The Democratic Party’s Bad Math

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 19, 2024

 

Sometimes Rich Lowry will pose questions to his guests on National Review’s The Editors podcast that require some prognostication on their parts and, in the process, shed light on their priors. So it was when Rich recently asked his guests what they thought the odds were of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election.

 

As I told him then, I do not think the odds are good. Campaigns matter, and Republicans are likely to be outspent by their Democratic opponents this election cycle. Trump will continue to be compelled to spend inordinate amounts of his time in courtrooms as the year progresses, which will play very differently with general electorate than it does among Republican primary voters. To win, Trump will have to do one of two difficult things: Either he must convince voters who cast their ballots against him in 2020 to vote for him (a high psychological hurdle to clear), or he must remake the electorate with low-propensity voters, who are unlikely to be as drawn to his campaign as they were in 2016 now that he is the establishment candidate representing an all-but-unified Republican Party. Barring unforeseeable events that shake up the race, the general election will be a tough slog for him.

 

That said, if I’m wrong, I’ll be wrong for reasons that are not unknowable even eight months out from the election. Despite his self-set reputation as a lunch-pail-toting nine-to-fiver with familial roots set deep in the carbon-rich soil of Scranton, Penn., Joe Biden has presided over the hemorrhaging of his party’s support among non-college-educated voters. The Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by degree-holders, and its officials seem resigned to that evolution continuing in perpetuity. The party is pinning all its electoral hopes on driving up turnout among this relatively affluent, highly educated slice of the electorate. The big problem with that plan is that there just aren’t enough of those voters.

 

A Gallup survey from earlier this month illustrates the scale of the Democratic Party’s conundrum. While the party has increased its support among voters with college and post-graduate educations, it is losing voters without those certificates who would otherwise call themselves Democrats:

 

The Democratic Party’s wide lead over Republicans in Black Americans’ party preferences has shrunk by nearly 20 points over the past three years.

 

Democrats’ leads among Hispanic adults and adults aged 18 to 29 have slid nearly as much, resulting in Democrats’ holding only a modest edge among both groups.

 

Whereas Democrats were at parity with Republicans among men as recently as 2009, and among non-college-educated adults as recently as 2019, they are now in the red with both groups.

 

At the turn of the 21st century, Democrats could count on the vestiges of the New Deal coalition to deliver the support of a sizable number of voters without a college education. In 1999, according to Gallup’s historical surveys, working-class Americans identified more as Democrats than as Republicans by 14 points. Today, that has flipped, with the GOP enjoying a 14-point advantage over Democrats among those voters. Democrats have suffered similarly with young voters: Today, only 8 percent more voters between the ages of 18 and 29 associate themselves with the Democratic Party than with the GOP, the smallest the gap has ever been in a presidential-election year.

 

American Enterprise Institute scholar Ruy Teixeira recently illustrated the Democratic Party’s conundrum in discussing a chart of data compiled by the Financial Times:

Teixeira attributes the Democratic Party’s declining appeal among voters with a high-school diploma or less to what he describes as the “boutique issues” on which its highly educated voting base fixates. Threats to American democracy, the scourge of institutional racism, climate change, the gender pay gap, and so on — these issues just do not speak to the concerns of voters who make up a substantial majority of the general electorate. It’s as though Democrats simply assumed that, as the nation’s macroeconomic outlook improved with the retreat of the pandemic, the party’s problems with voters whose primary concern was the state of their own pocketbooks would recede on their own. That is not what has happened.

 

In his latest piece, elections analyst Nate Silver observed that the economy has improved, and voters’ views toward it have grown markedly less hostile in recent months. But Biden’s prospects are not commensurately improving. “On balance, that ought to be a concerning fact for the White House,” he wrote. “It implies that Biden’s poor position is not the result of something fixable (the economy) but rather something that very much isn’t — the fact that he’s 81 and getting older every day.”

 

Silver devotes much of his critique of the Biden team’s lackluster electioneering to the president’s decrepitude, which is a justifiable criticism. He also notes that it is a reparable problem — or at least, it could be if the White House selectively deployed the president in adversarial settings where he could theoretically demonstrate more cogency than he displays on a day-to-day basis. But while a shocking 86 percent of respondents to a recent ABC News survey said Biden is too old to serve a second term, fully 62 percent said the same of Donald Trump. Even if Biden transformed himself into the very picture of vigor tomorrow, that would do little to repair his reputation and that of his party among the non-college-educated minority and white voters who respectively made up 24 and 35 percent of the 2020 presidential electorate.

 

As Teixeira notes, these voters have become convinced that Democrats no longer share their values or concerns, in part because the party’s elected officials cannot dwell on the issues that matter to them — crime, inflation, border security, etc. — without highlighting the party’s failures and blind spots.

 

Again, between the power and unrivaled agency afforded incumbent presidents, the Democratic Party’s spending advantage, and a badly damaged opponent who will spend much of the campaign season defending himself in courtrooms, Democrats have advantages Republicans do not. But theirs is a fragile coalition. There is no doubt that if the GOP nominated anyone other than Trump, the Democratic Party’s uneasy confederation of voters would come apart at the seams. And even with Trump at the top of the ticket, Democrats appear committed to a strategy that will produce, at best, the narrowest of reelection victories.