The following article by Gannon University History professor Jefff Bloodworth is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Riffraff. The Masses. Hoi Polloi. Working Class. The Silent Majority. The Great Unwashed.

“The People” have many synonyms. But “Middle American” best describes the demographic upon which every national election swings. Legendary Columbia University sociologist Herbert Gans defines Middle Americans as lower middle and working-class families between the thirty-first and seventy-first income percentiles. They are the working stiffs who are average in jobs, income, and schooling; a high school educated clerk or truck driver, of any race—that’s a Middle American. And Democrats have steadily lost them.

A broader grouping than working class, income alone does not define a Middle American. In his 1989 classic, Middle American Individualism, Gans outlined how income and a “popular individualism” renders them a distinct class. Reared in environments of economic insecurity, Middle Americans prize personal economic security more than anything. Their pursuit of economic autonomy is defined by self-reliance and an individualist ethos. These values and sensibilities are key to understanding Middle America’s political behavior.

Politically, Middle Americans support a version of “moral capitalism.” Moral capitalism is not socialism; Middle Americans think free enterprise and rugged individualism are just fine so long as labor receives a fair share. But any system that shortchanges labor loses legitimacy in Middle America and risks populist uprisings.

Moral capitalism was born on the nineteenth century populist frontier, and it subsequently evolved into the organizing principle that held rural and urban Democrats together. Moral capitalism was the philosophical basis of the Populist movement in the 1890s. Rejecting small government orthodoxy, populists looked to the state to make the urban, industrial economic order into a moral political economy. When markets failed, moral capitalists sought state interventions—but ones that reflected their individualist code. Social Security exemplifies this attitude: funded by dedicated payroll taxes, to Middle Americans the program is an earned benefit and not welfare.

Harry S. Truman’s GI Bill and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Medicare program followed the script Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote with Social Security. “Earned benefits,” recipients served in the military or labored a lifetime to merit eligibility. Not coincidentally, these programs are politically sacrosanct with most Middle Americans.

Oxford University historian Gareth Davies calls this underlying bargain “opportunity liberalism.” The state provides citizens equality of opportunity. Individuals offer grit and labor. And Middle Americans rewarded Democrats with votes.

By founding federal activism and social insurance programs on Middle American individualism, opportunity liberals defeated laissez-faire conservatism and created a liberal political consensus. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, entitlement liberals gained the political upper hand inside Democratic politics and policy circles. Seeking equality of results, they pushed a guaranteed income and single-payer healthcare as well as an array of unearned benefits. Moral capitalism, however, cuts both ways: Middle Americans revolt against economic systems andpolitical ideologies that ignore the bond between labor and economic security. Middle Americans came to distrust a liberalism that, in their eyes, dispensed unearned benefits. To them, it was not a moral capitalism, and many turned right as result.

Middle American was once rightfully synonymous with working-class whites. In 1975, nearly nine of ten Middle Americans were white, and in 1980 and 1984 Ronald Reagan won an average 61 percent of the white working-class vote. Because Middle America comprised two-thirds of the entire electorate, Reagan won in landslides. Post-1965 immigration, however, has remade American and Middle American demography. In 1980, whites were 80 percent of the overall population; today, that number has fallen to 60 percent. Indeed, almost half of today’s Middle Americans are non-white. These demographic changes have transformed American politics.

Bill Clinton combined a rising non-white population with the educated middle class, women, and enough white Middle Americans to win the presidency twice. He did so by emphasizing work and opportunity. In effect, he pushed opportunity liberalism back to the party’s rhetorical center.

Read more…

The following article,  “The key to messaging is repetition. These are the messages Democrats should repeat relentlessly” by Matthew Smith, is cross-posted from Daily Kos:

Mass-market messaging is all about repetition and consistency—telling the same story over and over till it finally sinks in with a media-deluged public. It’s the principle behind the famous “Rule of 7” in advertising (your audience has to hear your message at least seven times before they’ll consider buying your product). It’s why ads are repeated so often on TV or YouTube that we get sick of seeing them. And, of course, it’s the basis of Goebbels’s Big Lie (If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it).

Conservatives have learned this lesson too well. We all know the Republican Party’s brand, because every Republican, from Congress to city councils, sounds exactly the same: “freedom,” “liberty,” the Constitution, “family values,” blah, blah, till we’re sick of hearing it. When they find a meme that works for them (“woke,” trans hate, Hunter Biden), they seize on it with a groupthink that’s honestly a little creepy. They know that simply by endless repetition they can create their own reality, persuading millions of Americans to believe even stone-cold lies—for example:

• Republicans are the party of freedom, Christian values, and fiscal restraint.
• The Second Amendment is about owning a gun for your own personal use.
• The election was rigged.
• Democrats are radical socialists who hate America.

Clearly, repetition in political messaging is a powerful tool.

Now ask yourself: What messages do Democrats repeat so often you’re sick of hearing them?

If an answer doesn’t immediately spring to mind (and it won’t), that’s an issue. It means, for one thing, that persuadable voters may not have a clear idea of who Democrats are and what we stand for. For another, if we’re not constantly, relentlessly telling Americans who we are, then we allow conservatives to define our party for us. And they are.

Democrats have inspiring, powerful messages to tell, and plenty of time to make our case. But it has to be a coordinated effort at message domination. From now till Election Day, we need to tell those messages so often that voters beg us to stop. They should be short, simple, values-based messages that solidify our party’s brand and define our core beliefs.

What should those messages be? What reality do we want to create? One would hope Democratic leaders are answering those questions now, but if not, here are a few suggestions (If you have other or better ideas, please post them in the comments):

PRIMARY MESSAGES

DEMOCRATS MAKE PEOPLE’S LIVES BETTER.

This strikes me as the party’s most powerful and appealing message. But it can’t just be implied by our policies. It needs to be stated explicitly, and it needs to come from everyone, always.

Talking points:

• By all means tout the many, many accomplishments of President Biden and the Democrats, BUT tie those policies explicitly to our brand: The Democratic Party’s mission is making people’s lives better. It’s what Democrats do and what we stand for.
• We don’t just talk about making people’s lives better—we’ve been doing it for nearly a hundred years. Virtually every major improvement in our country’s quality of life has come from Democrats, including:
  • Social Security and Medicare
  • Affordable health care
  • The very idea of a minimum wage and getting paid for overtime
  • Unemployment insurance
  • Civil rights and workplace rights for women, people of color, and LGBTQ
  • Credit card reforms and consumer protections
  • And so much more
• We’re the party of compassion and caring. Our primary goals are to alleviate hardship and suffering and to improve the basic quality of life for all Americans.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS UNFIT TO GOVERN. VOTE THEM OUT. ALL OF THEM.

Because negative messages work too. President Biden has very effectively made speeches about the conservative threat to democracy. But an occasional speech won’t get the job done. Every Democratic politician needs to repeat the message at every media opportunity, campaign stop, and debate.

Talking points:

• This election is truly a battle for the soul of America. Ultraconservatism and its slavish devotion to Donald Trump has become an actual destructive force in America. It is a toxic ideology that poses a real and immediate danger to American democracy and the principles we have stood for for almost 250 years. Republicans have proven it by:
  • Trying to overturn a free and fair election, fomenting a riot at the Capitol, and preventing the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history
  • Passing laws making it harder to vote
  • Fomenting pointless culture wars that pit Americans against one another
  • Spreading outrageous conspiracy theories
  • Refusing to do anything about gun violence
  • Undermining people’s faith in elections, a free press, science, law enforcement, the rule of law, and government itself
  • Praising the authoritarian regime in Hungary as an example for America and threatening to withdraw support for Ukraine
  • Banning books
  • Threatening financial default and government shutdowns
• Nothing gets better without change. And nothing will change until every last Republican is out of office.
• Conservative policies toward the poor are immoral, cruel, un-American, un-Christian, irreligious, and inhumane.
• Conservatism is a timid ideology based on fear. Republicans are afraid of new ideas and anyone who isn’t just like them. Don’t live in fear, and stop electing politicians who tell you that you should.
• Conservatives have stopped listening to Americans. Polls show strong majorities of Americans agree with Democrats on virtually every important issue.

SECONDARY MESSAGES

OUR POSITION ON [X] IS BASED ON DEEPLY HELD AMERICAN VALUES.

Whenever Democrats do talk about policies, they should always, always relate them to traditional American principles. Don’t just make intellectual arguments; appeal to voters’ emotions—their patriotism and national pride.

Talking points:

• Democrats passionately believe in the values established in America’s founding documents:
  • All of us are created equal.
  • All of us have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  • Liberty includes, as Roosevelt said, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear.
• Explicitly relate every policy to the core values behind it. For example:
  • Gun safety: The unalienable right to life, freedom from fear
  • Civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights: Equality, personal liberty, the right to pursue happiness
  • Poverty and income inequality: Equality, fairness, freedom from want, the right to pursue happiness and the American Dream

DEMOCRATS FIGHT FOR THE UNDERDOG.

Talking points:

• We fight for everyone who needs a voice in America—workers and their families, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ people, voters having their rights taken away.
• It’s not about “identity politics” or “class warfare,” it’s about living up to the American ideals of equal opportunity, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

DEMOCRATS BELIEVE IN AMERICA’S FUTURE.

Talking points:

• America is doing well. We are the greatest, richest, most powerful nation on earth, respected and admired around the world. We believe America can do anything we set our minds to. We can create the society we want.

• We are the party of optimism and progress—the only party with a vision for the future and a better way of life for America. Republicans have no vision for the future and nothing to offer but divisive culture wars and a dark, apocalyptic view of our country.

  Reasonable Democrats may have disagreements about the specifics of message content. But Smith is surely right that Democrats can profit from better message discipline, repetition and, especially coordination.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

As the 2024 election approaches, Democrats have a three-point plan for their challenging quest to re-elect Joe Biden, take back the House, and defend their razor-thin Senate majority. The first two points one might characterize as the Democrats’ version of the culture war: (1) relentless attacks on Republicans’ association with abortion restrictionism, usually portrayed as a GOP drive to ban the procedure entirely; and (2) equally relentless attacks on the Republicans as destroyers of democracy, from Trump’s and his supporters’ “election denialism” to “MAGA” movement rhetoric and legislation said to be subverting democracy across the country.

The theory is that these attacks will neutralize and then some Republican messages on crime, immigration, race, gender and schools, where Democrats are easily associated with genuinely unpopular positions. The 2022 elections and special elections since are believed to provide a precedent for this approach. But then we have the third prong of the Democratic strategy: a bold attempt to sell Democrats’ stewardship of the economy as “Bidenomics.”

On one level, this can only be described as chutzpah. A massive tranche of poll findings uniformly find the public extremely unhappy with the state of the economy. In a particularly brutal recent poll from Washington Post/ABC News, Biden receives a dreadful 30 percent approval rating on handling the economy. It’s instructive to break this down by working class (noncollege) vs. college educated. Working-class respondents give Biden a 24 percent approval rating on the economy, way below the comparatively respectable 43 percent rating among the more upscale college educated group. Since Bidenomics has been explicity pitched as a way to build working-class enthusiasm for Biden’s candidacy, this signals a rather big problem with the strategy.

Similarly, the Post poll finds a mere 25 percent characterizing the national economy positively (excellent or good), with just half as many (19 percent) feeling that way among the working class as among the college educated (38 percent). And a rock-bottom 14 percent of working-class respondents say their personal financial situation is better now than when Biden took office, compared to 50 percent who say they are actually worse off.

The second wave of The Liberal Patriot/YouGov (TLP/YouGov) 2024 presidential election project was completed in early September, including interviews with more than 3000 registered voters. These new data flesh out how and why Bidenomics has been such a flop with voters. Start with the issue of inflation. As we noted in our post yesterday, voters overwhelmingly feel that inflation is “still a very serious problem that is not improving,” with working-class voters particularly likely (68 percent) to feel that way.

These sentiments baffle Democrats who note that the rate of inflation has actually been falling and that unemployment is super-low. So why aren’t people, particularly workers, happy? It’s very simple as liberal economist James K. Galbraith has noted:

Unlike unemployment, inflation does affect everyone. But what matters to working people is not the monthly or yearly price change taken alone. What matters is the effect on purchasing power and living standards over time. Whether these are rising or falling depends on the relationship of prices to wages. When wage growth exceeds price increases, times are generally good. When it doesn’t, they aren’t.

It is here that Biden has a problem. During his presidency, living standards have not risen. From early 2021 to mid-2023, prices have increased more than wages, implying that real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages and real weekly earnings have fallen, on average. Not by much, but they have fallen. Worse, the average figure probably masks a larger fall, in real terms, for families that started out below the average. And given how income distributions work, there are always many more families earning less than the average than there are who earn more.

In other words, it is the trajectory of workers’ living standards, not  misinformation or media framing, that explains why they see the economy of the Biden administration in such jaundiced terms. And why they tend to think Trump actually did a better job managing the economy. In the new TLP/YouGov poll, working-class voters prefer Trump’s economic management as president by 20 points (55 percent to 35 percent), again contrasting with the college educated who prefer Biden’s performance by 9 points (51percent to 42 percent).

Given all this, it should not be surprising that the very term the Democrats are seeking to popularize—”Bidenomics”—is not striking a responsive chord. On the contrary, the lack of enthusiasm is deafening. In the TLP/YouGov survey, a mere 28 percent of working-class voters are willing to say they support Bidenomics, just 29 percent think Bidenomics will help their family financially, and scarcely more (32 percent) believe Bidenomics will help the overall economy.

Interestingly, Bidenomics support lags significantly behind support for specific legislative measures passed by the Biden administration, especially the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Since these were unaided questions—that is, no descriptions of the bills were given, just the names—voters may partially have been reacting to things they already feel positively about like “inflation reduction,” “bipartisan,” and “infrastructure,” rather than the content of the bills themselves. But that in itself is a clue to what voters are looking for. The term “Bidenomics,” on the other hand, with its absolutely inevitable association with economic conditions voters, especially working-class voters, detest seems perfectly designed to annoy voters, rather than win them over.

A new NBC poll shows Republicans currently favored over Democrats on handling the economy by an astounding 21 points, the largest lead Republicans have had on this measure since 1991. That tells you about how well the Bidenomics messaging campaign is working so far. The Democrats would be wise to try a different approach—one that doesn’t rely on telling voters they should be happy when they are not.

President Biden’s participation in a UAW picket line stands in stark relief to Trump’s shameful record of opposing worker rights at nearly every opportunity. The Communication Workers of America share the particulars in “Trump’s AntiWorker Record,” cross-posted here:

“At every turn Donald Trump and his appointees have made increasing the power of corporations over working people their top priority. The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long, and growing every day. Here are a few examples.

Trump has encouraged freeloaders, made it more difficult to enforce collective bargaining agreements, silenced workers and restricted the freedom to join unions:

• Trump has packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector “right to work for less” in an attempt to financially weaken unions by increasing the number of freeloaders.¹
• Trump has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers.²
• Trump has made it easier for employers to fire or penalize workers who speak up for better pay and working conditions or exercise the right to strike.³
• Trump promised to veto the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, historic legislation that will reverse decades of legislation meant to crush private sector unions and shift power away from CEOs to workers.⁴

Trump has restricted overtime pay, opposed wage increases, and gutted health and safety protections:

• Trump changed the rules about who qualifies for overtime pay, making more than 8 million workers ineligible and costing them over $1 billion per year in lost wages.⁵
• Trump has reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there are now fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations.⁶
• Trump threatened to veto legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour.⁷
• Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, is an anti-worker, union-busting corporate lawyer who aggressively defended Cablevision’s decision to fire 22 workers when they tried to win a contract with CWA.⁸

Trump has helped insurers reduce coverage and made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to inflate drug prices:

• Trump supports an ongoing lawsuit that would eliminate protections that ensure that health insurers can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.⁹
• Trump threatened to veto legislation to reduce prescription drug costs, even though last year the prices of over 3,000 drugs increased by an average of 10.5%.¹⁰
• Trump’s made protecting the profits of pharmaceutical companies a priority in NAFTA renegotiations.¹¹
• Trump’s proposed FY2021 budget would cut funding for Medicare.¹²

Trump has encouraged outsourcing and offshoring:

• Instead of supporting CWA’s bipartisan legislation to help save call center jobs, Trump pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that gives companies a 50% tax break on their foreign profits – making it financially rewarding for them to move our jobs overseas.¹³
• On two separate occasions, a group of Senators wrote Trump asking him to issue an executive order preventing federal contracts from going to companies that send call center jobs overseas, and CWA President Chris Shelton even asked him to do so during an in person during a meeting in the Oval Office. He never responded.¹⁴
• Trump has broken his campaign promise to take on companies that move good jobs overseas—instead, he’s given over $115 billion in federal contracts to companies that are offshoring jobs.¹⁵

Trump failed to prepare the nation for the COVID-19 pandemic, opposes hazard pay for essential workers, and has given employers a free pass to lower safety standards:

• Trump has failed to secure enough Personal Protective Equipment for essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis and has weakened protections for workers who are concerned about working in unsafe environments.¹⁶
• Trump refused to use the Defense Production Act to get our IUE-CWA manufacturing members back to work producing ventilators or PPE and instead used it to force meatpacking plants to open despite thousands of workers getting infected on the job in unsafe working conditions.¹⁷
• Trump promised to veto the Heroes Act, which would give essential workers premium “hazard” pay and expand paid leave and unemployment insurance for those impacted by the Coronavirus.¹⁸
• Trump has opposed providing aid to help state and local governments continue providing services and keep workers on payroll—he suggested instead that it might make sense to allow states to declare bankruptcy.¹⁹
• Trump’s OSHA has lowered standards meant to protect workers from getting sick at work and given employers a free pass if they fail to follow even those minimal requirements.²⁰

Notes

1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1466_2b3j.pdf
2. https://www.epi.org/blog/by-overturning-specialty-healthcare-the-nlrb-has-made-it-harder-for-workers-to-organize, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/13/progressives-blast-new-nlrb-union-elections-rule-betrays-workers-it-meant-protect, https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/joint-employer-rule-trump-nlrb-sides-corporations, https://www.epi.org/publication/unprecedented-the-trump-nlrbs-attack-on-workers-rights
3. https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4582cc8e3e, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/companies-get-ok-to-ban-work-email-for-use-in-union-organizing
4. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/SAP_HR-2474.pdf
5. https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2019-06-12%20Trump%20Administration%20Overtime%20Rule%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
6. https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/workplace-fatalities-rising-trump-osha-enforcement-declines, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/29/18197346/trump-labor-electronic-injury-reporting-rule
7. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/SAP_HR-582.pdf
8. https://cwa-union.org/news/cwa-members-are-ready-fight-for-workers-rights-against-new-trump-labor-secretary-scalia
9. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/trump-supreme-court-obamacare-240366
10. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/SAP_HR-3.pdf, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-prices-in-2019-are-surging-with-hikes-at-5-times-inflation
11. https://www.citizen.org/article/fact-sheet-big-pharma-rigged-the-revised-nafta-to-keep-drug-prices-high
12. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/medicare-trump.html
13. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/396288-the-gop-tax-bill-rewards-offshoring-heres-what-we-can-do
14. https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/senate-democrats-letter-trump-action-against-call-center-offshoring, https://thinkprogress.org/democrats-call-on-trump-to-address-offshoring-jobs-16599e1e81b6
15. http://goodjobsnation.org/trumps-state-of-the-union-185000-jobs-lost
16. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/4/21208122/ppe-distribution-trump-administration-states, https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Guidance%20Before%20Reopening%204-29-2020%20-%20FINAL%20cardin.pdf, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/14/cdc-guidance-reopening-coronavirus-259565
17. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74w7m/general-electric-workers-ask-trump-to-force-their-company-to-make-ventilators, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/28/trump-meat-plants-dpa
18. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SAP_H.R.-6800.pdf
19. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mcconnell-gop-states-declare-bankruptcy-coronavirus-aid-2020-4
20. https://www.rollcall.com/2020/05/21/afl-cio-labor-department-spar-over-workplace-safety-amid-covid-19“

 

From “Biden campaign is ramping up its strategy to win over Latino voters” by Allie Raffa at msnbcnews.com:

President Biden’s re-election campaign is ramping up its strategy this week to try to win over Latino voters, with plans to use Wednesday’s Republican primary debate in California as a backdrop for new efforts to gain support from a critical constituency, according to two senior campaign officials.

The campaign’s broader strategy includes tailored ads for Latino voters in battleground states using narrators with accents from their countries or regions of origin; messaging on television and digital platforms that are popular with Latinos; and standing up an early effort to counter misinformation aimed at Latino voters, which Democratic officials believe eroded some support for Biden among Latinos in 2020.

Raffa notes, further,

“The campaign’s new playbook comes as polling shows that enthusiasm among Latino voters is lagging. A new NBC News pollreleased this week found 51% of Latinos have a high interest in the election, compared with 73% of white voters. Overall, Latinos currently have a lower interest in the 2024 election than at this same point in past election cycles….One event, they said, will specifically focus on Latino men, whose support for Biden trails that of Latina women. A poll released Monday by Univision, a co-sponsor of the GOP debate, found that Biden leads Trump among Latino men 54% to 38%, while among Latina women his lead is much wider — 61% to 25%.”

….Biden has struggled to get his economic message to resonate with the majority of Americans, including Latinos, according to the new NBC News poll, which also showed Biden ahead of Trump among Latino voters by 51% to 39%….In the Univision poll, inflation and cost of living ranks first among the concerns of registered Latino voters. And they don’t see either party as having a clear plan to deal with those issues, 27% believing Biden does, and 22% believing Republicans do, according to the poll.

Raffa adds, “Shoring up Latino support, and voter turnout, could make the difference for Biden in key states in what’s expected to be a tight race, particularly if it’s a rematch between Biden and Republican front-runner, former President Donald Trump. While Biden overwhelmingly won among Latino voters in 2020, that year Trump gained more of their support than in the 2016 election.”

In addition, “Latinos were flooded with misinformation during the 2020 and 2022 elections. Some of the most powerful GOP campaign ads in those election cycles featured clips of Democratic candidates talking about progressive policies to try to link Democratic candidates to socialism and encourage Latinos who fled socialism in their home countries to vote Republican.”

Also, “Misinformation is still a massive problem that Republicans will continue to weaponize,” said Cardona. “Democrats have gotten much better at tracking the problem and responding in a timely manner, something we did not do enough of in 2020.”

Some ‘key points’ from “The Republicans’ ‘Excess Seat’ Edge in State Legislatures: Republicans punch above their weight compared to presidential results in more places than Democrats” by Louis Jacobson at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

“We analyzed 48 states to see which have the most lopsided state Senate and state House chambers compared to how the state voted for president.

Both parties have some states in which the legislative breakdown significantly exaggerates the patterns of the presidential vote.

For Democrats, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have the most “excess seats” above the presidential vote threshold. For Republicans, the list is both longer and more varied, with Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin standing out as at least somewhat competitive states where the Republicans have large excess seat advantages.

In all, Republicans have proven much more adept than Democrats at leveraging presidential vote patterns into even larger majorities in state legislative chambers. The GOP has achieved significant levels of excess seats in about three times as many states as the Democrats have.

Gerrymandering is one reason for this, but it probably doesn’t explain the exaggerated legislative majorities in many states. Rather, the phenomenon of excess seats appears to be a natural consequence of minority parties being doomed into irrelevance once they start consistently losing presidential and statewide races, sapping their ability to recruit candidates and build party infrastructure.”

Jacobson provides a useful hover map of the U.S., which gives the details for each of the 48 states. At quick glance, it appears that Virginia, Oregon, Washington and Michigan have the smallest ‘excess seat’ ratios, which means the D and R percentages of their presidential vote and party distribution in states legislatures are closely aligned.

While gerrymandering accounts for a lot of the dissonance between state legislatures and presidential votes of each of the unaligned states, Jacobson notes, “My guess, though, is that gerrymandering, and even geography, matters less than one might think. I suspect that it has more to do with the minority party turning headlong into a spiral of irrelevance.” Substitute “incompetence” for “irrelevance,” and you have a more useful distinction, which may be corrected, in some cases, with a little house cleaning.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

I have written quite a bit about the Democrats’ emerging problem with nonwhite voters (for example, here, here and here), manifest in steadily declining margins among this demographic. Well, now it’s official.

Or at least strongly confirmed. The release of a characteristically thorough analysis by Nate Cohn in The New York Times provides abundant and persuasive evidence that this trend is real and shows no signs of going away. As Cohn notes, Biden leads Trump by a mere 53-28 percent margin among these voters in a merge of 2022-23 Times/Siena College polls. This is not only a sharp fall-off from Biden’s support in the 2020 election, but also from Biden’s and previous Democratic candidates’ support in analogous pre-election polls.

All this has left Democrats scratching their heads, given the nature of their opponent. Cohn points out some of the paradoxes that now confront Democrats:

Democrats have lost ground among nonwhite voters in almost every election over the last decade, even as racially charged fights over everything from a border wall to kneeling during the national anthem might have been expected to produce the exact opposite result. Weak support for Mr. Biden could easily manifest itself as low turnout—as it did in 2022—even if many young and less engaged voters ultimately do not vote for Mr. Trump.

Many of Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities—like his age and inflation—could exacerbate the trend, as nonwhite voters tend to be younger and less affluent than white voters…Issues like abortion and threats to democracy may also do less to guard against additional losses among Black and Hispanic voters, who tend to be more conservative than white Biden voters. They may also do less to satisfy voters living paycheck to paycheck: Mr. Biden is underperforming most among nonwhite voters making less than $100,000 per year, at least temporarily erasing the century-old tendency for Democrats to fare better among lower-income than higher-income nonwhite voters.

The Times/Siena data suggests the emergence of a fairly clear education gap among nonwhite voters, as Mr. Biden loses ground among less affluent nonwhite voters and those without a degree. Overall, he retains a 61-23 lead among nonwhite college graduates, compared with a mere 49-31 lead among those without a four-year degree.

Clearly there’s a very real and very large problem here. Democrats may simply have misjudged what is most important to nonwhite voters, reflecting perhaps the increasing domination of their coalition by white college graduate voters, virtually the only demographic among whom the party has been doing steadily better. The agenda of white college graduates, particularly the progressives who support the party so fervently and fuel the party’s activist base, is less coterminous with that of nonwhite voters than Democrats seem to believe.

Reviewing recent data on the views of nonwhite voters makes it less mysterious why they can contain their enthusiasm for Biden.

1. A May Washington Post/ABC News poll asked, “Who do you think did a better job handling the economy (Donald Trump when he was president), or (Joe Biden during his presidency so far)?” Nonwhite respondents felt, by 48 to 41 percent, that Trump had done a better job on the economy than Biden is currently doing.

2. In an August Fox News poll, two-thirds of nonwhite voters rated their personal financial situation as only fair or poor and barely over a quarter (27 percent) said the Biden administration had made the economy better, compared to 42 percent who thought Biden had made the economy worse. Respectively, 46, 54 and 56 percent of nonwhite voters say gas prices, grocery prices and utility costs are a “major problem” for them and their family. Biden’s net approval (approval minus disapproval) among these voters is minus 25 on handling inflation, minus 22 on handling border security and minus 8 on handling the economy.

3. In a recent 6,000 respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), 57 percent of nonwhite voters say Biden has accomplished not that much or little or nothing during his time in office. About half consider the Democratic Party too extreme, think it bases its decisions more on politics than common sense and supports policies that interfere too much in people’s lives. Over two-fifths don’t see the Democrats as sharing their values. And over a third think Democrats look down on people like them, don’t value hard work and aren’t patriotic.

The Democratic Party has been all-in on the idea of “structural racism”—that idea that racism is “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, rather than coming “from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions.” In the SCAL/NORC survey, about half of nonwhite voters choose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society. And two-thirds of these voters reject the idea of reducing police budgets in favor of social services, preferring instead to fully fund police budgets in the interest of public safety.

4. In The Liberal Patriot’s recent survey of American voters conducted by YouGov, most nonwhite voters believe the Democratic Party has moved too far left on both economic and cultural/social issues. On economic issues, 57 percent of these voters say Democrats have moved too far left. On cultural and social issues, 56 percent say the same.

As examples, only about a quarter of nonwhite voters identify with the standard Democratic position on transgender issues—that “states should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice”. And only around a third support the standard Democratic position on climate and energy policy—that “We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources.” The latter finding is intriguing because so much of Democrats’ industrial and economic policy is built around just this transition. But perhaps not surprising because climate change is just not a particularly important issue to the typical voter, including the typical nonwhite voter.

None of this means that nonwhite voters are now going to become a Republican constituency, despite these voters’ concerns about the Democrats and cross-pressures on issues. Hardly; Biden will likely carry these voters by a healthy margin in 2024. But it does mean that Democrats’ hold on these voters may well slip further in 2024, cutting Democrats’ margins dangerously among a group that has been the bedrock of Democrats’ electoral strategy.

That strategy has been based around the presumed effects of rising racial diversity. This demographic change is generally understood to be beneficial to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes (as John Judis and I argued in our 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority). That’s a reasonable viewpoint based on a very simple idea: If voter groups favorable to the Democrats (nonwhites) are growing while unfavorable groups (whites) are declining, that should be good news for the Democrats. This is called a “mix effect”: a change in electoral margins attributable to the changing mix of voters.

These mix effects are what people typically have in mind when they think of the pro-Democratic effects of rising diversity. But mix effects, by definition, assume no shifts in voter preference: They are an all-else-equal concept, as we were careful to stress two decades ago. If voter preferences remain the same, then mix effects mean that the Democrats will come out ahead. That is a mathematical fact.

But voter preferences do not generally remain the same. Therein lies the reason why, in some cases, rising diversity has not produced the dividends for Democrats that many activists and advocates anticipated. And why it may not pan out for the Democrats in 2024, judging from the data reviewed above.

Democrats may have thought that they were on the right track in the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020. Surely if Democrats went all-in on social justice and racial “equity,” that would lock down the nonwhite vote. That was a chimera as a careful examination of actually-existing opinions and priorities among actually-existing nonwhite voters would have quickly revealed. Perhaps now that declining nonwhite support for the Democrats is “official”, that much-needed examination can take place.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

In the wake of the first GOP primary debate, it would not seem that Republicans are making a strong case for their party as America’s common-sense, normie voter alternative. And the craziest one of the lot, Donald Trump, wasn’t even there!

But how much stronger is the Democrats’ case in this regard? For partisan Democrats, the answer is “infinitely stronger”—but it is not among partisan Democrats that the next election will be decided but among more persuadable voters for whom this is a tougher call. This is reflected in the continuing failure of Biden to open up much of a lead over Trump, his probable general election opponent, and even tighter polling in the generic congressional ballot for 2024.

This should worry Democrats a great deal. Given the dysfunctional and weakened nature of today’s Republican Party, why isn’t their party an easier sell? The simplest answer is that they, themselves, are not that attractive. What might it take for Democrats to get over the hurdle and make themselves the clear and easy choice as America’s common-sense, normie voter party and not just in the friendly environs of the country’s cosmopolitan metro areas?

Below are ten statements that I first formulated a couple of years ago that encapsulate some of what “Common Sense Democrats” might stand for. Since then these statements have been tested in statewide polls in the very blue state of Massachusetts and the purple state of Wisconsin and received overwhelming support. (I should note that the statements were simply tested as is, rather than reworded for survey purposes, but the results were striking nonetheless.) Most recently, the ten statements were tested nationally from April to June among over 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research.

Here are the results:

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not. (73 percent agree/13 percent disagree)
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country. (81 percent agree/14 percent disagree)
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society. (70 percent agree/24 percent disagree)
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair. (77 percent agree/15 percent disagree)
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country. (78 percent agree/14 percent disagree)
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. More and better policing is needed for public safety and that cannot be provided by “defunding the police.” (79 percent agree/15 percent disagree)
• There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong. (82 percent agree/12 percent disagree)
• There are basically two genders, but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and far from settled. (73 percent agree/17 percent disagree)
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races. (74 percent agree/16 percent disagree)
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith. (76 percent agree/14 percetn disagree)

It could be argued that these statements are too easy to agree with and are just common sense. But if they’re all just common sense, why do so many Democrats have trouble saying these things? Indeed, how comfortable would most Democratic Party politicians be endorsing the full range of these views? Would Joe Biden? I don’t think so.

Read more…

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Washington Post:

It’s well-established that Democrats have been doing better with White college graduates, even as they have been slipping with non-White and working-class voters. Between the 2012 and 2020 elections — two elections with very similar popular-vote margins — Democrats’ advantage among White college graduates improved by 16 points, while declining by 19 points among non-White working-class voters who didn’t graduate college.