While mulling some recent material from The Bulwark, I thought I’d explain something to the converted “Never Trumpers” the outlet represents, and did so at New York:
For a while now I’ve had a guilty-pleasure reading habit: The Bulwark, that semi-official outlet of Never Trumpers who view themselves as having definitively broken with the GOP thanks to their former party’s thralldom to Donald J. Trump. I share its contributors’ belief that they (the tribe usefully described by Miller as Red Dog Democrats) represent not just a self-promoting claque of elite scribblers but a real if marginal faction of the Democratic Party, having burned a lot of bridges on their way out of the GOP. Their views appear to parallel those of a significant number of suburban Republicans and independents who voted Democratic in 2018 and 2020. And given the very close balance between voters of the two parties, as reflected most recently in 2020, Democrats really can’t afford to contemptuously reject any potential adherents, however alien or even repugnant they might find their backgrounds.
So it’s understandable when Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes expresses frustration that Democrats refuse to consider their pleas for policy concessions on grounds of holding old grudges:
“The spending. The wokeness. The repeal of the Hyde Amendment. I could go on …
“These are difficult times for folks on the center-right, who’ve tried to join Democrats in a loose alliance to protect the Republic from Trumpism …
“Litmus tests are applied: it’s not enough to be pro-democracy, NTers are also expected to embrace the elements of the progressive agenda — from free community college, to abortion, rent moratoriums, police funding, transgenderism, CRT, social spending, and the candidacy of Greta Thunberg for sainthood.”
Sykes fears it’s all very personal, and warns, “If you cancel moderates/conservatives for their past sins, you don’t have a coalition.”
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not really about the Red Dogs. Yes, I’m sure it’s been tough for them to watch Democrats largely come together around a legislative program that’s significantly more progressive than the one advanced by the Obama administration. But Democrats have been coalescing around the basics of the Build Back Better agenda for some time now. That the famously moderate Joe Biden now embraces it is a sign of how the party has slowly evolved, not some sort of betrayal or surrender to the left. And anyone who paid close attention to the 2020 presidential primaries should have understood that there is less distance between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders than between Joe Biden and the Joe Biden of the 1990s.
Part of what has happened is simply a resolution of internal conflicts among Democrats that left them defensive and at times incoherent. A classic example is one that Sykes mentioned: abortion policy. For years, Democrats claimed to value reproductive rights even as they accepted significant limitations on them: e.g., the Hyde Amendment, which made abortion services, unlike any other medical services, ineligible for any sort of federal support. That amendment, along with acceptance of some largely symbolic restrictions on rare late-term abortions, and the whole “safe, legal, and rare” messaging introduced by Bill Clinton, represented concessions to a significant bloc of Democratic voters and Democratic pols who did not recognize reproductive rights at all.
That has changed over time. Anti-abortion Democratic politicians are a rare and shrinking breed, and there are now significantly fewer anti-abortion Democratic voters than there are pro-choice Republicans. Most Democrats, including Joe Biden, have made the leap into a more coherent and unified position. They aren’t going to turn back the clock to satisfy ex-Republicans, but they aren’t insisting on a “litmus test” just to annoy or exclude them, either. The same could be said for other policy tenets once beloved by a significant number of Democrats — from fiscal hawkishness to armed interventionism to an openness to “entitlement reform” — that remain attractive to the newest proto-Democrats. As for the idea that Democrats are some sort of rigid ideological cult: Come on, seriously? Look at what’s going on with the attempted enactment of the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. If this is an intolerant and exclusive political party, I’d hate to see a loosey-goosey one try to function. It may just be that the issues Red Dogs fret about may lie outside the still relatively loose bounds of party unity.
This doesn’t mean Red Dogs should despair, but it may mean another painful reevaluation of priorities, recognizing that most have already had to sacrifice a lot of old allegiances and even the habitual language used to make sense of the political world. In many respects, the Never Trumpers resemble their spiritual (and in some cases biological) predecessors, the neo-conservatives. These were people who broke with the Democratic Party out of a conviction that Democratic views on national security made continued party loyalty impossible. But most of them retained many views that horrified their new Republican allies until they accepted the inevitable role of a factional minority and grew to accommodate or even share the policy positions and ideological language of the GOP, which was increasingly dominated by conservatives with their own ideological-consistency demands.
Most Red Dogs have no illusions about the party they’ve left and understand their constituencies are too small to form a third force or demand concessions from a position of strength. Most, I suppose, will get used to the strange and sometimes lurid landscape of the Donkey Party. Others will embrace the posture of the gadfly, the people of no party or coalition. But it’s really not personal. It’s just politics.
We have seen extreme views on the importance of the “moral values” response to an Exit Poll question. At first it was touted as the main explanation for Bush’s victory. Then the question itself was blasted as poorly framed and practically worthless.
In fact, the question was a useful one for identifying a large and important component of Bush supporters, though it probably did not make the difference between 2000 and 2004, which was largely due to Bush’s connection to 9/11 and fighting terrorism.
But criticisms of the question as invalid miss the mark. It not only showed a large difference between Bush and Kerry voters in the main exit poll, but it did so in a comparison of open and closed questions in a Pew post-election poll, so the original finding was not just a function of question wording. Moreover, the claim that “moral values” was not an issue like the others asked about is incorrect. Was “terrorism” really an issue on which the two candidates differed? Hardly. What the choice of “terrorism” by Bush voters indicated was their view of character: Bush as a strong leader, just as moral values also was taken to indicate character, Bush as a faith-based President. Neither response was an “issue” in the sense that taxes was an issue.
Competing in terms of “moral values” will be important for a future Democratic candidate.
We have seen extreme views on the importance of the “moral values” response to an Exit Poll question. At first it was touted as the main explanation for Bush’s victory. Then the question itself was blasted as poorly framed and practically worthless.
In fact, the question was a useful one for identifying a large and important component of Bush supporters, though it probably did not make the difference between 2000 and 2004, which was largely due to Bush’s connection to 9/11 and fighting terrorism.
But criticisms of the question as invalid miss the mark. It not only showed a large difference between Bush and Kerry voters in the main exit poll, but it did so in a comparison of open and closed questions in a Pew post-election poll, so the original finding was not just a function of question wording. Moreover, the claim that “moral values” was not an issue like the others asked about is incorrect. Was “terrorism” really an issue on which the two candidates differed? Hardly. What the choice of “terrorism” by Bush voters indicated was their view of character: Bush as a strong leader, just as moral values also was taken to indicate character, Bush as a faith-based President. Neither response was an “issue” in the sense that taxes was an issue.
Competing in terms of “moral values” will be important for a future Democratic candidate.
The point about the moral values issue is NOT that it led to a wholesale win by Bush. Rather, the issue motivated people to come out who would not have come out otherwise. Remember, the election was close. A small increase in turnout was all that was needed.
If it motivated an additional 20,000-30,000 to come out, that would be important.
Martin – One answer to your lead-off question is that the largest demographic gain for Bush over his 2000 count was white women. He added about 4 million white women voters to his 2004 popular vote total, which is one way to explain his margin of victory. Other recent studies suggest that these were mostly married women. It would be interesting to know the class breakdown of these women and to get some idea of the issues that motivated them.
I second Mark Fine’s request. Tell us, if it wan’t the Jesusland people who put Bush into office, what crazies did so?
I admire and respect Ruy’s statistical analyses, but I think maybe the Democrats have gone a little overboard in looking at statistics. The same set of statistics can yield a dozen sets of conclusions.
I believe the definitive study that needs to be done will ask a lot of people these questions to gain some valuable qualitative data: did you hear Kerry’s message, did you understand his message, did you believe his message, and if you did all this, was that message or was it not important to you? Why or why not?
I simply cannot understand how rational people could vote for a man who has not really done anything to reduce tensions (he has played upon them and, if anything, increased them), improved the economy, brought any noticeable compassion to his task as he said he would, or been the “unifier” he said he would be.
Does this mean about 50% of the electorate is NOT rational? The explanation of the evangelical and theocon votes going to Bush, blocs that are not necessarily rational or pragmatic, made for a very pat explanation. If not that, then what was it?
Get that study going, somebody.
I think that the backlash against the moral values thesis has been too extreme. “Moral values” is ambiguous, of course, but the fact of the matter is that President Bush received 80% of the votes of the 22% who said that moral values was their most important issue. That suggests that a sizable number of voters interpreted moral values as meaning gay marriage, abortion, etc.