The factional politics animating congressional Democrats’ attempt to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a budget resolution for a larger reconciliation bill have stoked the perennial debate as to who “the base” of the Democratic Party is. More directly, it is a question of which faction has the leverage to direct the congressional policymaking process.
Last week, Democratic centrists exerted that leverage in crafting a deal with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to guarantee a vote on the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill on Sept. 27. In all likelihood, this will be before Congress can draft in full the $3.5 trillion social spending package backed by the White House and pass it through reconciliation. Centrists had initially sought a vote sooner, yet they were stymied by hard-line progressives who first wanted a vote on the big-money budget resolution. And while they may have a calendar date, it is unclear whether Pelosi will have the votes to pass the bipartisan bill if Democratic centrists cannot pick up enough Republican votes to blunt those progressives who may threaten to tank passage for a ransom — especially if in the meantime the reconciliation draft hits any snafus in the Senate. The jockeying around these two, now-intertwined bills is only one example of this factional divide among Democrats in Congress, but it has and will continue to exist on other issues as well, including the minimum wage, election reform, and labor reform.
This is the dominant lens through which congressional and White House reporters are telling the tale of these two bills: an ideological tug of war between progressives and centrists. This is more or less accurate. Crucially, however, it is the progressive side of this debate that is more commonly treated as the presumptive baseline in this reporting and opinion, and as though any slight deviation from it is an obstruction by centrists that risks upsetting the base, losing the party partial or full control of Congress, and spoiling the Biden presidency.
Underpinning this perspective is the cavalier supposition that the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the furthest left of the Left, can be interchangeably referred to as the party’s “base,” and further, that the prospect of policy moderation or bipartisan cooperation will result in mass disengagement from the Democratic electorate. Now, defining what constitutes “the base” of the Democratic Party (or the Republican Party, for that matter) is an unsettled and debatable question. Yet this premise, echoed from progressive flacks and major media outlets, represents a clear detachment from the complexity of the actual electorate.
“The base,” as commonly understood, refers to the various constituencies a party’s candidates need to turn out in order to win enough elections to govern. The standard argument within progressive commentary circles is that to win elections, Democrats need to energize the base — namely, staunch liberals, the young, and minority voters — by tacking to the left. If they don’t, the argument goes, the prospect of losing next year’s midterm elections will be thanks to insufficiently progressive party leaders. Despite Democratic voters decisively preferring comparatively moderate House and presidential candidates in the last two national elections, somehow, there remains this odd expectation among progressives that anything short of maximalist policy will risk dooming Democrats in the coming year.
Still today, there are progressives who believe that the Obama-Reid-Pelosi government of 2009 faced major losses in the 2010 midterm elections because the party didn’t move boldly enough on healthcare and stimulus legislation, while also not effectively communicating just how sweeping and progressive were those and the scant other programs they did manage to pass. According to the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, it wasn’t that voters opposed Obamacare or stimulus bailouts but that “too little of their work was evident in 2010, when [they] were running for re-election.” Says Tom Perriello, a one-time Democratic representative from Virginia who was elected in 2008 and defeated in 2010, “There’s a belief among a certain set of Democrats that taking an idea and cutting it in half makes it a better idea when it just makes it a worse idea.”
Of course, one could make the same argument as to why Republicans, who are comparatively more ideologically uniform, lost the House in the 2018 elections and the Senate in 2020, despite having amenable House and Senate maps. One could say the Republicans didn’t go far enough for the base in cutting taxes, didn’t pursue an aggressive enough trade deal with Mexico and Canada, didn’t sufficiently curb illegal border crossings, and didn’t try hard enough to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Or, one could argue that any or all of these things were unpopular or were not worth Republican and independent voters turning out in large numbers to defend — or, just maybe, federal politics aren’t important enough to voters to engage with consistently at a maximal level. The same dynamics could, of course, be at play with Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters.
The progressive argument warns Democrats with certainty that winning depends on moving left. But what we know about the Democratic electorate, the performance of candidates by ideology and general voting patterns that transcend party, tells a more complex story: namely, that the Left has less apparent leverage in the electorate than it does in Congress.
First, tacking to the left has not translated into votes. Left candidates in nonsolidly Democratic jurisdictions have largely failed to win elections, while the success of centrist and mainline liberal candidates in competitive districts are the primary reason Democrats currently control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Indeed, only around 10 progressive House incumbents endorsed by the hard-line progressive group Justice Democrats have succeeded, among them Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and most recently Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri. But these victories have all been in heavily Democratic districts, with the possible exception of Rep. Marie Newman of Illinois, who was elected last year in a district that tilts only 6 points Democratic.
But in competitive and even very Democratic jurisdictions, energizing voters by moving left has primarily not worked, in either primaries or general elections. In Democrats’ “blue wave” election of 2018, gubernatorial candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats lost primaries in New York, Michigan, and Rhode Island. And in the few where they did succeed in primaries, in Maryland and Vermont, those candidates then lost to Republican incumbents. In Senate races across Arizona, West Virginia, and Maine, Justice Democrats-endorsed candidates lost primaries. In congressional races, the story was much the same. This year already, centrists have routed progressives in the New York City mayoral primary, the Virginia gubernatorial primary, and in special elections for congressional seats in New Mexico and Ohio. And of course, there’s the presidential primary, and, well, we know how that turned out.
The second problem with the progressive electoral argument about moving left at all costs is the monolithic perception across news media that younger voters and voters of color are thoroughly progressive. A recent survey by Echelon Insights asked registered voters to back one of five platforms ranging from populist-conservative to populist-progressive. Only 52% of voters under 30 back a left-of-center platform, with twice as many (35%) supporting a mainline liberal platform over a progressive one (17%). Forty percent of voters under 30 backed a center (19%) to right-of-center platform (21%). Among millennials aged 30-39, half support a center or right-of-center platform, compared to 40% supporting a liberal or progressive platform. Another survey found that among Democrats who are registered voters under 30, 51% identify as a “Bernie Sanders-style Democrat,” 33% as a “moderate Democrat,” and 16% as a “mainstream Democrat.” Among those between 30 and 39, Sanders-style Democrats drop to only 34%, versus 41% who identify as moderate and 19% as a mainline liberal. This roughly lines up with what we know about the Democratic electorate in recent years.
By race, a 2020 Pew survey found 55% of non-Hispanic white Democratic voters identify as “liberal,” compared to only 37% of non-Hispanic black Democrats and 29% of Hispanic Democrats. The previously aforementioned survey also found that pluralities or majorities of black, Hispanic, and Asian registered Democrats identify as “moderate Democrats.” True, there may be considerable flexibility in ideological self-identification; for example, self-identification can be influenced by the momentary salience of particular issues more than a deeper commitment to a coherent ideology. But the ideological gradient among certain constituencies of the Democratic Party complicates perceptions not as to whether the base of liberal voters will show up to reward congressional Democrats for “going big,” but whether there are even enough of them to deliver Democrats the multi-majorities progressives need to govern at the federal level.
What further obscures the portrait of the base and the strength of the parties is the share of voters who identify as independents and the intensity of negative polarization in recent national elections. Today, a more than 40% plurality of people identify as independents. Though electorates tend to be more partisan, since independents vote at lower rates than partisans, the enormous shares of votes that either party earns in any given election are still largely influenced by the volatility of independent voters who are not necessarily moderates nor amenable to progressive maximalism but rather have a mix of often idiosyncratic views. With elections as close as they have been recently, a small share of independent or partisan voter defections could throw a statewide or national election, even if these voters share more or most other views with partisans.
Negative polarization, especially in elections with Donald Trump on the ballot, prompts questions as to just how much of recent Democratic electorates, including Democratic-voting independents, have been motivated by opposition to the Republicans (or one Republican) rather than the party’s ambitious political agenda. In 2008, 25% of Democratic voters said their vote was primarily against John McCain. In 2016, 46% of Democratic voters said their vote was primarily against Trump. There isn’t solid negative voting data on 2020, but one exit poll indicates that of the roughly one-quarter of voters who said their presidential vote was a negative vote, Joe Biden won by 38 points, 68%-30%. Though all or most negative Democratic voters may not necessarily be independents (surely, there were Democrats disappointed with Biden’s nomination but opposed Trump far more), these margins suggest that a not-insignificant factor in Democrats’ 2020 vote shares could be attributable to a strong desire to unseat Trump, as opposed to a resounding endorsement of a policy agenda.
The low-key tenor of the Biden administration thus far also raises the overlooked probability that a reason why political power might not shift dramatically after next year’s midterm elections is not that Democrats haven’t fired up a specific base but that the public is more or less content. A recent survey found that a record 59% of people say they’re “thriving.” And while the public’s opinion on the broader direction of the country seems to track with the perceived severity of coronavirus spread, in April, before the delta variant emerged, more people than at just about any point in the last decade said the country was on the right track. Legislatively, even after months of reporters nagging senators to abolish the filibuster, voters (including Democrats) are pretty divided on the 60-vote rule and don’t appear to see the need for its elimination as the five-alarm emergency it’s being portrayed as. Similarly, despite months of gratuitous hyperbole from the media and Democrats, including Biden, over Georgia and other states’ voter ID laws, recent polling has shown the vast majority of voters are in favor of such measures, including Democratic voters.
Maybe the most wildly understated reason why the base isn’t any one faction, and why defining the base is mainly futile, is because the United States is a federation that maximizes democratic representation by dispersing political influence. To govern federally, parties need to earn multi-majorities, which means they need to appeal to a number of factions within and outside of their party. During the 2010s, Senate Republicans flipped several blue seats in the Midwest and the South in states that had more frequently elected Democrats. Within the last two elections, House Democrats flexed their strength in the Sun Belt and in diversifying suburbs.
None of this is to understate the growing share of liberals within the Democratic Party, the popularity of universalist policies, or the striking asymmetric polarization liberals such as Kevin Drum have observed among Democrats. Voters might be less liberal than people who write about them, but it isn’t as though most of the party are a bunch of Joe Manchins either.
Arguably the Left’s greatest contribution to the Democratic Party has been its ability to articulate in simple terms the party’s broader priorities: addressing healthcare, climate change, economic inequality, and systemic racism. This itself has energized Democrats. Even if Democratic voters vary on the specifics, they want to know that their candidate’s general priorities are straight.
But in a country where only roughly 25% of the public affiliates with either party, political observers need to widen their scope as to who the electorate is, what they want, what they do not want, and how important those things are to those whose lives do not revolve around federal politics. That starts with recognizing that there is no one base of the Democratic Party.
Robert Showah is a writer and media entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas. You can follow him on Twitter @robertisnthere.
