The Democratic Party Fails to Increase its Appeal
Erin Schaff / The New York Times
On November 7th, 2020, Democrats around the United States celebrated achieving their main political goal: getting President Trump out of office. With a decisive popular and electoral victory for President-elect Biden, Democrats planned to implement their party platform through a unified congress and executive branch. However, as the final votes for Congress members were tallied, Democrats hopes of making great legislative achievements became more and more bleak; it appeared that they had lost significant seats in the House of Representatives.
Similar to the 2016 general election, the 2020 polls were markedly off. This didn’t significantly impact the predicted result of the Presidential election, but it greatly misjudged the actual results of congressional races. According to FiveThirtyEight, the Democrats had a 97% chance of winning the House of Representatives, with a predicted margin of 239 Democratic and 196 Republican seats. Currently, it looks like Democrats will end up with 222 to 224 seats while Republicans will end up with 211 to 213 seats. Democrats retained control of the House, but only by razor-thin margins. These polling discrepancies have drawn critical attention from the media towards the Democratic party and for good reason. President Trump had one of the lowest approval ratings of all presidents in recent years, and President-elect Biden inspired incredible turnout in his favor. With all these factors in favor of the Democrats, their failure to take decisive control of Congress confounded many party leaders. However, for many political analysts, this outcome was unsurprising. They know that the elites of the Democratic party have failed to increase their appeal because they refuse to adopt popular left-wing economic policies.
The Democratic party has been quick to point fingers at the causes of their poor performance down the ticket. Some centrist Democrats blame the progressive wing of the party for scaring off potential voters with their radical ideas. They argue that Biden received record support due to his centrist-messaging, so it must have resonated with the American people. Other left-wing members of the party, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, believe more conservative Democrats didn’t reflect the policy preferences of their voting bases, causing them to lose their seats. They argue that votes for Biden were primarily “protest votes” against Trump and not in support of Biden’s centrist platform. Progressives have also pointed out that all Democratic House candidates in swing districts that supported economically-left positions like Medicare for All won or are on track to win re-election. Meanwhile, economically centrist Democrats in similar districts failed to gain enough support to keep their seats.
Based on the patterns of the elections in the House of Representatives and for the presidency, it appears that politicians are out of touch with the progressive-policy viewpoints of their constituents. For proof, we can look at the results of exit polls taken for the 2016 presidential elections. Voter Study Group found that Clinton and Trump voters were starkly divided on social issues. However, in their graph of social and economic views of Trump/Clinton voters, “Trump general election voters... [were] more widely dispersed on economic issues [than Clinton voters], ranging more broadly from liberal to conservative.” Despite voting for a Republican candidate, their economic views were surprisingly liberal. And that’s not all: the Voter Study Group found a whopping 73.5% of total voters from both parties had fairly liberal economic views.
This pattern is also reflected among the 2020 electorate and their favorable views of left-wing economic policies. A Fox News Voter Analysis poll found that 72% of 2020 voters favored “changing to a government-run health care plan.” Similarly, a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in early 2020 found that 64% of respondents believed “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs,” indicating support for more progressive tax policy. Even Florida, a state Trump won over Biden in the 2020 election, voted overwhelmingly to increase the minimum wage. Over 60% of Florida’s voters, liberal and conservative alike, decided to pass an incremental increase of wages to $15. These views, though portrayed as radical by candidates who lost their seats, appear to enjoy support from a large majority of Americans. The failure of these centrists to adapt to the increasingly progressive fiscal views of their voting base might explain their underperformance in their re-election campaigns. The widespread support of these issues by the average voter compared to the opposition at a congressional level makes one thing clear: politicians are not as economically left as their voting base is.
If the majority of the voting population was on the same page with regards to economic issues in 2016, what drove so many voters to Trump? On the campaign trail, Trump pushed populist messages to recruit the white working class, playing to their fears of losing jobs to instigate anti-immigrant sentiment. According to The Atlantic, the Clinton campaign pushed messages “that focused more on social issues and embracing diversity”, using phrases like “stronger together” and “who we are” as socially liberal appeals. This made up the bulk of Clinton’s political messaging to the American people, leaving little room for a clear-cut economic message. If Clinton had centered her campaign on a liberal economic platform, she could have added voters from all ends of the political spectrum to her base. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign pounced on Clinton’s messaging as an opportunity to hyperbolize Clinton’s social policy, appealing to feelings of xenophobia. As a result, socially conservative voters weren’t pulled in by the Clinton campaign; her socially liberal views scared them while her economic views weren’t significant enough to appeal to them. While Clinton did have various progressive economic policies, some democratic pollsters felt that the Democratic party did not converge on a clear, decisively left-wing economic message. Had Clinton done this, the working class may have put aside their socially conservative beliefs and voted blue in favor of fiscally liberal policies. However, Clinton was unable to expand the typical Democratic voting base (college educated voters), preventing her from winning the presidency.
Despite patterns in recent years, the Democratic party wasn’t always this way; they used to embrace left-wing economic policy. The party was arguably at its most popular after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, when his economically left-wing New Deal policies were passed post-Great Depression. The party formed a coalition of immigrants, minorities, and the working class, and as a result, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate for all but 5 sessions of congress from FDR’s presidency up until the mid 1990s. What changed in the 1990s? President Bill Clinton was elected, ushering in the era of “Third Way” centrist policies and corporate backed politicians. Democrats were no longer the party of sweeping reforms and massive policy proposals, and were argued to have left the working class behind. This left the working class ripe for recruitment by the Republican party, allowing conservatives to win the House of Representatives almost every single session since 1995.
But Democrats haven’t just lost the working class: it appears that they are also losing support with voters of color. Minorities, historical strongholds of the Democratic party, voted blue in smaller numbers this year as party elites have failed to make significant change. Especially due to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial minorities, many Americans of color are under great financial stress. When many party leaders refuse to even consider concepts like a $15 minimum wage, pausing rent, rent control, or possibly a universal basic income, it’s no wonder voters of color didn’t turn out as much; few candidates appear to have minorities’ best financial interests at heart.
Voters are growing increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic party, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition is in tatters. In the words of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, "If you're a laid-off worker... and you say, 'What is the Democratic Party doing for me,' it's unclear… And in their minds, 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.” Based on the divisiveness of many socially liberal issues, if Democrats want to win more elections, they need to re-define themselves as the working-class party. They need to move away from nominating out-of-touch leaders who accept donations from lobbyists, interest groups and large corporations, who are unwilling to pass popular economic policies for fear of upsetting their donors. If Democrats primarily focus their party platform on left-wing economic policy, they can prevent workers from turning towards conservative opponents and keep voters of color within their coalition. If the Democratic party wants to prevent another disaster in congressional elections like the one they experienced in 2020, they need to seriously reevaluate their messaging. If Democrats can work to calibrate unified left-wing economic policy, they can recreate the New Deal coalition and re-establish their dominance as a party.