The Democrats’ Out of Touch 90s Tactics

I remain unconvinced by anyone who says that their personal political positions are the best route back to power for Democrats. But I remain highly convinced that one huge problem the Democrats face is that their leadership is stuck in the 90s. Bill Clinton endorsing Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayor’s race is just a perfect moment of this–the old white centrists holding onto power as long as possible. Of course this is the milieu in which Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and so many others rose into their positions. And they aren’t letting it go until the day they die, quite literally. But everything about the 90s was not only awful for liberals, but totally disconnected from what Democrats need to do today. Perry Bacon explores this problem:

The Democratic establishment’s plans were doomed to fail because they didn’t reflect today’s political realities, say Stanford University’s Adam Bonica and Jacob Grumbach of the University of California at Berkeley. They are part of a growing group of left-leaning political experts imploring Democratic officials to stop fixating on finding policies or phrases that perfectly appeal to centrist voters and instead try to harness the forces actually driving politics today: attention-grabbing politicians, social and partisan media, an antiestablishment mood, passionate activists, and voters who hate both parties.

Bonica and Grumbach aren’t radical philosopher-professors calling for the end of capitalism; they are mainstream political scientists who rely heavily on data and research.

Leave behind the DATA fetish here, please, and continue:

“The old playbook will not yield the gains that we need to fight off this very, very serious threat to our democracy,” Bonica told me in a recent interview.

Bonica and Grumbach, who have co-authored several articles together, say the Democratic Party’s leaders and strategists operate based on an outdated model of American politics. The establishment’s general view (party officials rarely discuss their strategies candidly) is that voters prefer parties and candidates closest to them ideologically on conventional left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative scales. So Democratic officials closely monitor polls and try to move toward positions held by the most voters — the political center. When Democrats lose an election, party officials conclude that their stances were not sufficiently popular and centrist. Because Democrats overwhelmingly win liberal voters but not necessarily moderates or conservatives, approaching politics this way means the party nearly always thinks that moving to the right will help.

This model seemed to apply to earlier eras. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election while positioning himself as a centrist, supporting the death penalty more strongly than previous Democratic presidential candidates. Eight years later, George W. Bush emphasized education and other issues that might have appealed to moderate and even liberal voters.

The success of Trump, who has pushed unpopular ideas such as banning Muslims from entering the country, would seem to confound this model. But many Democratic Party officials and strategists still cling to it. They argue that Trump is closer to the political center on issues such as immigration, policing and transgender rights than their own party’s left wing. So in the wake of former vice president Kamala Harris’s loss in November, center-left Democratic strategists have blasted progressive groups for tainting the party’s brand and urged Democratic politicians to stop heeding these groups’ wishes.

Bonica, 41, and Grumbach, 37, fundamentally disagree with this vision of politics. They argue that although moderation might have worked well for Clinton in 1992, today is much different. The rise of social and partisan media makes it much harder for candidates to define themselves as centrist: Fox News and other conservative outlets, for example, portray all Democratic politicians as super-liberal.

Even if a candidate builds a reputation as a moderate, that has limited utility. Partisanship is much stronger today than it was a few decades ago, so there are far fewer voters who will consider backing a candidate who doesn’t belong to their party.

This last point is key. There’s a reason that today we call swing voters the stupidest people in the world and we didn’t use this phrasing 25 years ago. They are different people. The people who still define themselves this way are engaging in their own fetish–being centrist for centristism’s sake without any actual policy beliefs or positions. Just vibes. So why are we chasing so called swing voters when they barely exist anymore, as the Bacon article then explores with the political scientists’ research.

This doesn’t mean much in terms of the ideology that Democrats should have except to say two things. First, the drive to move to the right among centrists probably doesn’t work anymore. Second, that means you need to pump up the base. Now, the base of the Democratic Party is also not leftists who at best will vote for Democrats with a lot of grumbling. It is motivating people actually excited to vote for Democrats to do even more work for Democrats. So that’s a different group. What is clearly necessary is the need to actually fight and Schumer, Cuomo, etc. just are way out of their league here. So is Bill Clinton, who needs to never speak about politics again.