Elections are a form of communication. Voters send messages to politicians and the press about what they will tolerate and what they won’t.
The Democrats haven’t voted yet, but they’ve been campaigning for more than a year. They have just held their last debate before the Iowa caucuses two weeks from Monday. That’s time enough to learn some useful things, from the majority of the two-dozen-plus declared candidates who have already dropped out and from those still in the race.
The first thing we’ve learned is that voters, Democratic voters, have a limited appetite for free stuff. Many candidates have been promising free college, free healthcare, and free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Sounds good at first, as when Elizabeth Warren backed Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal. But the refusal of the “I have a plan for that” candidate to say how she’d pay for it didn’t fly. And, when she did answer the question, that flopped, too, and she fell back on saying it would be delayed until her second two years or second term.
The second thing we’ve learned is related: As blogger Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Go woke, go broke.” Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, and Cory Booker, all candidates who have held some moderate stands in the past and could have played them up, chose instead to emphasize how hip they were. They embraced positions such as free medical care for illegal immigrants, reparations for descendants of slaves, and abortions for men who have transitioned to become women.
These things sound reasonable to fans of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To Democratic primary voters, not so much. All five are now ex-candidates.
Third, identity politics has proven to be a loser, too. Harris and Booker got only single-digit percentages from black voters. Castro made zero progress with Hispanics. Things were quite different in 1988, when Jesse Jackson carried blacks, Michael Dukakis won white ethnics, Al Gore won southern whites, and Dick Gephardt won union members.
Identity politics is big on campus, where you get denounced for wearing a serape on Halloween if you don’t have Mexican ancestors, but voters don’t care so much. Harris and Booker failed to duplicate the frisson inspired by President Barack Obama in 2008, probably because you can only elect the first black president once. Catholics were similarly excited by John Kennedy in 1960 but haven’t necessarily been inspired by any Catholic candidate since.
Fourth, the white college graduates, or gentry liberals, who are for the first time in history one of the Democratic Party’s largest constituencies, are a fickle bunch. Black and elderly Democrats have consistently given Joe Biden large pluralities, and Hispanic and the low-income noncollege Democrats have shown some affinity for Sanders. That largely accounts for the buoyancy of the support for these 77- and 78-year-old candidates.
But gentry liberals have been bouncing around. They were briefly smitten with Harris after she bopped Biden on school busing, they swooned longer for Warren when she kept repeating, “I have a plan for that,” and then they were charmed by Pete Buttigieg’s crisp and self-assured articulateness.
The gentry liberals’ fling with Harris didn’t last long, and current polling suggests their crushes on Warren and Buttigieg are over. But there’s still plenty of room for these voters, numerous among those who bother to attend Iowa caucuses and demographically a large share of the population of New Hampshire, to swing decisively in February’s first two contests.
That’s what happened in 2008, when high-education Iowans swung to Obama. That convinced black voters that he, unlike Jesse Jackson, could win whites’ votes and the nomination. But gentry liberals are hard to gauge, because what they’re after is not government aid but morally satisfying reassurances — not substance, but style.
Finally, Democrats, or their many friends in the press and social media, have an obsessive yearning for “diversity,” which turns out to mean racial quotas and preferences. There is moaning about not having any “people of color” on the latest debate stage, as if the party had a responsibility to somehow field a group of candidates demographically identical to the population.
Actually, the six candidates at the last debate come from a wide range of backgrounds, reasonably appropriate for a party which, in its 188-year history, has always been a coalition of out-groups. What’s important is not what the field of candidates looks like but who will be its nominee, who will inevitably be of one gender and a limited number of ancestries. But who that will be is something Democratic voters have not told us yet.
