Democrats in Distress: A Battle to Reclaim the Soul of the Party
By: Michael Lindemann
Tags: Democrats, Democratic Party, Analysis, Government, Politics

Introduction

A common enemy provides one of the most effective unifiers. Until last month, the Democratic Party had that in President Donald Trump. That is no longer the case, and as a result, the party’s schism between its moderate and progressive wings is in plain view.

Modern Democrats boast a broad, heterogenous coalition of voters, and because of this, the party has grown increasingly difficult to manage. Conflicts are inevitable in a party that seeks to represent constituencies running the gamut from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district in New York (50 percent Hispanic, 22 percent non-Hispanic white, 18 percent Asian, 8 percent Black) to Ben McAdam’s 4th district in Utah (74 percent white, 1 percent Black, 3 percent Asian, 17 percent Hispanic).[1]

This report is a dissection of a Democratic Party plagued by internal discord. It begins with their dismal performance in the 2020 elections and the altercations that followed. From there, reaching a sufficient prognosis for Democrats requires special analysis of their individual parts and their collective movement. Evidently, maintaining the electoral success of a party riddled with demographic and ideological diversity is a tall challenge. It involves overcoming inherent geographic difficulties and suppressing the intransigence arising among intraparty factions. The Democratic Party must render copious coalitional interests into a cohesive partisan vision — one of “productive coexistence” that utilizes contribution from both its progressive and moderate wings, as neither can flourish without the other.

The Antietam Election

November 3, 2020, was not a good day for Democrats. The Democratic challenger ousted the incumbent Republican president, yes, but characterizing down-ballot Democratic performance as “disastrous” would not be hyperbolic. That “blue wave” the Democrats were hoping for turned out to be a blue ripple, and that’s only because Joe Biden provided a lone splash.

Democrats were widely expected to cushion their House majority with new gains; instead, they lost ten seats (with two races still uncalled), dwindling a robust advantage to a tenuous edge. Likewise, the story in the Senate was equally disappointing. First, the positives: The Democrats sent a Republican incumbent packing in the now comfortably-blue Colorado and expelled Republican Martha McSally in traditionally-red Arizona. The latter was a commendable victory, but that’s where it stops. Democrats lost in all other competitive races. These include North Carolina, Iowa, Maine, and South Carolina. South Carolina, considered at least within striking distance for Democratic challenger Jamie Harrison, resulted in a double-digit drubbing by incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham, who, aside from President Trump, might be the Democrats’ biggest bête noire. To compound the chagrin, Harrison had raised a record-breaking 107 million dollars. Unlike South Carolina, however, where a Democratic pickup was deemed unlikely even to liberal optimists, Maine was sure to be a state where Democrats would prevail. But no, incumbent Republican Susan Collins will be taking another oath in January, having cruised to a nine-point victory in an otherwise blue state. Senate Democrats, with their two independent allies, currently sit at 48 seats to the Republican’s 50. Georgia remains undecided at the time this is written, as both Republican incumbents face runoffs to be held next month. It is worth noting, however, that Senator David Perdue led his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, by 1.8 points after all the votes were counted, though he failed to reach the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff per Georgia’s unique rules. So we wait on Georgia, but the battle for Democrats is uphill. They need two victories in two races. Two victories would give Democrats a 50–50 tie in the Senate with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris providing a tiebreaker vote if necessary, giving them the slimmest of majorities. That’s the best-case scenario — and it’s still not ideal.

Meanwhile, the disappointment is not confined to Capitol Hill. Democrats had hoped their “blue wave” would deluge statehouses that Republicans had controlled for years, running expensive ad campaigns and extensive get-out-the-vote efforts. But again, there was no wave. Aside from minor victories — like preventing Republicans from obtaining a supermajority in the Wisconsin Assembly, which will prevent the Legislature from overriding vetoes from their Democratic governor; reducing the Ohio Supreme Court’s conservative majority; and re-electing the Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, despite wins from both Trump and Republican Senator Tom Tillis — it was a lamentable showing for Democrats across state and local governments. “It was a huge night for state Republicans,” said David Abrams, deputy executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization dedicated to electing Republicans to state offices. “Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars to flip state chambers. [And] they don’t have a damn thing to show for it.”[2]

The Republicans were decapitated, losing President Trump (for now, at least), but the headless body is still very much alive. The election simply did not deliver the indubitable repudiation of Trump and Trumpism that Democrats had hoped for. Altogether, it points to a grim reality: The body politic is deeply divided, and the gap between red and blue America is widening. Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, likened this outcome to the Battle of Antietam, writing:

In America’s domestic cold war, this election was more like Antietam, a brutally bloody stalemate that wounded both sides, than a Gettysburg or Vicksburg, which pointed to a decisive victory for one side over the other. The election did more to underscore the impermeability of the nation’s divisions than to offer a path toward the reconciliation and unity that Biden has promised.[3]

Representative Cheri Bustos, the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who was nearly fired at the ballot box herself, voiced what all Democratic office-holders and voters alike are thinking after this so-called Antietam election. “I’m furious,” she said. “Something went wrong here across the entire political world. Our polls, Senate polls, gov polls, presidential polls, Republican polls, public polls, turnout modeling, and prognosticators all pointed to one political environment — that environment never materialized.”[4]

So what did go wrong for Democrats? Republicans, at least in affiliation if not endorsement, were tied to a losing president and his ostensibly damaging rhetoric, yet they generally triumphed despite him. And the creed of Trumpism was more appealing than the alternative to an overwhelming swath of Americans. Why was that? These are the fundamental answers Democrats now desperately seek, and in seeking them, they are starting with each other.

Democratic Blues

After the shock of election night waned, a despondent Democratic Party quickly started pointing fingers. That Thursday, November 5th, anger erupted among House Democrats during a private conference call, where centrist members excoriated their progressive colleagues over faulty ideology and irresponsible tactics. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. We lost good members because of that,” said Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat who narrowly won re-election. Boiling with ire, she did not stop there. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get f — -ing torn apart in 2022,” she asserted.[5] Other centrists made similar points. If Democrats “are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” said Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.[6]

Meanwhile, the progressives met the criticisms with their own riposte. Representative Pramila Jayapal, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that Democrats should not single out the people and ideas that excite the party base. Representative Rashida Tlaib, a self-described democratic socialist and member of the evocative “Squad,” was also incensed, accusing her colleagues of only being interested in appealing to white suburbanites. “To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want,” she said.[7]

The sparring did not remain behind closed doors and webcams, either. It played out for the world to see on Twitter. On November 11th, for instance, Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat representing blood-red West Virginia, tweeted the following:

Defund the police? Defund, my butt. I’m a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans’ jobs and healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.[8]

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the prominent progressive firebrand from New York City, has likewise been using her active Twitter thumbs to offer her thoughts on election 2020 and its implications for her party. In one example, she tweeted the following:

Pretty sad how much people have been conditioned to believe that not getting crushed by costs of healthcare, housing, education, and low wages is either “radical left politics” or “nice but unrealistic”[9]

Her fellow “Squad” member, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, does the same — taking to Twitter often to air grievances concerning her party’s politics. She has been especially vocal since Election Day. On November 8th, for example, she issued this tweet challenging a perceived double-standard:

Progressive [sic] get attacked by other Dems. Everyone: silent Progressives defend themselves and their democratic base. Everyone: stop being divisive Maybe people should stop attacking progressives and work on unity instead of projecting.[10]

We could find thousands of tweets exhibiting this feud, but you get the idea.

The aforementioned word wars are only some of the many examples showcasing the Party’s infighting in meetings, on Twitter, in the press, and really everywhere. The clash between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party has been ubiquitous the last few weeks, from Senators to Representatives, pundits to strategists, brothers to sisters, friends to friends. It’s a conspicuous rift right now, certainly, but this has been taking place for some time. Moderates and progressives have followed bifurcated paths for the party in this era and earlier ones. The quarrel now dividing Democrats is just one of many in the long history of political parties.

Intraparty Strife is Nothing New

Intraparty cleavages have existed in American politics for as long as the parties themselves, largely because our politics is fundamentally binary. There are only two dominating teams, but stances on a myriad of issues to be sorted between those two teams. Thus, it is impossible to have unilateral agreement within a faction that is covered by such a large umbrella.

The inherent chaos associated with political parties made the Founding Fathers perturbed. James Madison wrote in Federalist №10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”[11] When the framers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to hash out the skeleton for their new government, they intentionally omitted any mentioning of political parties from the new nation’s founding document. In their view, parties — or “factions,” as they called them — were corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they sought to abandon in favor of a superior democratic government. Throughout the first administration of George Washington, however, dreaded parties started to form among his Cabinet members over differing visions concerning the government’s role. When Washington left the presidency in 1796, he memorably warned in his Farewell Address of the pestilence parties could inflict on the workings of democracy: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”[12] It was too late however; the damage was done and irreversible. But just because two camps formed to debate their differences didn’t mean each camp wouldn’t face their own differences.

For the sake of brevity, let’s fast forward through the Whig wipeout, through the Bull Moosers, through the New Deal. In the long history of the Democratic Party, one of its most prominent and impactful displays of tumultuous dissension occurred in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement, though it was an insidious development. By the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party embraced big tent-ism as it strove to win elections and wield power. The party featured a complicated array of positions — notably, conservative Southern Democrats, often dubbed “Dixiecrats,” led by men like Strom Thurmond, and liberal Democrats, led by men like Eugene McCarthy. Today, fervent ideologues as different as those two sitting on the same side of the Senate floor sounds like the comical workings of Saturday Night Live. However, it was possible for the party to flourish despite this internal divide for two reasons. One, the party lines were much blurrier than today; and two, the more important reason, the prioritization of compromise in order to maintain dominance. In his book, Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein describes the dynamic as such:

National Democrats cared about passing [legislation], about winning presidential elections, about building infrastructure projects. Given the choice between working with a southern Democratic Party that could provide them crucial votes or challenging a southern Democratic Party that could defect and doom the Democratic Party’s national agenda, they chose accommodation.[13]

Nevertheless, the conflicts of interest undergirding the party proved too strong, and the “bend don’t break” philosophy would eventually break. When the federal government’s Democratic triumvirate passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it ossified Northern liberal support and drove Southern conservatives to the Republican Party. This sorting set the political scene for decades that followed, which is a good segue for bringing us to the inner Democratic conundrums of today.

Contemporary Division of the Democratic Party

About 45 percent of adults who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents said that they had initially favored Senator Bernie Sanders (31 percent) or Senator Elizabeth Warren (14 percent) during the Democratic primary, per a PRRI survey, which was conducted September 9–22, 2020.[14] Twenty-eight percent said they had preferred Joe Biden, 10 percent said former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 6 percent said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 4 percent said Senator Amy Klobuchar, 2 percent said businessman Tom Steyer, and 4 percent said someone else.[15] The former grouping was the progressives; the latter grouping was the moderates — a simplified sorting done by the media, but nonetheless fairly accurate appellations, at least relative to each other.

As this field of candidates suggested, slightly less than half of Democratic voters prefer a very liberal candidate, insinuating they are very liberal themselves, while slightly more than half of Democratic voters prefer a more moderate candidate, insinuating they are more moderate themselves. It is worth noting, however, that some voters who are otherwise liberal may have favored a moderate candidate if their top priority was defeating President Trump and they believed a moderate who may not align with their views had the best chance of winning the general election. Regardless, this split in primary preferences is indicative of the party-wide split between progressivism and moderation, or centrism. Simple ideology polls support this as well. According to an average of Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2019, 47 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters describe their own political views as liberal, including 15 percent who describe their views as very liberal. “Liberal” identifiers represent a plurality, but moderates (38 percent) and conservatives (14 percent) combine to represent slightly over half (52 percent) of all Democratic voters.[16]

The following data reflects some of the issues and topics currently dividing Democrats:

Medicare: According to a survey conducted for the New York Times by online research firm SurveyMonkey, 58 percent of Democrats said they would like to make government-run insurance universally available, while allowing people to keep their private insurance if they prefer it, a policy similar to the “Medicare for all who want it” plan proposed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg. On the other hand, 25 percent said they would prefer a Medicare for all plan that eliminates private insurance. Fifteen percent said the United States should reform the health care system without adopting a government-run plan at all, or that the current system was working well.[17]

College Tuition: According to another survey conducted for the New York Times by online research firm SurveyMonkey, Democratic voters held three differing positions on the costs of public colleges. For 35 percent of respondents, the government should take steps to make college more affordable, but most families should still have to pay something. For 32 percent, the government should make public colleges free to middle-class and low-income Americans, but wealthy families should still have to pay. And for 31 percent, the government should make public colleges free for all Americans, regardless of income.[18]

Border Security: A 2018 Harvard-Harris poll asked simply, “Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders?” Perhaps the poll was overly vague to accurately weigh public opinion on a complex issue, but nonetheless, the answers were telling. Among Democratic respondents, 32 percent supported “basically open borders,” while 68 percent supported “secure borders.”[19]

Reparations: Exactly half of Democrats (50 percent) said they supported economic compensation for African Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people, and almost exactly half (49 percent) opposed this idea, according to PRRI. It is worth noting that this is a fairly unpopular idea overall — only 27 percent of Americans, including 5 percent of Republicans, supported reparations.[20]

Religion: Forty-six percent of Democrats said they felt that religion causes more problems in society than it solves, while 53 percent of Democrats disagreed with that notion. Only 38 percent of Americans overall said that religion creates more problems than it solves, compared to 61 percent who disagreed with that sentiment, including 79 percent of Republicans.[21]

The dominating schools of thought in the Democratic Party today, among candidates and voters, can be simplified into one of progressivism and one of moderation. To better understand the two, let’s use a baseball metaphor. The progressives are the 2002 Oakland Athletics and the moderates are the 2002 New York Yankees, both highly successful competitors with two starkly different modus operandis.

That A’s team, documented in the award-winning film Moneyball, were an alluring group — they were young; they were hungry and enthusiastic; they were cheap. And they appealed to zealous new fans enthralled by their underdog, team-of-the-little-guy status. This generally describes the far-left of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, the Yankees that year represented a status quo operation for obtaining wins — they were full of established veterans and all-stars, and they maintained a strong grip on donors in the form of long-time fans imbuing the organization with spending power. This sounds a bit like the centrist, moderate Democrats. In this hypothetical baseball game, the A’s have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the mound with manager Bernie Sanders in the dugout, and the Yankees have Pete Buttigieg on the mound with manager Joe Biden in the dugout.

That metaphor provides a very broad overview of the contributors to Team Democrat, which includes Bernie Sanders, who, despite his independent branding in the Senate, caucuses with Democrats and sought the presidential nomination of their party twice. Even his equally-liberal heir apparent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a Democrat. Anyway, the classification of Democrats into a duplex of either progressive or moderate provides only a partial elucidation of the intraparty coteries. To adequately sort the modern Democratic Party into its amalgam of players and ideologies, more depth is required.

Perry Bacon Jr., from FiveThirtyEight, defines six — yes, six — wings of the Democratic Party.[22] They are: The Super Progressives, The Very Progressives, The Progressive New Guard, The Progressive Old Guard, The Moderates, and Conservative Democrats. With each, we can examine their featured players and the general beliefs they espouse.

The Super Progressives: This vanguard clamors very liberal views on economic and identity/cultural issues, likely using the term “socialist” or “democratic-socialist” to describe themselves. They do not hesitate to challenge the “establishment,” even inside their own party. Prominent examples include “The Squad” — Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — all political newbies but rhetorical heavyweights.

The Very Progressives: This group has a lot in common with the Supers when it comes to economic issues. The distinction arises with issues of culture and identity, where this group is less radical. You’re less likely to hear one of these folks demanding the abolishment of ICE on Twitter, for instance. They are also more willing to play nice with the Democratic Party establishment. Notable examples include Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The Progressive New Guard: This flock is liberal on both economic and cultural issues, but they are willing to quell bold polices in order to maintain electability and an appeal to the center. Prominent examples include Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke. Bacon says, “I consider the vast majority of Democratic members of Congress and Democratic governors either in this group or the one that comes next. The people in this group (and the next one) are often reacting to the ideas of the two more progressive blocs instead of really driving the party’s vision themselves.”[23]

The Progressive Old Guard: This group starts the classification tattooed with the moniker “moderate.” They are center-left on economic and cultural issues, but very concerned about the electability of candidates and the appeal of ideas to the political center. Notable examples include Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, and Chuck Schumer. “People in this bloc are often considered ‘moderate,’ while those in the previous one are tagged ‘liberal,’ but I’m not sure these two groups have huge policy differences,” writes Bacon. But “the old guard is less willing to placate the party’s most progressive wings. The defining phrase of this group might be ‘how do you pay for that?’”[24]

The Moderates: This bloc is easy to characterize. They are the prototype for this platitude: “fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” With some economic issues, calling them conservative is unjust, but they are certainly more fiscally conservative than their aforementioned contemporaries. They might often tell their constituencies, “I’m a Democrat, but not that kind.” These politicians likely govern in neutral or slightly conservative areas. Prominent examples include Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Representative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania.

Conservative Democrats: These Democrats are skeptical of liberal views regarding both economic and cultural issues. The politicians subscribing to this ideology are, unsurprisingly, nearing extinction. However, Bacon stresses their importance to the party as a whole. “This is probably the smallest wing of these six. But it’s an important one. Democrats may need more Democrats in this mold to gain seats in state legislatures in the West and the South,” he says.[25] Conservative Democrats govern in red areas, hence how they are capable of getting elected despite the D next to their names. Notable examples include West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.

It’s a complex party. And a complex party is difficult to mange.

The Leftward Shift

Despite the aforementioned ideological spectrum, the Democrats as a unit have undeniably moved leftward in recent decades, even recent years. The shift has helped them in some ways and hurt them in others. More on that later, but for now, consider the following:

Today’s Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before [omitted for later emphasis] became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In [omitted for later emphasis], our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.[26]

It sounds Trumpian, doesn’t it? That is an excerpt from the official 1996 Democratic Party platform. The omitted words were “Bill Clinton” and “1992,” respectively. Fast forward to the 2020 Democratic Party platform:

Democrats believe that our fight to end systemic and structural racism in our country extends to our immigration system, including the policies at our borders and ports of entry, detention centers, and within immigration law enforcement agencies and their policies and operations. We will also eliminate unfair barriers to naturalization, reduce application backlogs, and make our immigration processes faster, more efficient, and less costly. These reforms will strengthen our communities, our families, our economy, and our country.[27]

You would have to be living under a very heavy rock to mistake that as Trumpian. So what changed? A lot. But for this issue in particular, immigration, it is largely a new reliance on Hispanic voters and, relatively speaking, less reliance on non-Hispanic white voters. According to data obtained from Pew Research Center, nonwhites comprised 23 percent of Democratic voters in 1995 and 43 percent in 2019, marking a 20 percent upward shift in 24 years.[28] Over the same period, white contribution to the party’s total vote share declined from 76 percent to 57 percent.[29] As the party’s voters change, so does, well, everything else. Michael Tesler, a political science professor at the University of California at Irvine, provides a concise explanation for this evolving dynamic:

In the post-civil rights era, Democrats needed to maintain their nonwhite base without alienating white voters. So their incentive was silence. And Republicans needed to win over white voters without appearing racist. So their incentive was to speak about race in code. The shifts now have made it so Democrats’ incentive is to make explicitly pro-racial equality appeals and Republicans now have an incentive to make more explicit anti-minority appeals.[30]

Of course, this presents a chicken and egg question: Are new voters causing new appeals, or are new appeals causing new voters? The full answer involves a combination of both, but the short answer is the first — new voters are causing new appeals, and that is the impetus for the left turn.

Naturally, a party opening its doors to new voters will close them to others. Indeed, the collective shift leftward has definitely caused some voters to abandon the party, consequently agitating the relations between progressives and moderates within the party. According to a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll, when asked whether the “Democratic Party has moved too far to the left, too far to the right, or would you say the Democratic Party hasn’t moved too far in either direction,” nearly half (47 percent) of respondents say that the party has moved too far left.[31] More specifically, almost 6 in 10 men (57 percent) say Democrats have moved too far left as do 55 percent of whites with a college degree.[32] The party has grown particularly unsavory to whites without college degrees, though.

The Democrats were formerly the party of the white working-class. Nowadays, that more accurately describes Republicans. Liberals in denial take their declining performance in blue-collar white areas and attribute it to racism, but that is a foolish sidestep, and there is an easy rebuttal. A Black, Hawaiian-born turned South Chicagoan named Barack Hussein Obama outperformed an old, white son of the middle class with a ballot name to match — and outperformed him by a lot.

Explaining the white working-class collapse for the Democratic coalition could warrant a lengthy book on its own, but two explanations — one of policy and one of culture — can be succinctly set forth. On the policy front, Katherine J. Cramer’s book The Politics of Resentment, describes a “rural consciousness,” the sense that “the government must be mishandling my hard-earned dollars, because my taxes keep going up and clearly they are not coming back to benefit people like me. So why would I want an expansion of government?”[33] On the cultural front, these excerpts — from Ted Van Dyk and Nick Cave, respectively — shed light on detrimental culture, the first mildly, the second not so much:

[Democrats] must recognize that most Americans are not racist, sexist, ignorant or opposed to alternative lifestyles. Most largely accept the cultural and social changes of the past half-century. To recapture traditional Democratic voters, and attract new ones, Democrats must learn empathy for those who believe they are being mocked for working hard, going to church, serving in the military, and trying to instill moral standards in their children.[34] I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as ‘the truth’ or ‘the way’. This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including ‘woke’ culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me. Antifa and the Far Right, for example, with their routine street fights, role-playing and dress-ups are participants in a weirdly erotic, violent and mutually self-sustaining marriage, propped up entirely by the blind, inflexible convictions of each other’s belief systems. It is good for nothing, except inflaming their own self-righteousness. Some of us…are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.[35]

Even with the exodus of white working-class voters, the party has withstood thanks to its firm grip on minority voters, young people (ages 18–29), and, to a lesser extent, women. A bigger problem for Democrats, however, is found on the map.

Land is Not Blue

Electorally speaking, the biggest nemesis for Democrats is one without a pulse. It’s land. Most land is green, but most political land is red — neither of which help a party that prefers blue.

In recent decades, domestic geopolitics has experienced a seismic shift at the county level. In an analysis at FiveThirtyEight, Dave Wasserman examined “landslide counties” — counties where the winning presidential candidate got at least 60 percent of the vote.[36] When centrist Democrat Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, 39 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. By the time his wife lost 24 years later, that figure shot to 61 percent of voters. When Wasserman looked at those living in “extreme landslide counties” — counties where the winning candidate took more than 75 percent of the vote — the change was even starker. In 1992, four percent of voters lived in such counties; by 2016, that number catapulted to 21 percent.[37] These homogenous types of counties contribute to both political parties and are evidence of a growing urban-rural divide. With exceptions few and far between, densely-populated counties are getting bluer and sparsely-populated counties are getting redder. Marc Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program, has approximated nine hundred people per square mile as the dividing line. Above that mark, areas trend Democratic; below it, they trend Republican.[38] While both parties enjoy an overwhelming majority of support in certain counties, the problem for Democrats is that they claim far fewer of these counties than Republicans; theirs just house a lot more voters.

While Democratic votes are becoming more concentrated in urban centers, the total number of counties that they carry in presidential contests is ebbing substantially. The Atlantic columnist Ronald Brownstein explained the phenomenon in his recap of the 2016 election:

In both 1992 and 1996, [Bill Clinton] carried nearly half of America’s 3,100 counties. But since then, Democrats have retreated into the nation’s urban centers. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but carried fewer than 700 counties. In 2012, President Obama squeezed even more advantage from the biggest places: He carried 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including the District of Columbia), winning them by nearly 12 million votes combined. That allowed him to win comfortably, although he carried only about 600 of the remaining 3,000 counties, and lost them by nearly 7 million votes combined. Clinton has won only about 420 counties total — far fewer than any popular vote winner over the past century.[39]

Hillary Clinton’s final county count wound up at 472 to Trump’s 2,584, per the Brooking’s Institute. Her tally is more than one thousand counties fewer than her husband carried just two decades earlier. Consider it a tale of two Clintons. As for Joe Biden, he put 477 counties in the win column, about 400 fewer than his former boss amassed in 2008. The land lag is also troublesome for Democrats down-ballot, perhaps even more so. In the upcoming Congressional term, Democrats will represent 51 percent of all House seats but just 16 percent of the nation’s land area, the smallest geographic footprint of any majority in modern history.[40] Geography changed the game for Democrats, and it did so in a hurry. Having votes heavily concentrated in small land area presents unique challenges for the party, and puts them at a profound disadvantage against their Republican rivals.

Democrats would have little problem if it were not for the uniquely American technicalities architecting our electoral system. “In most democracies,” writes political scientist Jonathan Rodden in his book Why Cities Lose, “the path to victory is simple: win more votes than your competitors. For the Democratic Party in the United States, however, this is not good enough.”[41] The reason is because the United States does not fully subscribe to majoritarianism. That is to say, 50.1 percent on its own is not a guarantee. Our electoral system is predicated on geographic units, all of which reward sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones. Evidence in the Senate is the equal power wield of California and Wyoming; in the House, it is due to the way districts are drawn; with the White House, it’s the Electoral College. In a glaring analysis, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver estimates the average state is six points more Republican than the average voter.[42] While gerrymandering is a cause, it would be unjust for Democrats to entirely dismiss this problem as a ploy from nefarious Republicans. Jonathan Rodden explains why:

In many US states, Democrats are now concentrated in cities in such a way that even when districts are drawn without regard for partisanship, their seat share will fall well short of their vote fair share. It matters a great deal how the districts are drawn, and by whom, but because of where Democrats live, the very existence of winner-take-all geographic districts has facilitated the systemic underrepresentation of Democrats.[43]

All this can be summarized with the classic real estate maxim: Location is everything. And barring a spate of radical structural changes, which would need to include Constitutional amendments, this is not going to change. It is therefore vital for Democrats to acquire ample votes in areas where the birds chirp and the kids play.

The Physical Path to Victory

As the country’s urban-rural Cold War endures, Democrats need to transcend that polarization, at least to a degree. Blue victory parades run through purple and faint red suburbs. “A pronounced suburban shift toward one party would be a decisive change in the partisan balance that could reshape American politics for a generation,” says Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston. Underscoring the importance of suburbanites, he notes that their “share of the Democratic presidential total has risen to 52 percent from 40 percent while the party’s urban vote share remained stable and its rural share collapsed.”[44] The trends are more pronounced in congressional elections, according to Boston College political scientist David Hopkins:

The share of Democratic House seats in predominantly suburban districts rose to 60 percent in 2018 from 41 percent in 1992, while the share in rural districts fell to 5 percent from 24 percent. The share of Democratic senators from predominantly suburban states rose to 79 percent from 55 percent while the share from rural states fell to 6 percent from 28 percent.[45]

While city dwellers remain stalwart allies, they do not constitute an outright majority for the Democrats, so finding success in the suburbs is nonnegotiable. Thus, a compact is necessary between the progressive and moderate wings — call it the non-physical path to victory.

Productive Coexistence

Here lies the crux of this entire report. The key for Democrats to achieve optimal electoral success is resolving the internecine battle between progressives and moderates through a productive coexistence. With neither faction willing or able to separate from the other and still win elections, a dynamic where each side can harness the other’s strengths would be beneficial and probably imperative. “Leftists and moderates, stop fighting. You need one another,” says Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times.[46] To evolve and improve as a unit, each side of the Democratic fissure would benefit from introspection.

For the progressive wing, it involves brooding over two difficult truths. The first is that the country, as a whole, is not as liberal as they think or care to admit. A 2019 nationwide Gallup poll supported the long trend of more people self-identifying as conservative and moderate than liberal, with 37 percent claiming conservative to 35 percent moderate and just 24 percent liberal.[47] Moreover, the second truth, closely related to the first, is summed up nicely by Michelle Goldberg. “The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative,” she writes.[48] Again, location is everything.

Now, with those two truths registered, progressives need to evaluate their problematic culture. Whether fair or unfair, a large chunk of America attributes noxious culture to “leftists,” and as a result, this culture is tied to the party as a whole. It is an in-your-face, aggressively condescending style of play. Comedian Bill Maher, who is an outspoken Democrat himself, offered this message to his party in the wake of last month’s election results:

The message to Democrats from so much of the country seems to be, ‘we don’t like Trump, but we still can’t bring ourselves to vote for you.’ Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable, or ask, ‘what is it about a D next to candidate’s name that makes it so toxic?’ Democrats often come across as not having common sense to a huge swath of Americans; Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social justice warrior woke bulls — t story in the news.[49]

Empirical evidence would suggest many Americans are tired of walking on egg shells for fear of ostracization, tired of the omnipresent prosecutorial labels of “racist” and “bigot,” and tired of the hypocritical flouting of free speech. Now is it fair to throw these behaviors entirely into the lap of the progressive left? Maybe not, but American politics is binary in nature, and each side generally has to own all their contributors, at least voters see it that way. If the Republicans own QAnoners, the Democrats own statue-topplers and the vicious you-made-a-mistake-so-you-should-lose-your-livelihood cancelers.

For all the democratic-socialism talk and lionizing of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when the dust settled on the 2018 elections — a much better showing for Democrats than last month — the House’s moderate New Democrat Coalition swore in forty new members, making it the largest caucus in the Democratic Party.[50] That’s because most Democrats are reformers, not revolutionaries; they seek to improve capitalism, not purge it with socialism.

As far as the introspection for moderates is concerned, it involves acknowledging this truth: In most races, including the White House, winning requires the progressives’ votes. After the 2020 primaries, individuals like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were loyal soldiers, putting aside their disappointment to rally voters whom Joe Biden might not have reached. The Democratic Party simply can’t afford to alienate the liberal frondeurs inspired by the Squad and company.

For progressives and moderates, the solution does not have to be a unifying message. After all, a one-size-fits-all national message may not be possible for the Democratic Party. Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, put the problem this way:

The Democratic Party’s intraparty schism is closely tied to the nationalization of Congressional elections. What works in local campaigns between urban, suburban and rural areas cannot be neatly packaged into a one-size-fits-all national message. You end up with this tension between what drives national media coverage and donations, and what actually works on the ground for a particular district’s constituents. This is part and parcel of the breadth and heterogeneity of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.[51]

For this reason, the party faces vexing complexities in developing strategies, and there is no obvious way to ameliorate the issue. An anonymous Democratic strategist took to the New York Times with the following ideas:

I do think that defund the police and socialism hurt in Trump-leaning swing districts with more culturally conservative swing voters, but it’s not clear what one can do about it as you can’t reject your own base. You do need progressive politicians to be a bit more “OK” with centrists denouncing their own base. And you need centrist politicians being OK that the grass roots will have ideas that they don’t like. This all needs to be more of a ‘wink wink do what you need to do’ arrangement, but it’s not there right now — it’s all too raw and divisive. We need to extend the tent and extend the map further in some way — out of necessity. That’s where I sympathize with the centrists. You also need a strong, passionate, determined base. That’s where I sympathize with the progressives.[52]

An auspicious path to victory for Democrats starts with effective messaging. This means messaging that combats the partisan fusillade launched by Republicans while simultaneously causing as little damage to your own side as possible. It is meant to attract voters, not deter them. In an interview with The Root, an anonymous Democratic Midwest House member put it plainly: “People don’t know who we are or what we stand for. Once we tell people, they say ‘Great! I didn’t know that you all were doing that.’ But we don’t do it well. We don’t let people know who we are and what we stand for.”[53]

Through all the challenges the Democratic Party faces, the bottom line is simple. Moderates need the progressives to widen their scope for opportunity and pump voters with enthusiasm. Progressives need moderates to exert power in a large, heterogenous country with a built-in proclivity for territorial influence. Reclaiming the soul of the Democratic Party, therefore, requires both these wings quelling their disputatious conduct in favor of a productive coexistence.

Endnotes

[1] Edsall, “The Far Left Is the Republicans’ Finest Asset.”

[2] Tavernise, “Democrats’ ‘Blue Wave’ Crashed in Statehouses Across the Country.”

[3] Brownstein, “A Cold War Between Red and Blue America.”

[4] Werner and Bade, “Centrist House Democrats Lash out at Liberal Colleagues, Blame Far-Left Views for Costing the Party Seats.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] Siegel, “‘It Was a Failure’: House Democrats Grapple over Surprise 2020 Losses.”

[7] Werner and Bade, “Centrist House Democrats Lash out at Liberal Colleagues, Blame Far-Left Views for Costing the Party Seats.”

[8] Manchin, Twitter Post.

[9] Ocasio-Cortez, Twitter Post.

[10] Omar, Twitter Post.

[11] Madison, Federalist №10

[12] Rauf, Washington’s Farewell Address

[13] Klein, Why We’re Polarized, 26.

[14] Bacon, “The Issues That Divide People Within Each Party.”

[15] Ibid.

[16] Gilberstadt and Daniller, “Liberals Make up the Largest Share of Democratic Voters, but Their Growth Has Slowed in Recent Years.”

[17] Casselman, “Democrats Love Free College, Until You Offer Them More Options.”

[18] Ibid.

[19] “Monthly Harvard-Harris Poll: January 2018 Re-Field.”

[20] Bacon, “The Issues That Divide People Within Each Party.”

[21] Ibid.

[22] Bacon, “The Six Wings Of The Democratic Party.”

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Platform of the Democratic Party, 1996.

[27] Platform of the Democratic Party, 2020.

[28] Khalid, “Democrats Used To Talk About ‘Criminal Immigrants,’ So What Changed The Party?”

[29] Ibid.

[30] Klein, “White Threat in a Browning America.”

[31] Cillizza, “Half of Americans Think the Democratic Party Has Moved Too Far Left.”

[32] Ibid.

[33] Cramer, The Politics of Resentment.

[34] Van Dyk, “The Democrats’ Biggest Problem Is Cultural.”

[35] Gillespie, “Nick Cave Slams ‘Woke’ Culture as ‘Self-Righteous’ and Suppressive.”

[36] Wasserman, “Purple America Has All But Disappeared.”

[37] Ibid.

[38] Klein, Why We’re Polarized, 38.

[39] Brownstein, “How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country.”

[40] Wasserman, Twitter Post.

[41] Rodden, Why Cities Lose.

[42] Silver, “‘Likely Voter’ Gap Favors G.O.P. by 6 Points; Gallup’s Model Sees It Bigger.”

[43] Rodden, Why Cities Lose, 11.

[44] Galston, “Democrats Move Left, but the Center Holds.”

[45] Hopkins, “The Democrats Don’t Have the Suburbs Sewn Up Yet.”

[46] Goldberg, “Leftists and Moderates, Stop Fighting. You Need One Another.”

[47] Saad, “The U.S. Remained Center-Right, Ideologically, in 2019.”

[48] Goldberg, “Leftists and Moderates, Stop Fighting. You Need One Another.”

[49] Tapp, “Bill Maher Jabs At Trump, But Rips Democrats For Trying To Seize Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory,”

[50] Skelley, “The House Will Have Just As Many Moderate Democrats As Progressives Next Year.”

[51] Edsall, “The Far Left is the Republicans’ Finest Asset.”

[52] Ibid.

[53] Starr, “Democrats Have a Messaging Problem. Will They Do the Work to Fix It?”

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