What is to become of the Democratic party? The world’s oldest political party, formed in 1832 to secure the re-election of a president whose name is no longer deemed acceptable as an honoree of party fundraisers (psst, it’s Andrew Jackson), is in as dire straits as it has ever been.
It has lost a presidential election most of its followers expected to win. It failed to win a Senate majority, gaining just two seats in a year when it had nearly a dozen plausible targets. Its minimal gain in the House leaves it with just about as few House seats as it has controlled since the 1920s. It holds only 15 governorships and fully controls only four state governments — giant California, mid-sized Oregon and tiny Delaware and Rhode Island.
The total party strength index calculated by Sean Trende and David Byler at realclearpolitics.com has them at their lowest point since 1930.
Its congressional leaders are able but getting on in years. House leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer have held party or elective office since the 1970s, and interned in Maryland Senator Daniel Brewster’s office in the 1960s. Senate leader Charles Schumer was elected to the New York Assembly in 1974, when whip Dick Durbin was already a congressional staffer.
And the Democrats’ plight is all the more poignant because right up until election night, many of them believed that the future was forever theirs. And with some reason.
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” pointed the way, predicting that blacks, Hispanics and single women would produce increasing Democratic margins over time. National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in his 2015 book “Ascendant America” thoughtfully elaborated on this theme.
But a vulgarized version of this idea got many Democrats — apparently including the Clinton high command in Brooklyn — thinking an eternal Democratic majority was a dead certainty. Between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. on election night it became clear that this was, in the title of Trende’s shrewd analysis, “the god that failed.”
Now it’s beginning to seem possible that Barack Obama’s two electoral majorities were an exception to the rule. In 2008, when Republican foreign and domestic policies seemed in ruins, Obama gave Americans the chance to do something many had been longing to do for years: elect a black president, a landmark in our history.
But the Obama coalition turned out to be too heavily clustered to be easily replicated in an election decided by electoral votes, and much too heavily clustered to make the party competitive in congressional and legislative elections conducted in equal-population districts.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign blithely assumed that rallying “people of color” and Millennials would produce victory. They didn’t figure that Midwest non-college whites, who had long voted Democratic, wouldn’t be dazzled by Lady Gaga concerts.
The Democrats’ initial reflex seems to be to lurch further left. Schumer joined Bernie Sanders in backing Rep. Keith Ellison as Democratic national chairman. Ellison may be smart and charming, but he’s also a Muslim representing a 73 percent Obama 2012 Minneapolis district. Back in 2007, he said the 9/11 attacks were “almost like the Reichstag fire,” enabling a leader to “have authority to do whatever he wanted.” That sounds uncomfortably close to 9/11 trutherism and comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.
It’s not likely to win votes for Democrats in Wright County, 40 miles outside Ellison’s district, where Hubert Humphrey had a lakefront home and Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton 62 to 29 percent. A party with a leftist national chairman and congressional leaders from Brooklyn and San Francisco is not ideally positioned to appeal to voters in those places where Hillary Clinton fell short.
Exit polls showing Republican improvement among blacks, Hispanics and Asians suggest regression to the mean—people considered minorities behaving more like the national average than they had previously. The results also suggest that when you keep telling white Americans that they soon will become a minority—a message that sometimes sounds like “hurry up and die”—then many non-college-graduate “deplorables” may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively against your own side.
The election results certainly don’t guarantee an eternal Trump Republican majority or anything like it. Trump’s margin was thin and reversible if events turn out badly or policies fail. But the results also suggest that the arrival of a leftist “ascendant” Democratic majority is not inevitable either. The polarized partisan patterns familiar for two decades have been shaken up this year and not, so far, to Democrats’ advantage.
