Home / General / The leftward shift in Democratic policy positions is not the problem

The leftward shift in Democratic policy positions is not the problem

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Elizabeth Warren at Women In Finance symposium
pictured above: not the problem

I’m mostly in agreement with Matt Yglesias here: the post 2014 political landscape can’t really yield any other reasonable conclusion for a national party than the one he draws. His assessment regarding the Republican party seems more or less correct to me as well, as is his assessment of the electoral shortcomings of the political dynamic that makes Wendy Davis the state-wide candidate in Texas in 2014. Indeed, this is one of several reasons the #feelthebern crowd can be so frustrating–whether the next Democratic president is 17 clicks to the left of the median vote in congress or merely 14 isn’t necessarily entirely irrelevant, but there’s no good reason it should be a central concern for Democrats, or a repository of considerable energy.

Here’s where I find some disagreement:

If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.

If we treat the issues listed here as the core basis for the current leftward shift of the Democratic Party, it strikes me as a pretty electorally canny way to move to the left. Taking the issues one at a time: The wave-conversions to a pro-SSM position by major national Democratic politicians were neither courageously/foolishly premature nor embarrassingly late; they took place at more or less the precise moment that the shift on public opinion on that issue was at least politically harmless, if not helpful. There’s still a handful of districts and states where this isn’t good for them, but that number is going to continue to go down, they have much bigger problems in those districts anyway, and the political strategy worked spectacularly well.

Raising the minimum wage is a fine partisan issue for the Democrats. In 2014 the reactionary Tom Cotton waltzed to an easy victory in the Arkansas senate race, yet polled nearly 10 points behind the minimum wage increase on the ballot. There are few issues that are more clearly ballot box winners for the Democrats than this one. A nearly 50% federal increase, to $10.10, is supported by large supermajorities nationally. Similarly, the underlying premise of the grand bargain, social security cuts, would be an utter catastrophe for the Democrats; avoiding them is an electoral no-brainer. (You can occasionally goose the results to get theoretical support for cuts as deficit relief, by pairing them with tax increases, but even then, it’s important to remember that public opinion in favor of deficit hawkery is a mile wide and an inch deep.) Furthermore, as we move into an era where we’re forced to confront the consequences of the failed social experiment of replacing pensions with a a tax shelter for high earners, the electoral salience of expanding social security benefits, already popular, will continue to increase. Paid family/parental leave is such a huge winner that Marco Rubio is pretending to support it. Gun control is admittedly more complicated here, but the nature of the Democratic leftward lurch, it seems to me, reflects that more complicated reality. It seems to me to be primarily the widely popular incremental measures that are seeing broad public support, such as universal background checks, while insofar as individual Democrats are calling for more than that that seem fairly sensitive to their specific political circumstances.

Again, none of this is to suggest Yglesias’s larger argument is incorrect–the Democratic Party is indeed in some real, underappreciated trouble, the Republicans do have a workable strategy to maintain power in the House of Representatives and most state/local governments for the foreseeable future as long as they can’t capture the White House, and while they are at a distinct disadvantage on the Presidential front, they’re by no means hopeless there. This is a terrible dynamic for the Democrats, and they don’t appear to be on a path to developing a plan that’s likely to fix it. The more politically savvy fans of Bernie Sanders see his value in pulling Clinton to the left, which is fine and good, but not a particularly important chokepoint for the project of pulling policy outcomes leftward. It also shouldn’t be taken as licence to throw out the median voter theorem out the window, because some issues don’t fit it particularly well. (The observations made about these issues can contribute to a kind of pundit’s fallacy for the left–if moving toward my view on issues A, B and C is good or neutral for the Democrats, that doesn’t necessarily imply anything about issues D, E and F, even if we’d like it to.) Nor is it a a suggestion that these policy shifts are sufficient to fix what’s wrong with the Democratic party–or that further shifts on these issues would necessarily be a solution to it. And, of course, the most successful Republican candidates can sometimes successfully demagogue their opponents’ otherwise popular positions. Whatever the problem is, though, I don’t see any good reason to believe these policy shifts are exacerbating the problem. Insofar as the Democratic party has seen a leftward shift, it’s been, as one would expect, an electorally sensible leftward shift. It’s not the solution to their problems, but the reasons to think those shifts might be doing some good on the margins seems more plausible than the reasons to think they’re doing harm.

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