By Matthew Continetti
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Voters run from the progressive Left’s positions on race, immigration, and crime
Democrats begin campaign season on offense. President Biden is piling up legislative victories, benefiting from falling gas prices, and slamming “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy. At this writing, Democrats have caught up with the GOP on the congressional generic ballot. They have done well in the four special elections since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Their Senate candidates are either tied with or ahead of Republicans in battleground states. Republicans remain the favorites to take control of the House, to be sure. But the Senate is a jump ball, and governor’s mansions in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania look out of reach.
A lot can change before Election Day, of course. A lot will change. Races will tighten. Undecided voters will break for one party. The horse-race polls could be wrong. And candidates will say or do something that dooms their chances. Recall that Terry McAuliffe’s career-ending gaffe in last year’s Virginia governor’s race — when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — happened late in September.
Biden remains unpopular. Most Americans believe the economy is in a recession. Republicans have the advantage on inflation, crime, immigration, and education. What makes this cycle unusual, though, is that Democrats have a chance at an upset despite a political environment that overwhelmingly favors Republicans.
Why? Part of the reason is the changing nature of the Democratic coalition. Since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has stood for protecting middle-class entitlements and delivering benefits to working-class families. In recent years, however, the Democrats and Republicans have swapped working-class white voters for college-educated voters of all races. The long-running professionalization of the Democrats accelerated during the Trump era. The trend culminated in a party that privileges upscale cultural interests and ideology over traditional values and the practical challenges of everyday life.
The future of the Democratic Party depends on its ability to mask the unpopular parts of its cultural agenda while emphasizing those moral issues on which Democrats are perceived to be in line with public opinion. The sudden relevance of abortion — and the inability of many Republicans to speak sensibly and prudently about it — has jolted pro-choice Democrats with enthusiasm and élan at a critical juncture. But the moment may not last.
The growth of white, college-educated professionals in the Democratic Party has been steady and consequential. In 1994, according to the Pew Research Center, only 18 percent of Democratic voters were white college graduates. By 2019, that number had risen to 28 percent. Newton’s third law of motion — that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — also applies to politics. As college-educated white voters fled the GOP for the Democrats, non-college-educated whites went in the other direction. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats were white non–college graduates in 1994. A quarter of a century later, 30 percent of Democrats were whites without college degrees.
As the Democratic Party became more credentialed, it also became more liberal. In 2001, according to the Gallup poll, 30 percent of Democrats identified as liberal. Twenty-five percent said they were conservative. In 2021, 51 percent of the party called itself liberal, and the share of conservatives dropped to 12 percent.
The party also became more secular. As recently as 2008, says Pew, 73 percent of Democrats were Christian. By 2019, 52 percent were.
Joe Biden leads a party that is more left-wing than either Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s. Take, for example, the growth of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Six Democratic House members launched it in 1991. Bernie Sanders was its first chairman. Today the caucus has more than 100 members, including Senator Sanders. It is the second-largest caucus in the Congress (after the conservative Republican Study Committee) and outnumbers the pro-business New Democrat Coalition.
Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) was a key figure in negotiations over Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better plan. She insisted on measures that helped sink the bill in the Senate, but the caucus later supported the $737 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). “Progressives will not stop fighting for the pieces left on the cutting room floor,” Jayapal said in a celebratory statement after the IRA became law.
Biden has largely sided with the Left’s economic goals. He just favors a more incremental approach to achieving them. In 2020 he invited Sanders, a self-professed democratic socialist, to participate in a “unity task force” that set the Democratic agenda. The platform mentioned neither the Green New Deal nor Medicare for All but was enough to satisfy the progressive Left. Biden also filled his administration with protégés of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and sided with the progressive heroine on antitrust policy, financial regulation, and student-loan relief.
Biden has tried to mollify the resurgent Left without alienating independents and moderates. He has spent as much time distancing himself from the progressives on culture as he has appealing to them on economics. It hasn’t worked.
Biden’s problem is that progressive college-educated white voters are a minority of the country yet disproportionately influential inside the Democratic Party, print and broadcast media, Silicon Valley, academia, Hollywood, and the nonprofit sector. They drive the national conversation. They set the terms of debate on subjects other Democrats would rather avoid.
What has been called “the Great Awokening” has turned progressive activists into zealots for political correctness. They hold radical views on immigration, crime, race, and patriotism. They have embraced slogans such as “abolish ICE” and “defund the police.” They champion causes such as ending standardized tests and merit-based achievement. They infuse school curricula with critical race theory (CRT) and promote gender transitions for minors and biological males in women’s sports. Their moralistic crusade has splintered liberal newsrooms, university faculties, and Democratic think tanks. It has contributed to a collapse in trust in institutions. It’s behind the record jump in violent crime and the breakdown of the southern border.
The political effects of this radical impulse surfaced in 2020. For starters, the parties are becoming less polarized by ethnicity than by education. Over the summer, the New York Times/Siena College poll found that Democrats received more support from whites with college degrees than from Hispanic Americans. In July, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Ruy Teixeira reported that between 2012 and 2020, Democratic support among non-college minority voters fell by 19 points. Support among college white voters rose by 16 points.
Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently tested a Democratic campaign message against a non-woke, “America First” message. He was shocked when 28 percent of African Americans, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 47 percent of Hispanic Americans preferred the strong words against crime, open borders, and national shame in the America First statement to the list of policy achievements in the Democratic one. “And the biggest worry in the survey,” Greenberg wrote for the American Prospect, “if Democrats were to win control of the Congress, would be a surge of crime and homelessness and attacks on the police.”
Educational polarization makes Democrats more dependent on areas with high numbers of white voters with college degrees. They rely on a shrinking geographic base that consists of dense cities and inner suburbs. Consider Washington, D.C., one of the most educated cities in the country. It voted for Biden, 93 percent to 5 percent. “Biden won the presidency winning 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel — the widest gap ever,” tweeted David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Wasserman also observes that this summer’s string of Democratic special-election victories took place in “college-heavy enclaves” that are “not all that representative of the larger fall electorate.”
The party’s dependence on deep-blue metro areas limits its talent pool. The safest Democratic seats are typically the most progressive. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) represents one of the most Democratic congressional districts in the country. She is a fixture on social media and will be 33 years old in October. She’s also this month’s GQ cover model. There’s no question that she will be in the House next year.
The same can’t be said of Representative Jared Golden (D., Maine). He was elected in 2018, the same year as Ocasio-Cortez. He turned 40 in July. He’s a former Marine who represents a rural district that went for Trump twice. Golden is a smart politician who opposed the inflation-fueling American Rescue Plan Act, the Build Back Better Act, and Biden’s student-debt giveaway. He’s endorsed by Maine’s Fraternal Order of Police. Yet ideological trimming may not be enough to save his seat in November. A Golden loss wouldn’t only reduce the Democratic House majority. It would deprive the party of future talent.
And talent matters. Democrats are about to hit a demographic tipping point. President Biden turns 80 years old in November. Most Democrats don’t want him to run for a second term. House speaker Nancy Pelosi is 82 and considering a second career as ambassador to Italy. House majority leader Steny Hoyer is 83. The spring chicken of the Democratic congressional leadership, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, is 72 years old.
The rising generation of Democrats are progressives who, like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, come from deep-blue states. They have never faced serious opposition. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is now a resident of Michigan. The only elected office he’s ever held is as mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana. It happens to be a college town.
Governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Jared Polis of Colorado, and Roy Cooper of North Carolina might be able to follow in Biden’s footsteps and claim the middle ground between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But first Whitmer and Polis would have to win reelection — Cooper is term-limited — and run a progressive gauntlet in the Democratic presidential primary.
The backlash against the Dobbs decision has moved inflation, border security, and CRT off the front page. It may consolidate college-educated white voters behind pro-choice candidates and prevent a Republican takeover of the Senate. What it won’t do is resolve the Democratic dilemma: The party’s most powerful and vocal constituency is far to the left of the public. When the spotlight falls on the progressive Left’s positions on race, immigration, and crime, voters run away. Toward the GOP.
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