With President Trump all but certainly defeated in the presidential election, the mood is surprisingly somber among the nation’s Democrats.
Retaking the White House was always only the first step in the ambitious Democratic battle plan to transform the political establishment, but it appears the party of the Left expected to be welcomed as liberators — receiving an enthusiastic embrace from the public, rather than divided government and a fuzzy mandate.
During the primaries, candidates spoke of enacting some form of true universal healthcare, establishing a $15 minimum wage, embarking on a green jobs program, severely curtailing the use of fracking, eliminating student debt, establishing tuition-free college, and much more. But it turned out that public support for the Republican Party was much stronger than the polling suggested. As of this writing, the GOP picked up seats in the House, wiping out a slate of Democratic centrists in swing districts, and is in a strong position to keep the Senate. The party also expanded its reach in state legislatures ahead of crucial redistricting.
Democratic Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, speaking to the House Democratic caucus, told her colleagues that Democratic calls to defund the police almost cost her the election in her Central Virginia district. She also implored her colleagues: “Don’t say socialism ever again,” likely an allusion to the GOP’s strategy of tying everyone in the Democratic Party to Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang sounded similar warnings when he told a CNN panel that in the minds of many working-class voters, the “Democratic Party, unfortunately, has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites, who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life that has been declining for years.” Political scientist Michael Lind noted that exit polls showed that crime and public safety were top concerns for many voters who supported the Republicans.
Ocasio-Cortez was not sympathetic to critiques that Democrats went too far left on social and cultural issues. When former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill warned that these issues distracted from the party’s economic message, Ocasio-Cortez took her to task. “Why do we listen to people who lost elections as if they are experts in winning elections?” she asked. She also ridiculed the low spending on Facebook by (winning) Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb, who held on to his Pennsylvania swing district.
The problem is that Ocasio-Cortez’s district was ranked as D+29 in the 2017 Cook Partisan Voter Index, meaning that it was 29 percentage points more Democratic than the national average. Ocasio-Cortez’s district isn’t representative of the sort of territory Democrats need to hold in order to retain governing power in Congress — Lamb’s is. In an interview with the New York Times following the election, Lamb expressed frustration at Ocasio-Cortez’s insistence that the party adopt some positions that are politically toxic in moderate areas. He complained about her “tweeting out that fracking is bad in the middle of a presidential debate when we’re trying to win western Pennsylvania — that’s not being anything like a team player.”
One retort to the Yangs, Spanbergers, and Lambs of the world is that they’re appealing to an older electorate. The rising electorate will be stridently left-wing, in both cultural and economic beliefs, this argument goes.
But perhaps the biggest surprise, at least to political pundits, was that Trump actually expanded his base of minority voters; exit polls suggest that Trump did better with minorities than any Republican president in decades, making significant gains with black and Latino voters.
While these gains weren’t enough to save his reelection hopes, they presented liberal elites with a truth they’d rather not hear: Black and Latino voters are not all the identitarian, far-Left caricatures they are often portrayed to be. Especially when it comes to social issues, many of them tend to be much more conservative than their white Democratic colleagues.
For instance, a majority of white Democrats said in one 2018 poll that they’d like to see immigration to the United States increased. Just 38% of minority Democrats and 32% of black Democrats agreed. American National Election Studies data found 83% of white Clinton voters said that increasing diversity has made the U.S. a better place; 46% of all Hispanic voters agreed.
Maybe you were shocked to learn that in the most diverse state in America, California, voters rejected Proposition 16, which would’ve repealed the state’s ban on racial discrimination and empowered authorities to use affirmative action policies in hiring and university admissions, by double digits. But I wasn’t. National Pew polling shows that a majority of people in all ethnic groups think race should not be considered in college admissions. Yet it would be hard to know that if you took a look at the endorsements page for the referendum, which included both of the state’s U.S. senators (one of whom is the next vice president), the state’s governor, and a wide slew of California-based businesses including Twitter and Uber.
What all of this represents is a chasm between the multiracial population of the country and the Democratic Party. This isn’t to argue that the Republican Party is perfectly in sync with the diverse electorate — the party did lose the presidential election, after all — but that neither major political party is.
This was not the plan. Demography was supposed to be destiny. As America becomes a browner nation, the Democratic Party was supposed to form a veritable electoral Voltron that an aging, white Republican Party can’t compete with. Yet even with a leader like Trump, who was often impolitic with his language and abrasive toward people of other cultures, the GOP was able to capture a sizable chunk of minority voters, enough to ensure Texas and Florida weren’t even close calls on election night.
Far from strict voting along racial lines, this reality reveals that people vote along their social networks — that is, they are influenced by their friends, family, coworkers, and neighborhoods. As the country becomes more diverse and integrated, so does its politics. Over time, groups of people who are staunchly attached to one political persuasion naturally begin to open themselves to other ways of thinking about the world.
This is a good thing. We should be proud to live in a country that isn’t just ethnically diverse but also ideologically diverse; nobody needs to be locked into one way of thinking about the world just because of his or her skin color. Contra the New York Times’s Charles Blow, who claimed with agony that “some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with their oppressors,” it’s likely that many black and Latino voters supported Trump because wages went up under the mostly good economy he oversaw prior to the onset of COVID-19.
As Jose Mota, a former vice consul at the Dominican Republic in Philadelphia, told the HuffPost reporter Daniel Marans, “I never saw so many Dominicans telling me, ‘I am going to vote for the Republican.’ Many people say, ‘This guy, he’s a bully, but I have food on my table in [a] time of need.’”
Therein lies the challenge for Democrats. It’s simply not enough to call the other side racist or sexist and hope that every woman or nonwhite person will run to the polling booth to vote for you. Not everyone is as repelled by politically incorrect language as the post-graduate set that increasingly guides the elite liberal institutions in the U.S. While most people support some form of police reform and a pathway to citizenship for those in the country illegally, many want more policing of violent crime and decent border security, too.
This means Democrats have to be willing to meet minorities where they are, which is roughly in the middle. The Democratic agenda on issues such as increasing the minimum wage, improving college affordability, and expanding access to healthcare is quite popular; referring to Latinos as “Latinx,” asking whites to check their privilege, and defunding the police aren’t. While Joe Biden tacked close enough to the center to avoid being defined solely by the far-Left, there is no doubt that via both cable news and social media, the Democratic Party is increasingly being characterized by niche cultural views espoused by college-educated elites. This cultural distance from the bulk of voters, many African Americans and Latinos among them, is one of, if not the biggest threats to securing a Democratic majority actually big enough to govern.
As the Trump years recede into the rearview mirror, the challenge for Democrats is avoiding the polarization that occurred under both the Obama and Trump administrations; only by winning the trust and support of a commanding majority can you govern with anything resembling consensus support.
On the other side of the aisle, there are signs of GOP candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who have shown they know how to tap into certain working-class populist themes without the boorish excesses of the current president. It would be the height of irony if the Democrats’ inability to calibrate means the Republicans will be the ones who eventually reap the benefits of an increasingly diverse America.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.
