They Love the Highly Educated!
Today’s Democratic party is in love! I explain at The Liberal Patriot:
“In 2022, it appears that white college graduate voters are reporting for duty once again. These voters are less sensitive to economic problems and more likely to be moved by a social issue like abortion rights, which looms large in their world view. In short, they are the perfect voters for Democrats in the current environment.
An average of the last month of public polls (where crosstabs are available) finds Democrats leading the generic ballot among white college graduates by 12 points while trailing among white working class (noncollege) voters by 25 points. Hispanic margins for the Democrats are about half what they were in the last midterm and lag behind 2020 as well, which was a relatively poor year for the Democrats among this group.
Similarly, a merge of 2022 NBC polling data finds Democrats leading the generic among white women college graduates by an astounding 27 points while getting crushed among white working class women by 22 points. Now that’s a gap.”
Read the rest at The Liberal Patriot. And subscribe!
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TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 19: Will Chaos of Chicago ’68 Return This Year?
A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Gaza isn’t Vietnam.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
Political conventions are different today.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
Here is something that would help our cause:
PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS
If you like to call yourself a liberal, please don’t. It does not help the Democratic party by using that term publicly.
“Liberal” is a terribly self-defeating word. It has negative connotations from the 1960’s-70’s when it was associated with liberal spending on welfare programs, culminating in the 80’s with Reagan’s assertion that black “Welfare Queens are driving Cadillac’s.”
Liberals created welfare and over time it has been associated with being too free with spending the government’s money. Most Americans do agree that we should be conservative in managing our own personal finances as well as the government’s use of our tax money.
It is more difficult to convince an undecided independent voter by using the term “liberal” than by replacing that term with one that carries a lot less negative baggage, “Progressive.”
Progressive is a much better term because its meaning is associated with the only constant law in the universe, which is “change.” Progressive or change-minded means we should not keep repeating the policies of the past over and over, as “Regressives” (Republicans) are wont to do. To achieve a better society, we need to have policies which “progress” along with the advancement of the constantly changing times. When progressive policies don’t keep up with the changing times, Republican “regressive” actions result, and we stay stuck in the past.
Now let me make it perfectly clear that I am not apologizing for being a liberal.
I am a proud liberal and it is o.k. to use that term among us.
But when we are talking to people, who’s politics we do not know,
I strongly recommend we use the term Progressive.
The truth is that there really
is no difference in the meaning of the two terms.
But, “Progressive,” will get us more votes.
Lyndon Johnson’s quipped, “Democrats look ahead through the windshield while Republicans continue to gaze in the rearview mirror.” “True, true, true”, as Harry Truman was fond of saying.
So, I would ask that all Democrats (candidates and activists) stop using the word “liberal” and in its place, always use the term “progressive.” And to drive the point home, we need to stop referring to Republicans as Conservatives and call them REGRESSIVES. Because they truly “are always looking in the rear-view mirror.”
This is not just a matter of semantics. It is a matter of dead serious political consequence. It is an important sociological fact which affects voting behavior consciously or unconsciously. And semantics aside, isn’t it true that only voting behavior matters!
It might take a while before the word “regressive” is absorbed into our lexicon. But if we all keep using it, it will.
WORDS MATTER.
WORDS ARE POWERFUL,
MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SWORD.
Wendell H. Williams
Former Democratic Nominee
U.S. Congress (CA10)
Does anyone believe a product is new or improved just because the ad agency printed “New! Improved!” on the wrapper? The term “liberal” became pejorative because liberal policies failed on issues like crime, education, inflation, taxation, illegal immigration and energy. If we offer the voters the same policies under a new label, the term “progressive” will soon be as pejorative as “liberal” has become.
No Democrat in a competitive race calls himself or herself a “liberal” or a “progressive.” They know, if they have any sense, that the only political labels that matter for winning or losing elections are “Republicans” and “Democrats.” The relatively low-information voters and swing voters who decide competitive elections have little or no clear conception of the meaning of “liberal,” “progressive,” “left-wing” “right-wing,” “fascist” or “semi-fascist.” They just know they’ll have a choice between “Republicans” and “Democrats.”
That fact calls for GENERIC anti-Republican attack ads and messaging as the focus of Democratic campaigning. Ads that damage the Republican BRAND as a whole. Here in Pennsylvania we’re seeing a constant barrage of John Fetterman campaign ads attacking Dr. Oz for his personal weaknesses — his mansions, his super-rich lifestyle, his not being a Pennsylvanian. All legitimate attacks. But they don’t help other Democrats running in competitive Pennsylvania races, including state legislative candidates whose names swing voters will never recognize.
A barrage of generic anti-Republican attack ads that damage the Republican brand and use the term “Republican” to define those who will deny women and girls the ability to make decisions about abortion and their personal lives and who will empower and protect the super-rich would help Democrats up and down the ticket.
The simple message “Republicans say it’s not your body, it’s theirs. Vote them out” defines the choice for midterm voters, especially women, suburbanites and young people, as well as any pro-Democratic message could. And it uses the term that matters most — “Republicans.”
We might see that type of ad from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund or similar groups this fall. But we’re not seeing them here so far. And we need to.
So basically, it will come down to turnout. If white college grads turn out in higher numbers, the way they usually do, and non college whites turn in lower rates, the way they usually do, then it’s a major advantage for the Democrats.