Their big problem is not a lack of moderates, it's nationalization of party brands. And: A new era for the exit poll; The end game of partisan gerrymandering; and how Substack's AI works. + more!
I will summarize the Dem problem in one sentence: many Americans think Dems stand for democracy, equality, and inclusion, and those things are evil. The single most important thing the DNC could be doing is protecting the brand - making sure people know basic American principles and that's whatwe stand for. But they're too busy asking for money to do anything useful.
I wonder if the lack of local news in "rural" area contributes to the effect of nationalization of party brands? Which has been exacerbated by the defunding of NPR!
Do I have this right: that voters who vote R [almost] solely because they are Rs follow this practice because Ds are seen as [unacceptably] urban-?? That is, even J Tester and S Brown solely because of "national" Ds-? If so, these unmovable R voters are rejecting [voting against] not only the urban D candidates but also against the [urban] voters who do support the D candidates. How, if at all, is this conflict addressed?
The Democrats are just as beholden to corporate donors as Republicans are and will always do what they are told by the wealthy even if it doesn’t help their constituents. Get rid of the money in politics.
At the risk of being too simplistic, on issues and the public’s views of their issues, don’t Democrats have a progressive problem on social issues and a moderate/centrist/business/establishment problem on economic issues?
To be clear, I’m not talking about individual candidates, I’m talking about the party as a whole. We have been in a nationalized environment for at least 20 years (which I would start with the second Iraq War when NE Republicans and the last white southern Democrats were losing or switching parties or Karl Rove’s intention to use culture issues to flip the Appalachia corridor between West Virginia to Arkansas Red).
Also strategically, Democrats need to look for 10 Osborn like independents to run for Senate in 2028 and not run a Democratic Senate candidate in Idaho, Utah, ND, SD, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, & Missouri so that there is a chance for some surprises in these safe Red seats.
WelcomePAC had a great memo called, "Deciding to Win". While it does spend a lot of time shooting down progressive talking points, it ALSO has a brilliant section called, "What it Does and Does Not Mean to be a Moderate".
Basically, the moderate approach is ALSO flawed. While progressive candidates waving around unpopular ideas isn't ideal, having a boring moderate who just picks centrist positions on EVERYTHING (even popular ideas like healthcare) is also a bad move.
Basically, Dems need to pick unorthodox candidates with different positions than the mainstream party. Maybe going left on healthcare, a bit to the right on immigration, etc.
Excellent article - on point with a recent conversation with my son - both of us still registered democrats only because we want to vote in primaries, both of us wishing there were either more parties or no parties. Multiple parties are the advantage of parliamentary systems (which have their own problems) but I thought it might be impossible to get multiple actionable parties here. Our smaller parties have always functioned as creators that slowly evolve and push their ideas to one of the major parties, before big changes are actually made. My three millennial grandchildren are almost completely disaffected independents. They still vote - but they wonder why, because they see both parties as two faces of the same corrupt corporation. Everyone in our multi generational family are variously progressive to lefter than thou. Nobody is happy with the national party. We all wish for parties and viable candidates that are a better fit. Everyone still knows their local elections are really important, so there’s that. Is it possible to have serious smaller parties here, supporting a greater number of impressive candidates, with real primaries open to all? Or is that a pipe dream?
To your point on nationalization, research on the impact of the decline of local news parallels your findings. From The state of local news and why it matters from the American Journalism Project:
"Research shows that the loss of local news is having an insidious effect on our democracy — contributing to polarization, decrease in voting, and government accountability. Local news is an essential lever to a healthy democracy; it helps communities understand what’s at stake in local elections, equips them to get involved in the political process by voting, contacting officials and running for office, reduces political polarization, and holds public officials accountable."
Fusion balloting could possibly also overcome the inherent bias our system has towards a two party system, and bring us c closer to the type of "coalition" governments seen in many other countries. Could it be accomplished by a change in the PARTY rules rather than requiring legislative changes? That would make it much simpler to implement.
I think the diagnosis makes sense, but I'm less sure about Drutman's prescription here. He has a tendency to constantly rediscover some esoteric electoral reform concept as the next silver bullet, most typically from the rare B-sides of US history (fusion voting has never really been a thing outside of the US). This is often to the exclusion of much more evidential models of well functioning multi-party democracy across the modern world.
And, of course, no red-state legislature would ever enact any of these proposals to de-nationalize Senate and House elections.
I wince whenever I see otherwise lucid analyses of our present predicament careen in their last paragraphs to election reforms that make sense to political scientists but which actual politicians would never enact.
Amen to that. Proportional representation might be too hard to reach, but a) a larger House, and b) mandatory ranked choice would be two great steps forward. And of course, make DC and PR states.
The Democrats' problem in the Senate is the structure of the Senate.
Christopher Armitage writes:
"When the system is this structurally unjust, when small-population states can dictate policy to large-population states through institutions designed in the 18th century for a country of 4 million people, participation in that system on its existing terms becomes a form of complicity."
There may be a way to make the Democratic brand less toxic to non-urban voters, but we are at the point where we have to seriously explore "soft secession".
The Abundance crowd will never accept that obstructionist conservadems were not primaried out by progressives, they got BTFO'd by Republicans. Zaid Jilani in his 2014 post-election hit piece on the Blue Dogs and Georgia's Michelle Nunn predicted a liberal revolution in the Democratic party, energetic populist candidates in the next cycle (Ossoff and Warnock) and panned the paucity of ideas except for the same uninspired neoliberal triangulation on the Blue Dog side.
"Georgia’s white residents are 55 percent of its population, down from 72 percent in 1980…. It has all the makings of a future progressive bastion, led by a robust political coalition of young people, racial minorities and women. But for this midterm election, the script is decidedly unprogressive. The Democratic candidate is campaigning via a Third Way algorithm, churning out rhetoric about bipartisanship and being pragmatic. The issues that animate actual Georgians—56 percent want to raise the minimum wage to $10.00 an hour and expand Medicaid—are only on the fringes of the campaign."
"The 2014 elections seemed like the final reckoning for Southern Democrats, the culmination of a political metamorphosis that began in the Civil Rights era and concluded under the nation’s first black President.
Wiped out in governors’ races, clobbered in Senate contests, irrelevant in many House districts and boxed out of state legislatures, Democrats in the South today look like a rump party consigned to a lifetime of indignity."
"On Tuesday night, a lot of Republican-ish candidates got crushed by the official Republican candidates, confirming yet again that a gutless, wincing version of one kind of politics always loses to the robust one. Nobody first starts drinking Diet Coke because they think it tastes better, and the only people who keep drinking it are the ones who’ve drunk nothing else for so long that actual flavor seems weird. Why vote for someone hesitantly and semi-apologetically tacking toward the right when you can just vote for someone who goes balls-to-the-wall rightward and is damn proud of it? At least that person gives off the sense of actually enjoying his own beliefs.
If you’d been following the Twitter feeds of unabashed progressives like Zaid Jilani for the last few months, you could watch the gradual unraveling of optimism give way to negativity over, say, the Senate race in Georgia. On Tuesday, Jilani finally unloaded his disgust for the Michelle Nunn campaign. What populist message did she have to offer? Pro-trade agreements that outsource jobs. Pro-Social Security cutting “grand bargain” budget solutions. A pro-business attitude toward regulation that makes a screwheaded case for government by arguing that it “needs to get out of the way”. "
In my view, the problem with “woke” politics for Democrats has nothing to do with how “moderate” the policies being pushed by one Democrat or another may or may not be. It’s that “wokeness” fixates on *identity* as the final goal of politics, and then preferences certain identities over others (“BIPOC”, “LGBTQ+”, etc.), while mostly offering policies for nominal members of those identity groups that enhance the “signification” of these identities in the most superficial terms. First of all, this pushes cultural discourse towards an unhealthy reification of identity, and encourages a certain virulence in a psychologically unstable portion of the general population, while not delivering anything of substance to American economic or civic life. For the Democratic Party as an institution, this is not a winning style of politics, and it masks the true competence of Democratic governance recently and historically. Most actual Democratic politicians want to be open to all identities (because they want to win the most votes!), and that’s why, for instance, the IRA and the BIF prioritized siting industrial projects in red districts. As a result, despite being closely associated with a narrow set of identities, Democratic voters often don’t actually *identify with the Democratic Party*, and at the same time, Democratic politicians don’t receive full credit for their successes. Republicans, on the other hand, have a large constituency who sees the MAGA movement as a primary identity marker in their lives, and they will credit the Republican Party regardless of its failures.
Rather than go back and forth about how “moderate” Democrats should be in their policies, Democrats should be seeking out a *style* of politics that focuses on something other than identity as the central aim of American civic life. I think Mamdani is the best example this cycle of how Democrats could harness this approach. Assuming he wins in NYC, Democrats should be studying his way of engaging with voters, and they can do this without committing to public grocery stores, rent control, or any other policy that would only be appealing in NYC.
When has a Democratic candidate lost due to moving "too far" to the right and losing the left-wing vote? I get that this is a plausible fear in principle, but it's unclear how we know it can happen in practice.
Also, 2012 I will give you, but 2018 does not count as "before the party moved to the left", especially if you take the party's brand as represented by the broader stance of urban left-wing culture. Wokism in the broader culture, with the *perceived* (fairly or unfairly) support of the Democratic Party as an institution, was in full swing in 2018; that was the year that DiAngelo's _White Fragility_ came out, for instance, and the year that AOC successfully primaried a safe D incumbent by appealing to a surge in urban wokeness.
Left-wing voters staying home definitely hurt Harris in 2024. Sure, she would have lost either way because of inflation, but turnout problems on the fringes matter
I lived in AOC's district for much of my life and she beat Joe Crowley (whom I knew) because he became a corrupt DC insider and forgot about his working class constituents, whose economic struggles were getting steadily worse. AOC connected with working class voters because she lived their lives as a bartender and championed a progressive economic agenda to improve their lives.
This is an excellent piece. But can we have a conversation about why “fusion” isn’t the panacea lots of folks suddenly seem to think it is? I’m just amazed at how this musty old corruption-fueling idea has been embraced by smart “reformers” as a way to “increase supply” of parties when the actual party-like groups you get with so-called fusion are mere vote-funnels to the big parties.
I will summarize the Dem problem in one sentence: many Americans think Dems stand for democracy, equality, and inclusion, and those things are evil. The single most important thing the DNC could be doing is protecting the brand - making sure people know basic American principles and that's whatwe stand for. But they're too busy asking for money to do anything useful.
I wonder if the lack of local news in "rural" area contributes to the effect of nationalization of party brands? Which has been exacerbated by the defunding of NPR!
Do I have this right: that voters who vote R [almost] solely because they are Rs follow this practice because Ds are seen as [unacceptably] urban-?? That is, even J Tester and S Brown solely because of "national" Ds-? If so, these unmovable R voters are rejecting [voting against] not only the urban D candidates but also against the [urban] voters who do support the D candidates. How, if at all, is this conflict addressed?
. So explain Mamdani?
The Democrats are just as beholden to corporate donors as Republicans are and will always do what they are told by the wealthy even if it doesn’t help their constituents. Get rid of the money in politics.
At the risk of being too simplistic, on issues and the public’s views of their issues, don’t Democrats have a progressive problem on social issues and a moderate/centrist/business/establishment problem on economic issues?
To be clear, I’m not talking about individual candidates, I’m talking about the party as a whole. We have been in a nationalized environment for at least 20 years (which I would start with the second Iraq War when NE Republicans and the last white southern Democrats were losing or switching parties or Karl Rove’s intention to use culture issues to flip the Appalachia corridor between West Virginia to Arkansas Red).
Also strategically, Democrats need to look for 10 Osborn like independents to run for Senate in 2028 and not run a Democratic Senate candidate in Idaho, Utah, ND, SD, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, & Missouri so that there is a chance for some surprises in these safe Red seats.
WelcomePAC had a great memo called, "Deciding to Win". While it does spend a lot of time shooting down progressive talking points, it ALSO has a brilliant section called, "What it Does and Does Not Mean to be a Moderate".
Basically, the moderate approach is ALSO flawed. While progressive candidates waving around unpopular ideas isn't ideal, having a boring moderate who just picks centrist positions on EVERYTHING (even popular ideas like healthcare) is also a bad move.
Basically, Dems need to pick unorthodox candidates with different positions than the mainstream party. Maybe going left on healthcare, a bit to the right on immigration, etc.
Excellent article - on point with a recent conversation with my son - both of us still registered democrats only because we want to vote in primaries, both of us wishing there were either more parties or no parties. Multiple parties are the advantage of parliamentary systems (which have their own problems) but I thought it might be impossible to get multiple actionable parties here. Our smaller parties have always functioned as creators that slowly evolve and push their ideas to one of the major parties, before big changes are actually made. My three millennial grandchildren are almost completely disaffected independents. They still vote - but they wonder why, because they see both parties as two faces of the same corrupt corporation. Everyone in our multi generational family are variously progressive to lefter than thou. Nobody is happy with the national party. We all wish for parties and viable candidates that are a better fit. Everyone still knows their local elections are really important, so there’s that. Is it possible to have serious smaller parties here, supporting a greater number of impressive candidates, with real primaries open to all? Or is that a pipe dream?
To your point on nationalization, research on the impact of the decline of local news parallels your findings. From The state of local news and why it matters from the American Journalism Project:
"Research shows that the loss of local news is having an insidious effect on our democracy — contributing to polarization, decrease in voting, and government accountability. Local news is an essential lever to a healthy democracy; it helps communities understand what’s at stake in local elections, equips them to get involved in the political process by voting, contacting officials and running for office, reduces political polarization, and holds public officials accountable."
https://www.theajp.org/news-insights/the-state-of-local-news-and-why-it-matters/
So one clue to remedying the move to nationalization is to increase differentiation that can come through strengthening local news.
Fusion balloting could possibly also overcome the inherent bias our system has towards a two party system, and bring us c closer to the type of "coalition" governments seen in many other countries. Could it be accomplished by a change in the PARTY rules rather than requiring legislative changes? That would make it much simpler to implement.
I think the diagnosis makes sense, but I'm less sure about Drutman's prescription here. He has a tendency to constantly rediscover some esoteric electoral reform concept as the next silver bullet, most typically from the rare B-sides of US history (fusion voting has never really been a thing outside of the US). This is often to the exclusion of much more evidential models of well functioning multi-party democracy across the modern world.
And, of course, no red-state legislature would ever enact any of these proposals to de-nationalize Senate and House elections.
I wince whenever I see otherwise lucid analyses of our present predicament careen in their last paragraphs to election reforms that make sense to political scientists but which actual politicians would never enact.
To be fair, I imagine the proposal is to enact these reforms through federal legislation.
Amen to that. Proportional representation might be too hard to reach, but a) a larger House, and b) mandatory ranked choice would be two great steps forward. And of course, make DC and PR states.
The Democrats' problem in the Senate is the structure of the Senate.
Christopher Armitage writes:
"When the system is this structurally unjust, when small-population states can dictate policy to large-population states through institutions designed in the 18th century for a country of 4 million people, participation in that system on its existing terms becomes a form of complicity."
There may be a way to make the Democratic brand less toxic to non-urban voters, but we are at the point where we have to seriously explore "soft secession".
https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/67-of-democrats-want-more-aggressive
We need to add Puerto Rico and DC as states.
The Abundance crowd will never accept that obstructionist conservadems were not primaried out by progressives, they got BTFO'd by Republicans. Zaid Jilani in his 2014 post-election hit piece on the Blue Dogs and Georgia's Michelle Nunn predicted a liberal revolution in the Democratic party, energetic populist candidates in the next cycle (Ossoff and Warnock) and panned the paucity of ideas except for the same uninspired neoliberal triangulation on the Blue Dog side.
"Georgia’s white residents are 55 percent of its population, down from 72 percent in 1980…. It has all the makings of a future progressive bastion, led by a robust political coalition of young people, racial minorities and women. But for this midterm election, the script is decidedly unprogressive. The Democratic candidate is campaigning via a Third Way algorithm, churning out rhetoric about bipartisanship and being pragmatic. The issues that animate actual Georgians—56 percent want to raise the minimum wage to $10.00 an hour and expand Medicaid—are only on the fringes of the campaign."
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://archive.ph/http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/georgia-senate-electionnunnperdue.html
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/win-white-swing-voters-democrats-should-stop-trying-appeal-white-swing-voters/
"The 2014 elections seemed like the final reckoning for Southern Democrats, the culmination of a political metamorphosis that began in the Civil Rights era and concluded under the nation’s first black President.
Wiped out in governors’ races, clobbered in Senate contests, irrelevant in many House districts and boxed out of state legislatures, Democrats in the South today look like a rump party consigned to a lifetime of indignity."
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/03/politics/southern-democrats
"On Tuesday night, a lot of Republican-ish candidates got crushed by the official Republican candidates, confirming yet again that a gutless, wincing version of one kind of politics always loses to the robust one. Nobody first starts drinking Diet Coke because they think it tastes better, and the only people who keep drinking it are the ones who’ve drunk nothing else for so long that actual flavor seems weird. Why vote for someone hesitantly and semi-apologetically tacking toward the right when you can just vote for someone who goes balls-to-the-wall rightward and is damn proud of it? At least that person gives off the sense of actually enjoying his own beliefs.
If you’d been following the Twitter feeds of unabashed progressives like Zaid Jilani for the last few months, you could watch the gradual unraveling of optimism give way to negativity over, say, the Senate race in Georgia. On Tuesday, Jilani finally unloaded his disgust for the Michelle Nunn campaign. What populist message did she have to offer? Pro-trade agreements that outsource jobs. Pro-Social Security cutting “grand bargain” budget solutions. A pro-business attitude toward regulation that makes a screwheaded case for government by arguing that it “needs to get out of the way”. "
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/05/liberal-hangover-2014-democrats
In my view, the problem with “woke” politics for Democrats has nothing to do with how “moderate” the policies being pushed by one Democrat or another may or may not be. It’s that “wokeness” fixates on *identity* as the final goal of politics, and then preferences certain identities over others (“BIPOC”, “LGBTQ+”, etc.), while mostly offering policies for nominal members of those identity groups that enhance the “signification” of these identities in the most superficial terms. First of all, this pushes cultural discourse towards an unhealthy reification of identity, and encourages a certain virulence in a psychologically unstable portion of the general population, while not delivering anything of substance to American economic or civic life. For the Democratic Party as an institution, this is not a winning style of politics, and it masks the true competence of Democratic governance recently and historically. Most actual Democratic politicians want to be open to all identities (because they want to win the most votes!), and that’s why, for instance, the IRA and the BIF prioritized siting industrial projects in red districts. As a result, despite being closely associated with a narrow set of identities, Democratic voters often don’t actually *identify with the Democratic Party*, and at the same time, Democratic politicians don’t receive full credit for their successes. Republicans, on the other hand, have a large constituency who sees the MAGA movement as a primary identity marker in their lives, and they will credit the Republican Party regardless of its failures.
Rather than go back and forth about how “moderate” Democrats should be in their policies, Democrats should be seeking out a *style* of politics that focuses on something other than identity as the central aim of American civic life. I think Mamdani is the best example this cycle of how Democrats could harness this approach. Assuming he wins in NYC, Democrats should be studying his way of engaging with voters, and they can do this without committing to public grocery stores, rent control, or any other policy that would only be appealing in NYC.
When has a Democratic candidate lost due to moving "too far" to the right and losing the left-wing vote? I get that this is a plausible fear in principle, but it's unclear how we know it can happen in practice.
Also, 2012 I will give you, but 2018 does not count as "before the party moved to the left", especially if you take the party's brand as represented by the broader stance of urban left-wing culture. Wokism in the broader culture, with the *perceived* (fairly or unfairly) support of the Democratic Party as an institution, was in full swing in 2018; that was the year that DiAngelo's _White Fragility_ came out, for instance, and the year that AOC successfully primaried a safe D incumbent by appealing to a surge in urban wokeness.
Left-wing voters staying home definitely hurt Harris in 2024. Sure, she would have lost either way because of inflation, but turnout problems on the fringes matter
I lived in AOC's district for much of my life and she beat Joe Crowley (whom I knew) because he became a corrupt DC insider and forgot about his working class constituents, whose economic struggles were getting steadily worse. AOC connected with working class voters because she lived their lives as a bartender and championed a progressive economic agenda to improve their lives.
This is an excellent piece. But can we have a conversation about why “fusion” isn’t the panacea lots of folks suddenly seem to think it is? I’m just amazed at how this musty old corruption-fueling idea has been embraced by smart “reformers” as a way to “increase supply” of parties when the actual party-like groups you get with so-called fusion are mere vote-funnels to the big parties.
I would read more from you on this!