How liberal are Democratic primary voters?
More liberal than they are moderate or conservative, but just barely
The takeaway: Democrats are more liberal than they are moderate or conservative. This has become true only recently. But the more important shift has come among Democratic primary voters, who used to be more moderate than those who don’t vote in primaries, but are now more liberal than they are.
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Martha, a reader, sent me an email:
Re Joe Biden, it’s interesting to me that there are so many moderate Democrats, white, black, Hispanic, and that moderate D voters are a group about whom the analysts and pollsters have written v. little. Are there more moderate Democratic voters than progressives in the battleground states is one key question, no?
First, I’m not sure we have actually ignored this group of voters. Many of the analyses of Joe Biden’s prospects in the 2020 Democratic primary have emphasized the fact that there is a sizable chunk of moderate and conservative Democrats left.
But the bigger question is still valid: How many moderate Democrats are there actually? More importantly, do they vote?
I took a look at Gallup’s polling data to find out. In January 2019, the firm released estimates of voter ideology for each political party. In it, they found that, for the first time ever, just over half of Democratic Party voters called themselves “liberal”. An additional third of voters referred to themselves as moderate and 13% called themselves conservative.
We detect this trend in other survey data as well. The Cooperative Congressional Election Study, an election-year survey spearheaded by researchers at Harvard and Tufts (including Dr Brian Schaffner, whose tweet I’ve linked to below) shows a marked liberalization among Democrats.
Perhaps more importantly, Democratic primary voters have become more liberal. In 2012, according to data Schaffner crunched, Democratic primary voters were slightly more moderate than their non-primary-voting Democratic colleagues. But that changed rapidly over the last three election cycles. By 2018, Democratic primary voters were slightly more liberal than the ones who didn’t vote in primaries.
This trend is likely responsible for a whole host of political consequences. I will touch on some of them briefly here.
First, the record liberalism of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates is perhaps explained by the increasingly liberal primary electorate. Second, more progressive Democrats have become more successful in recent years as they have (a) become more strategic about who they primaries and (b) had more voters to rely on.
…
Martha ended her email thus:
PS, I shared your post on Twitter..
Perhaps you will do the same!