#WTH Went wrong for the Ds?

Ruy Teixeira has thoughts

If you want to know why I think Ruy Teixeira is the greatest, and why losing him to AEI was a massive self-own by the Center for American Progress, here’s a line from this week’s pod. I asked him about Peter Beinart’s mindless NYTimes piece suggesting that it was Gaza that lost it all for darling Kamala:

If you like that kind of plain talk, this will be your favorite of our recent pods. If you think the Ds have lost their way because they believe it’s all about “fascism,” trans rights, Oprah, abortion, Beyonce, and racial divides, read on.

There have been tons of postmortems on the ignominious loss of the House, Senate, and White House by the Democratic Party not simply to the GOP, but to the DJT MAGA GOP. And fear not, we will have *plenty* to say on that topic in the coming weeks, months, and what will seem like years, but will just have been two days. But back to the election.

Rather than ruin a really fun read or listen — whichever you prefer — with too many spoilers, allow me to point you to Yascha Mounk’s really smart substack that dove deep into the problem of journalistic bias. I’m not cheating; this is part and parcel of the problem we talk about with Ruy. Or, as the man sitting next to me on the plane (from Switzerland, mind you) neatly encapsulated things for me today: “What kind of a country is it when my friend was called into his daughter’s school to hear their complaints about her Pocahontas costume on Halloween.” Well, sir, it’s the kind of country that causes Native Americans to be the largest single ethnographic group that voted for… Donald Trump. Pocahontas costumes notwithstanding.

Anyway, Yascha makes the point that if the corporate media and its minions had not gone completely bonkers in recent years, perhaps there might have been news stories in the mainstream press that told the world that Joe Biden was losing it, and forced them to face up to it. (As it was, only the WSJ had the courage to note that the emperor was, ahem, nude.) Perhaps there would have been stories detailing the crime epidemic poor neighborhoods were facing. Or stories talking about the anger in small communities about the influx of refugees. Or stories about how terrible Kamala really was at her job. You know… News.

As it was, Yascha notes, these self-appointed guardians of “democracy” ended up being the instruments of Democratic self-delusion and the oil that smoothed Donald Trump’s pathway to the White House. Not to speak of the fact that they have intentionally destroyed public faith in their profession.

Ruy notes that Trump derangement has masked the deepening of the divide between the Democratic Party and its erstwhile working-class constituency. But it won’t be simple to drag either the journalistic elites Yascha talks about or the Dem Party poohbahs back to their roots. Plenty of fancy D loudmouths (Jon Stewart, I mean you) are insisting that it wasn’t wokeness that doomed the party. It was the shittiness of the American people. They need to get past the desire to blame Americans for voting for their opponents.

In truth, what the Democratic Party needs is a major wake-up call. The path it’s on will not lead to future election victories. And they will not always be able to count on the polarizing presence of Donald Trump. Will it happen? It’s hard to see the forces that push the party in the right direction. I mean, yes, they prefer to win. But they also have a party leadership and a wealthy suburban and urban elite that is sending the next gen to schools that are only going to make the problem worse. There are few voices in the party that are going to be able to drag the next Kamala to a place where she acknowledges that inflation and crime are more important than wearing Pocahontas costumes and abortion. Would it were so.

As Donald Trump is busy proving with every passing hour, it is good to have two healthy and responsive political parties vying for power. Or one. Sigh.

HIGHLIGHTS

When did you realize that the Democrats were losing their ability to count on votes from once reliable constituencies such as working-class and Hispanic voters?

RT: I particularly started making this argument after 2020 when I felt that it was pretty clear from the election results and the shift of the Hispanic vote and the working class vote overall against Biden, despite what the polls said and despite how weak Trump was, and the Democrats losing 12 House seats and so on, this was a reflection of the way the Democratic Party had evolved in the previous period of time, when it had moved quite far to the left on cultural issues that were not really in the wheelhouse of most working class and indeed, most nonwhite voters.

And they were sort of oblivious to this, right? They thought, well, basically since we won the election, we have a mandate to have a transformational administration, that the masses are with us, and I thought that was highly questionable. I thought that Democrats' weaknesses that had evolved over the teens were just coming home to roost already. Even though yes, they did win the presidency, blah, blah, blah, and by a miracle they won the Senate. But I did think that underneath it all, you could see that the tectonic plates of American politics were shifting against the Democrats. That their whole theory of the case about how the demographics of the country were shifting in such a way as to make their victories almost certain. They would always have the nonwhite voters at basically the same level.

They could retain the working class support and their BFFs, their new BFFs, white college graduates who continue to move in their direction would put them over the top. And that was actually a very salient fact from the 2020 election, which I tried to flag a lot, is if you compare 2012 to 2020, about the same popular vote margin for the Democrats to winning elections. The only demographic that really moved in their favor was white college graduates. There's about a 16 point margin shift toward the Democrats between those two elections and a 19 point margin shift against them among non-white working-class voters. It's a lot, and that's sort of the core arguably or should be, of the Democratic coalition. But they were clearly moving in a different direction.

So, fast forward after 2020, the Democrats felt they recovered in 2022 and 2023 with their relatively good performance in the midterm and then really killed it in a lot of special elections. But as a number of people observed, this just primarily to some extent reflected the fact that Democrats were becoming low turnout election specialists. They had the most activated, educated base, and they would turn out in elections like this. Peripheral voters who maybe would show up in presidential elections, the data over and over showed that they were far more Trump-sympathetic and far more conservative on a lot of these issues. And Democrats said no, they were not all going to turn out because they cared about abortion rights.

So, people poo-poo'd that they said, some people famously argued there's an anti-MAGA majority in the country and all we have to do is activate it, baby. I mean, that's it. All this bedwetting about the Democratic coalition is a bunch of hooey, but it turned out not to be hooey. It turned out that there's a pro-MAGA majority, not an anti-MAGA majority that did get activated, for better or worse.

So basically in this election, you saw exactly the same weaknesses that I'd outlined before, come home to roost even more firmly, right? You saw the margin among all working class or non-college voters for Trump triple from four to 12 points. You saw another maybe 15 point margin shift toward the Democrats among Hispanics. You saw a collapse of the Democratic vote among younger voters under 30, which is basically Gen Z at this point. I mean, this was extreme disappointment to the Democrats, including a 14-point decline in support among young women who were supposed to be the ones who would all show up at the polls because they were all sort of activated by abortion rights issues. None of this turned out to be correct. It didn't turn out to be correct that you could mobilize a majority in your favor basically by talking about how Trump's a fascist and they were very, very bad people, and we must all show up at the polls to do something about that.

Do Democrats realize how out of touch they are with the average voter?

RT: I think there's still a ton of resistance to the idea Democrats have moved radically, basically way too far to the left in culture, so really out of the touch with the median voter. And indeed, the people who run the Democratic Party appear to still be out of touch with them. So I think there's a lot of resistance to that. But we'll see again if they're able to sort things out, I mean, to me, you look at these election results and I think it's hard to make the argument that being sort of hard left in cultural issues is not a big liability for the Democrats, a big liability. Maybe out where I live out in Montgomery County, inner suburb, it's not a liability, but most people don't live in inner suburbs of big metropolitan areas.

Your book Where Have All the Democrats Gone warned the party it was moving away from the working class. What was the reaction to that?

RT: We did try to tell that tale about how the Democrats had evolved over the course of the 21st century away from its more traditional commitments around basic economic issues around being attentive to the interest of the working class.

I mean, not that there weren't signs before that, it's a long-term evolution, but it seemed like particularly in the 21st century, it was getting away from that. And the professionals, the liberal professionals who basically staffed the Democratic Party, who staffed the nonprofits, who staffed the advocacy groups, who are on academia, who run much of the, what we now call legacy media. They were totally on board with all this, including the younger cohorts who were coming into that, into those institutions who had, I don't know if you want to blame it all in the universities or just other phenomena, but they clearly had a different point of view on what Democrats and being a progressive should all be all about. And they were basically privileging a lot of these issues around race and gender, around climate, for that matter. Around sort of the, we can't be tough on immigration, we can't be tough on crime, that's like basically racist and xenophobic.

Who thought that the shift toward identity politics would be a common-sense change?

RT: It's not very, very sensible, but it was the common sense of the people who ran the Democratic Party, the people who staffed it, the people who advocated for it, the people who supported it in associated institutions, they all bought into this. For want of a better word, you could call it woke-ness, you could call it social justice ideology, but it had a huge influence on the Democrats and how they presented to voters. The brand, what is the Democratic Party all about? Is it all about uplifting the working class or is it all about fighting structural racism? Those are two different things, and only one of those is actually likely to be very popular with voters.

Has Trump-ism and the Democrats’ ability to run as the anti-Trump party masked the internal problems they are facing?

RT: Yeah, I think pretty clearly that's the case. I mean, Trump really transformed the Republican Party and its base and sort of ushered us into a much more populist era than before. And Democrats starting in 2016 misinterpreted that as meaning this is the rise of racism and xenophobia and the deplorables and completely losing touch with what the data all said about how America was trending as a country and what a lot of these voters were all about, including many of course, who voted for Barack Obama, those racists. So this was an initial misjudgment fed by the visceral reaction of most of again, this educated liberal base of the Democrats that Trump is the deplorable.

He's so out of bounds that all we have to do is remind people over and over again of how bad he is. And we don't have any internal weaknesses. What weaknesses? I mean, our only weakness is we're going hard enough at Donald Trump. Let's keep on reminding people of how bad he is. And if you have that in your mind as your sort of whole world outlook, Trump is a fascist or quasi-fascist, this populism stuff is all nonsense or there aren't any real grievances behind it. We just have to keep pushing on this guy until he falls over. And they felt they did that a bit in 2020. Though again, we talked about in 2020 was obvious that there were key weaknesses that were evident even in that election. But going toward this election through 2022, when they did, as you pointed out relatively well, and they did well in the special elections, it did basically breed a certain amount of... I mean, for want of a better term, just laziness on the part of Democrats. We don't need to fix anything. We have this big fat target in Donald Trump who... I mean the data did say was pretty unpopular and people think he's got all kinds of problems. And since we know astute analysts that we are, that he's basically the second coming of Adolf Hitler, all we have to do is basically tell people and over and over again that that's true. And they will certainly, especially in light of what happened with Dobbs and so on, add the abortion rights stuff to the equation.

Basically this is a give me. All we got to do is keep pushing that line and other ways in which people might not like us, it's all irrelevant. I mean, the trans stuff, irrelevant. The race stuff, irrelevant. The border stuff, irrelevant. The crime stuff, irrelevant. It's all to ginned up by Fox News anyway and people like Marc.

Why did Democrats overlook the pain inflation was causing everyday Americans?

RT: The issue of inflation, which originally remember was supposed to be transitory, which turned out that an absolute killer for the Democrats in terms of their view of voters in terms of their ability to manage the economy. Huge, just absolutely huge. And I think underlying the failure to grapple with those issues in real time as they were happening was a sense that we're just... The Republican Party is so bad and Trump is so bad that our foibles, we don't need to attend to them as much as sort of common sense might think you should because we are keeping the barbarians from the gates. That's our job. And the American people realize how right we are. Well, apparently they didn't.

How easy will it be for the Democrats to claw back the party from the progressive base that has caused all these problems?

RT: I think it won't be easy. It's kind of like another version of the question people have been asking about, "Has wokeness peaked? Is it going away?" And I think it kind of peaked in 2020, 2021, and we're seeing... You can even count mentions in the newspapers. You could do quantitative work on this. And just living in America, it's clear that it's not quite as awful as it used to be. People could talk about more things than they used to be able to. But what I always said to that was, "Okay, that's true and that's good, but we should never forget that a lot of these people are ensconced in the institutions." They have money, they have power, they have positions, and they're not going to change their views overnight.

They may sort of keep them more hidden or compromise a bit, but fundamentally they probably haven't changed the world view. And as you point out, a lot of these people in the younger cohorts, they come out of institutions that have basically marinated them in this kind of outlook, particularly in the elite colleges. And they're still there and the colleges aren't changing that fast either. We'll see. I think there is some change now, but I think it will take some time. So one of the big questions for the Democrats is.. And this is really what you're getting at, I think, is even if they... In certain sectors of the party, they decide, "Okay, our image basically sucks. We got to do things really different. We got a really radically compromise on a lot of these issues we thought were so important, and we got to appeal more to the median working-class voter. We just have to do that. And I think there are going to be a lot of people in and around the party saying, "No, no, I don't want to do that. That would be wrong. That would be immoral, that would be racist. That would be throwing people, 'under the bus.'"

Whereas I think actually the best thing to throw under the bus is those people, are those progressive activists who have led the Democrats down the primrose path. I say throw them under the bus, but I think it'll be hard. I do think it'll be a struggle, and it's not at all clear to me it's going to resolve very soon in a good way.

How did gender and trans-gender issues play a role in this election?

RT: Some of the stuff it gets associated with is just too weird. All the pronouns stuff, all the boys on girls teams, all the basically providing... handing out surgery and puberty blockers like candy to young kids who are confused about their gender.

And the fundamental point, biological men are different from biological women. And you cannot become a woman by saying you're a woman if you're a biological man. That just became so controversial. Controversial? What are you talking about? I mean, this is the kind of thing that makes people's heads explode.

So I knew it would come back to bite them at some point. And I think finally it did. And I think not only the accumulated sort of reaction and backlash against how far the Democrats have gone down this road, but as you were pointing out, Marc, it just symbolized for people, really underscored, the way in which Democrats are concerned with issues that are just bonkers basically. And they're not paying attention to the stuff I care about. It just made them seem, for wanting to use a popular word in this campaign, weird, really weird.

Is Trump’s victory going to be replicable in four years with someone who isn’t Trump?

RT: Well, the short answer is we don't know, but actually John Judis and I have a piece coming out in the New York Times this week basically asking the question, is this an historic realignment?

And our argument is, I mean, to telescope it's a rejection of Harris and the Democrats, but it's not at all clear it's really a realignment. It sure is a realignment in the sense key voter groups have moved toward the Republicans. The Democrats are in disarray. That is a marker of a potential realignment. But ultimately, realignments have to be driven by basically delivering for the coalition that puts you in office and consolidating their support.

And we think that's where they're going to run into trouble. There's all kinds of things that might go wrong, obviously, in a Trump administration. It's not even clear what his economic policy is going to be and whatever that policy is going to be, it's going to deliver for his voters.

And I think without that magic ingredient, you don't really have a realignment. You have a reaction against the other party.

What does Trump’s administration have to do to maintain this new coalition he’s created?

RT: I think conversely, if they have a successful administration and there's strong economic growth and there's not another bout of inflation, and people feel like the country's getting back to kind of normal, working class people are comfortable with, and they feel like there's good upward mobility, I think absolutely the Republicans could continue progressing in a non-Trump era, and that really would be more of a realignment.

So if you get JD Vance in 2028 running on top of a successful Trump administration, absolutely possible. I can see a million ways that that'd go wrong, but I think it is quite possible. And I think people out there who are denying it's possible are kidding themselves, and that's why I think Democrats really need to up their game.

Because I think the temptation, again, back to sort of taking the easy way out is, "Okay, we had a bad election, incumbent parties all over the world, they're getting their ass kicked. What basically we'll do is wait for the Trump people to screw up, and then we will come roaring back, and we basically will be... our same old, same old will look better than the people in power. So that's what we'll do. We won't really fundamentally change our approach to things."

Harris underperformed abortion referendums in every state. Did having abortion on the ballot at the state level help Trump?

RT: We knew that from the 2022 election. We knew that people could be pro-choice or vote for a pro-abortion referendum and still vote for Republicans. And we saw that in spades in this election where tons of people who, as you point out, voted for an abortion rights kind of referendum thing, but then just turned right around and voted for Trump. I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning whether the abortion referenda by themselves were sort of a way that bringing more voters to the polls who otherwise wouldn't have voted and voted for Trump.

Why didn’t abortion rights propel Harris to victory?

RT: I think to me, the key fact is the idea that abortion rights, per se, was an automatic sort of an ATM for Democratic votes was just incorrect because tons of people are quite capable of having their own view on abortion rights and still voting for Trump and the Republicans. I think that was clearly true. And I think Trump cleverly diffused a lot of that stuff because he said, "No, I wouldn't sign in a national abortion ban. Absolutely not." And he said, "Well, let's just leave it to the states," which of course is what Dobbs does.

So I think for a lot of people it's like, "Oh, that's kind of reasonable. I mean, I guess if I want a liberal abortion law, I can have one in my state." And obviously that's what a lot of these abortion referenda were about. And I just think it wasn't the deal breaker talking about abortion rights that Democrats talked themselves into believing it would be.

What role did young women end up playing in the election?

RT: Wasn't it supposed to be the case that women under 30 were going to spike toward the Democrats and have this massive turnout because they're all fundamentally motivated by abortion rights? Well, apparently not because Kamala did way worse than Biden among young women.

Peter Beinart came out with an NYT oped that Harris lost because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the Israel-Gaza war. What do you make of that argument?

RT: I really thought that was kind of an extraordinary op-ed. I mean, leaving aside his, shall we say somewhat one-sided view of the Israel-Palestine issue in Gaza, there was absolutely no evidence adduced in this op-ed that would show that it was a decisive factor in this election. I mean, yeah, maybe, buddy, but where's the data? Where's the evidence? There was nothing other than an assertion that there was this vast progressive upsurge because of the Gaza situation and because of that, something, something, something, Democrats lost the election. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is complete bullshit. He has no idea what he's talking about. None. Zero. So, I don't get it. I mean, people are capable of believing all kinds of weird stuff, but I guess for Beinart it comes kind of easy.

How easy will it be for Democrats to walk away from the cultural issues that cost them the election?

RT: I think that on cultural issues, this will really be something that people still treat very gingerly. And I think one popular approach will be, "Well, okay, we just weren't economically populist enough. If we just turn up the volume on economic issues and talk more about the kitchen table, that mythical kitchen table, we won't really have to change much at all. Maybe just be a little bit more moderate." And I think that's going to hang them up. I do.

So, I think it'll be a muddle. I think what they do need is the more root and branch rebranding of the party. I mean, the sort of, you need a come to Jesus moment backed by the key leaders of the party. We no longer are the party of the working class in this country. We've got to do things really different. We've got to move to the center in an unqualified way on a lot of these issues. I think that's what would be better for them. But I don't think it'll happen at least immediately in the aftermath of this election through the autopsies, because again, I think they'll all contradict each other.

And I think there's a lot of people, again, as we were discussing earlier in and around the Democratic Party who aren't really too interested in rebranding the party in a big way. They sort of want to keep their powder dry for when the Trump administration screws up and then they can get back in power and everything will be fine. So, that's where I think things will be in the immediate aftermath. I think by the time you get to 2028, we'll see, the next presidential cycle really starts, we'll see if someone comes out of the woodwork, some political entrepreneur in Democratic ranks who realizes, has a more astute version of how to rebrand the party. Who realizes how necessary this is.

Maybe Josh Shapiro, just to pick a name, decides, "I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be the guy who can beat JD Vance. And because I realize how hard this is going to be, I'm just going to have a really different approach and I'm going to compete in the primaries on that basis, and I'm going to beat all those other people who aren't willing to really change their approach." And then there's a groundswell of support for him, and there's discussion in the discourse and the papers and whatever. And the next thing we know, he is the nominee and he beats JD Vance.

So, I don't know, anything's possible.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Trump Called His Win a ‘Historic Realignment’ of U.S. Politics. We Have Our Doubts. (John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, NYT, Nov 13, 2024)

2024 Election Edition: Young Men Swing Toward Trump - The Survey Center on American Life (Dan Cox, Survey Center on American Life, Nov 7, 2024)

Trump’s Huge Latino Gains Put a Big Crack in Democratic Coalition (David Luhnow, Caitlin Ostroff, Juan Forero, WSJ, Nov 7, 2024)

How Different Groups Voted in the 2024 Election(Brain McGill, Anthony DeBarros, Caitlin Ostroff, WSJ, Nov 6, 2024)

The Democratic Coalition Has Shattered. Here’s How to Rebuild It. (Ruy Teixeira, The Free Press, Nov 7, 2024)

The Demographics of a Trump Victory—Or Defeat (Ruy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot, Oct 31, 2024)

The Progressive Moment Is Over (Ruy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot, Oct 24, 2024)

The Fox News Fallacy (Ruy Teizeira, The Liberal Patriot, Aug 5, 2021)

Harris humbled: How Democrats lost their way (Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, Axios, Nov 8, 2024)

Where Does This Leave Democrats? (Ezra Klein, NYT, Nov 7, 2024)

A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat (Bret Stephens, NYT, Nov 6, 2024)

I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason They Keep Winning. (Ben Rhodes, NYT, Nov 8, 2024)

Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party (Peter Beinart, NYT, Nov 7, 2024)

The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy (Tressie McMillan Cottom, NYT, Nov 6, 2024)