or if it is enacted but fails to provide the benefits that it promises—than many Democratic supporters will judge his approach wanting, and look around for an alternative strategy that doesn't make the perfect the enemy of the good. 

The current "impure" nature of the Democratic Party does not reflect the triumph of corrupt corporate sellouts over innocent idealists, but instead represents the hard-won experience of most core groups within the party coalition that incrementalism and ideological flexibility are the best way to realize their political goals. If Sanders, or a future Sanders type, wishes to convince Democrats to dispense with that assumption, he or she would need to demonstrate that a more dogged adherence to ideological doctrine is equally if not more successful in addressing the specific social problems that Democratic constituencies seek to solve. Until then, the Democratic Party will remain a party on the left, but not truly of the left.

The Changing Partisan Preferences of Asian-Americans

An interesting article by Cecilia Hyunjung Mo of Vanderbilt points out that Asian-Americans have collectively shifted from a predominantly Republican to a predominantly Democratic voting group over the past 20 years. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans voted nearly 2-to-1 for George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton in 1992, but gave 73 percent of their votes to Barack Obama in 2012.

This is a striking and historically unusual partisan swing over just a few elections. Mo argues that Asian-Americans' decisive shift toward the Democrats reflects a negative response to anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism messages from conservative elites, compounded by personal experiences of social prejudice and exclusion, which have engendered anti-Republican attitudes despite Asian-Americans' collectively prosperous economic status.

Asian-Americans represent only about 4 percent of the national electorate, and are disproportionately concentrated in California and other non-competitive states. Their increasingly pro-Democratic partisan affinities are therefore not likely to be electorally pivotal in the immediate future. But this trend is one piece of a larger evolution in the social coalitions of the parties that has occurred over the past several decades, as the increasing identification of the Republican Party with the political views and cultural traditions of the white South has caused ripple effects in the partisan alignments of Americans elsewhere in the nation as well.