What, exactly, is a "normal" Democrat?
What, exactly, is a "normal" Democrat?
An essential inquiry
Welcome to the Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It’s been a year of highs and lows, hopes and letdowns, mass mobilizations and ambitions asphyxiated behind closed doors. We’re now sitting in a short-term stasis, parked at turning points, waiting to see which direction history takes, urging action but skeptical that our voices will hold any sway in the Capitol shadow play.
Will the quarter-loaf Build Back Better survive inevitable attacks and hacks by conservative Democrats armed with a rigged CBO score and the media-boosted inflation hysteria? Do Senate Democrats have a plan to save voting rights and democracy? Do they even care? Will Merrick Garland continue to follow through on prosecuting the right-wing terrorists or clear a runway for Trump to run again in 2024? TBD!
All of these things seem to happen in a dimension not accessible to us, with any hearings or debates now rendered the performative phase of the long walk toward the inevitable. The dearth of substance is exacerbated by myopic play-by-play and horse race journalism, while ideological fractures in the Democratic Party and the menace of Republican governance conspire to orient most other discussions towards future election strategy. That is especially true this year, as the collective anxiety from legislative disappointments, Virginia wipeout, and falling polls has focused conversation less on salvaging this session of Congress and more on what it’ll take to win in 2022.
Punditry tends to bore me, but the tug-of-war over messaging happening right now is not just a debate over semantics. With the caveat that many politicians have few qualms with lying or breaking promises, a fight over the language that candidates should use is also a fight over the kinds of candidates that Democrats should nominate. As we’ve seen over and over this year, simply electing any Democrat is no guarantee of policy success or tangible change.
In this edition of the newsletter, we will look at that ongoing debate, using several new polls and expansive studies, with insights from some of the experts behind them.
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: David, Michael, and Norman!
It would be easy to describe the Democratic Party as a circular firing squad right now, but in reality, there’s really only one faction pulling the trigger. Terry McAuliffe’s loss in Virginia and the weeks-long news cycle it guaranteed could have been a horror for centrists, given McAuliffe’s politics, but they instead took it as a golden opportunity to both dictate the national narrative and torpedo the reconciliation bill that so offends their donors. They may have hesitations about helping people pay for medicine and school, but they did not hesitate to seize this moment.
The task required simply leaning in on their favorite pastimes: Deflecting, spinning, offering broad generalizations about an American public they otherwise disregard, and trashing the left in sound bites designed for headlines.
James Carville and some cowardly “strategists” used the moment to inject thinly veiled racism into the conversation, while Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger swerved from blaming the Black Lives Matter movement for Democrats’ stumbles in 2020 to pinning McAuliffe’s loss on the party’s economic program. “Nobody elected [Joe Biden] to be F.D.R.,” Spanberger told the New York Times, “they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
A few days after the Times story was published, Spanberger’s fellow centrist, Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb, advanced the “normal” talking point in what first appeared to be an unprompted Twitter fit.
It was a clear shot at Pennsylvania Lt. Gov John Fetterman, his chief rival for the Democratic Senate nomination next year. Because Fetterman has a far more dynamic personality and trounces Lamb in Twitter followers and social engagement, Lamb’s team clearly drummed up borderline advertorial coverage to sell the “normal” narrative in Axios, one of DC’s leading pharmaceutical company and military contractor-sponsored transcription services.
Setting aside the problematic implications of an ethically-compromised Leave It To Beaver background actor trying to seize the mantle of “normal” in a big-tent party that relies on ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities for its continued existence, Lamb’s missive does raise a key question: What should a normal Democrat look like, sound like, and stand for if the party wants to win popular majorities across the country?
The party’s factions are unlikely to forge any kind of consensus as to how and why Democrats have struggled amongst rural and working-class voters over the past decade. In lieu of any internal agreement, then, we can look at several recently released polls and studies, one a snapshot of current events and another that removes the static and noise of day-to-day cable news, for some guidance on where to go from here.
First up is a groundbreaking and revelatory new study from Jacobin, the Center for Working-Class Politics, and the polling firm YouGov. The project focused specifically on working-class voters, using educational attainment level as a proxy, as do most surveys and polls. It’s no small subset — as the study lays out, 63% of voters who participated in the 2020 election did not have college degrees, while 74% represented households that earned less than $100,000 a year.
Together the organizations surveyed 2000 working-class voters in five swing states, pitting an exhaustive combination of hypothetical candidate profiles, messaging, and policies in head-to-head matchups to determine what appealed most to different types of voters. Instead of trying to win over the most hardcore addled MAGA-heads and Trump voters, they cast aside that committed 30% and looked to the 70% of voters that are realistically winnable for Democrats.
They tested five different types of messaging, broken down here:
Progressive populist: A Bernie Sanders-style message that pits working-class Americans against wealthy elites and emphasizes bread-and-butter economic questions;
Woke progressive: Which borrows rhetoric from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, and combines identity-focused, activist-inspired language with a call for social justice;
Woke moderate: Inspired by Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, which combines a softer strand of activist rhetoric with more cautious, incremental policy commitments;
Mainstream moderate: A Joe Biden-style message that prioritizes national unity and pragmatic, bipartisan government and support of ordinary, working Americans;
Republican: A message drawn from generic Republican Party rhetoric in the Trump era
Policy and ideologies were grouped together in different ways, allowing researchers to better understand how voters want to see the issues they care about addressed by policymakers. They chose health care, the economy, racial justice, and immigration as the issues, then assigned a conservative, centrist, and progressive policy solution to each one.
For example, the economic policies offered were cutting government spending, empowering small businesses, and a federal jobs guarantee; on health care, the options were repeal and replace Obamacare, increase access to affordable health care, and Medicare for All.
In total, they mixed and matched messages, candidate profiles, policy preferences, and ideologies to produce 24,000 different hypothetical campaigns. It’s a lot of data, but the topline conclusions should come as no surprise to people that don’t live in DC or eat half their meals at political fundraising events.
In short, working-class voters gravitated toward candidates who come from modest or middle-class backgrounds, offer populist rhetoric and progressive solutions on the economy and health care, and offer aspirational language on racial justice. Those candidates perform even better in more rural and conservative regions, besting both moderate and woke options.
Here’s a topline breakdown on messaging, policy, and ideology:
The 75-page study write-up offers a rich trove of information that can be used to model out campaigns and considered when evaluating primary candidates. Some of it can seem counterintuitive or conflicting, which can in part be explained by the fact that humans tend to act in counterintuitive and inexplicable ways. I reached out to the people who conducted the study to clarify and explain some of those results, as well as to expound on some of the more striking findings.
What was maybe most intriguing was the strong popularity of candidates who call for “racial justice,” especially when compared to the failure of those who use “woke” language that often invokes terms that originated in academia and seem to take on a more aggressive, confrontational (and to be clear, entirely justified) tone. This lines up with one of the major misleading talking points that have emerged from the hysteria over Critical Race Theory and public schools: White kids are supposedly made to feel bad about themselves because they’re being told that they are privileged and/or descend from racists and slave owners.
Highlighting difficult history is sadly offensive to many white people, and as the study suggests, that especially applies to working-class voters. In my experience, many are trapped by the low-wage economy and don’t feel particularly privileged (you don’t know when you’re not being shot by a cop), and Republicans like Glenn Youngkin are able to weaponize that simmering resentment (and in many cases, actual racism). Still, those surveyed here are actually supportive of racial equality as an egalitarian concept and profess a desire for policies that would lead to a more just society. This applies to Black voters as well as white voters, underscoring the complicated dynamic.
“Someone can certainly promote racial justice as their primary issue without using ‘woke’ rhetoric, just as they might use woke rhetoric but do little policywise to promote racial justice,” says Jared Abbott, who works at the Center for Working-Class Politics and is one of the study’s authors. Youngkin fell into that second category, as he spoke often of encouraging everyone to pursue their dreams on the campaign trail but is exceedingly unlikely to use his power as governor to help working-class people of color one way or the other.
Like Connor Lamb, I’m a straight white guy, but unlike the Congressman, I have the self-awareness to know that my guidance on how a candidate or political movement should talk about race is both useless and unwelcome. The results of this study in no say suggest downplaying racial justice, and in fact, the data shows that candidates of color perform just as well — and in many cases better — as white candidates. How racial justice is discussed going forward will be something to watch, and as this great piece by Perry Bacon in the Washington Post explains, history tells us that even beyond the moral implications, there are real limits to the utility of white appeasement.
What’s abundantly clear, though, is that working-class voters are keenly aware of their place in the economic hierarchy and gravitate towards politicians that pledge to improve it. That doesn’t mean, however, that all working-class voters want the same kind of champion.
The data tells us that suburban and urban voters prefer candidates who project mainstream moderate messaging but support more progressive policies, while rural voters gravitate toward populist rhetoric but don’t gravitate in as large numbers to the very progressive policy solutions provided.
“I think a couple of things are happening here,” Abbott says. “First, rural voters are more likely to feel alienated from the political system, and therefore more friendly toward populist messaging, while well-educated suburban voters tend to look down at populist messaging. Second, rural voters just tend to be more conservative across the board than urban, and to some extent suburban voters.”
In McAuliffe’s case, his message and policies wound up alienating both subsets of working-class voters. I’ll speculate here: Suburban voters may have appreciated his moderate messaging but were turned off by his failure to move past the triangulation and modest changes he offered during his first term (which he won in a tight race against a scandal-plagued Republican), while rural voters were likely unmoved by his milquetoast rhetoric.
Youngkin’s background as the former co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a monster private equity firm, could have been a liability, but McAuliffe’s own personal wealth — including investments with the Carlyle Group — made it almost impossible for him to creditably attack the Republican as an elitist plutocrat. As much as voters prefer candidates that come from roughly the same economic strata (teachers and construction workers polled best here), the overwhelming electoral success of Donald Trump, a man whose entire identity was wrapped up in being a gaudy billionaire and avatar of excess, proved that someone’s rhetoric is generally more powerful than their past.
“With Trump, remember that populism played a major role [in his victory],” Abbott says. “Yeah, he was a rich guy, but in our study we found that a CEO who used populist (albeit progressive populist) language was much more popular (viewed favorably about 54% of the time), whereas a CEO who used Biden-style language was viewed unfavorably.”
Another study, conducted by long-time pollster Stan Greenberg, offers a look at how working people in swing districts currently view Democrats and Republicans on certain issues and how Democrats can move the needle in their direction.
As Abbott alluded to above, Trump’s twisted version of populist rhetoric, his incessant fanning of white grievances, and his pugnacious style together convinced many working-class voters that he was on their side, even if the economic policies he enacted were geared entirely toward the wealthiest 1% of Americans. The focus on cultural signifiers like immigration and “freedom” helped obscure the impact of his agenda.
The poll was conducted in late October, amidst the Democrats’ deepest internal squabbles over Biden’s economic agenda. The party’s seeming inability or unwillingness to deliver on any of Biden’s promises only weakened the perception that Democrats were interested in doing anything for working people, and in the poll, a majority of voters gave Trump the edge when asked which president fought harder to help people like them.
Worse, the tired old myth of trickle-down economics, repackaged as “freedom” from big government socialism, gives the GOP a slight edge on who is more equipped to handle a struggling economy.
Given the disparity in how the media covers the two parties (network news is spending much more time on the price of milk than new evidence that Trump orchestrated an American genocide) and the GOP’s ability to marshall its various factions to pass demented right-wing bills, it’s actually not entirely unreasonable for Republicans to get better marks on the economy. If people aren’t happy with things, they tend to blame the people who are in charge.
The flip side is that Democrats have the power to flip the script. As this poll suggests, a decisive and impactful next few months, combined with messaging that would make Abigail Spanberger fume, could turn the ship around for Democrats. And once again, it’s economic populism, channeled through rhetoric and actual results, that provides the way forward.
According to Greenberg’s poll, raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations remains remarkably popular, especially with two demographics that Democrats have been losing by increasingly alarming margins: White working-class voters under the age of 50 support those tax hikes by a net +45%, while voters from white working-class families favor the idea by +35%.
Naturally, taxing the rich has largely been taken off the table by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, whose reputations as deft political minds stems from the media’s refusal to simply call them corrupt and their deep love of internecine drama.
Kitchen table economic issues dominate these voters’ concerns, though once again, some of the most popular items are those that the “moderate” Democrats are working desperately to block.
There are some bright points, as the child tax credit has transcended its horrible name to become very popular amongst its recipients (who doesn’t like free money?). It’ll take work to actually earn any political momentum from an extension of the tax credit’s shelf life, though, as another recent poll found that fewer than 50% of voters believe that Democrats are responsible for the $300 monthly surplus.
Infrastructure, it should be noted, ranks near the bottom of priorities listed out by every demographic polled save for AAPI voters. It performs better in battleground districts, but given the White House’s promise that expenditures funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill will be sparse next year, throwing in the towel on the rest of the economic agenda would be suicide. The numbers back that up, as 51% of voters said that Biden is failing to keep the promises he made during the campaign, compared to just 35% who give him a passing grade in that regard.
No election is held in laboratory conditions, and right-wing media will prove an ongoing challenge for Democrats. The right’s all-out effort to link Democrats to the “Defund the Police” movement continues to prove a potent weapon for Republicans; that not a single police department has been defunded is irrelevant to many voters, whose reality is shaped by television. The poll shows that the specter of socialism is also an ongoing thorn in the Democrats’ side, which might seem maddeningly incongruent with what respondents point to as their most preferred economic policies.
This is no fluke or outlier; in a poll released by ABC and the Washington Post today, 58% of voters said they are in favor of the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better program while 59% expressed concerns about federal spending.
There’s actually a pretty simple explanation for this dissonance: People don’t think things that help them count as big government. It’s a racist dog whistle for welfare that too many Democrats and pundits take literally, either out of naivety or as a convenient justification for their neoliberal devotion to a rigged private sector. With just 23% of respondents willing to describe the economy as excellent or good, more of the same just won’t cut it.
Party and leaders may want to rethink how they want to define “normal” Democrat — assuming that winning elections is actually the goal.
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Honesty! Democrats are not Americans' friends, be the latter working- or middle-class. And progressives ought to get clear on their own relationship to the 'progress' they ostensibly desire! There is no progress without class struggle!
https://beforethedawn.substack.com/p/to-move-past-trump-the-left-should