By John Fund
Sunday, July 21, 2019
About every other year, I make it a point to stop by
Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of thousands of progressive activists, to
take the temperature of the American Left. One year, I was even invited to join
a panel, and I enjoyed jousting with attendees while playing the role of piƱata
at their party.
This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The
choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in
2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage
point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did
in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind”
blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at
Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead,
Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by
presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and
identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she
would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian
Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for
decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington
governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my
secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the
championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than
hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
It is true that a couple of panels tried to address how
the Left could appeal to voters who cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2012
but switched to Trump in 2016. “How’d we lose the working class? Ask yourself,
what did we do for them?” asked Rick Smith, a talk-show host who explores labor
issues, adding:
You called them stupid. You
marginalized them, took them for granted and you didn’t talk to them. For 20
years, the right wing has invested tremendous amounts of money in talk radio,
in television, in every possible platform to be in their ears, before their
eyes, and on their minds. And they don’t call them stupid.
But that kind of introspection was rare at Netroots
Nation. Elizabeth Warren explicitly rejected calls to keep Democrats from moving
too far to the left in the next campaign: “The progressive agenda is America’s
agenda, and we need to get out there and fight for it!”
Warren and her supporters point to polls showing that an
increasing number of Americans are worried about income inequality, climate
change, and America’s image around the world. But are those the issues that
actually motivate people to vote, or are they peripheral issues that aren’t
central to the decision most voters make?
Consider a Pew Research poll taken last year that asked
respondents to rank
23 “policy priorities” from terrorism to global trade in order of
importance. Climate change came in 22nd out of 23.
There is a stronger argument that Democrats will have
trouble winning over independent voters if they sprinting so far to the left
that they go over a political cliff. As my National Review colleague
Ramesh Ponnuru wrote last month in the New York Times:
On several polarizing issues,
Democrats are refusing to offer the reassurances to moderate opinion that they
once did. They’re not saying: We will secure the border and insist on an
orderly asylum process, but do it in a humane way; we will protect the right to
abortion while working to make it less common; we will protect gun rights while
setting sensible limits on them. The old rhetorical guardrails — trust us,
there’s a hard stop on how far left we’ll go — are gone.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less
interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates.
Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing
demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I
encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in
2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This
Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority
people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t
want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to
assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will
vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because
black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no
assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by
Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics
is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among
Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35
percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists
are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and
assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are
also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with
Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot
going into the 2020 election.
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