By Thomas Schaller
Before the 2000 recount had even finished, George W. Bush’s pollster Matthew Dowd approached Bush adviser Karl Rove with some surprising news. As recounted in Tom Edsall’s compelling new book, Building Red America, Dowd informed Rove that the center of the electorate had essentially collapsed. Moving forward, Rove concluded, the fight between the two major parties would be a struggle to mobilize and expand their respective bases. Faster than you can say, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was shelved in favor of divide-and-conquer politics because, in the polarized America of the early twentieth century, that approach at least offers “conquer” as a possible outcome.
How should Democrats respond to these emergent realities? In kind. As the more progressive of the two major parties, that means starting to rebuild toward a national majority by focusing on the nation’s more liberal and progressive elements, moving toward the moderate voters next, and leaving the most conservative elements in the most conservative states in the nation’s most conservative region–the South–for last. As I argue in my book, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, there is a Democratic majority to be created by maximizing the Democrats’ control in the existing blue states of the Northeast and Pacific Coast, converting the purple states of the Midwest to blue, and purpling the increasingly competitive red states of the Interior West. Put another way, to regain national majority power on the presidential, congressional and state-level, Democrats should figure out how to win Arizona or even Alaska, before thinking about Alabama.
A common criticism I receive about the feasibility of Democrats winning with a non-southern strategy is that the South is not a homogeneous monolith–that there are many pockets of the South that are quite progressive or at least not ardently conservative in their religious-cultural sensibilities and, additionally, that there are many non-southerners who share those conservative sensibilities.
This is undeniably true, in part because regional distinctions are blurring with each passing day as Americans in our mobile society move into and out of the South and other regions, and as immigrants from various parts of the world populate a wide range of states in every region. The permeability of American culture in the media age; the propensity of Americans to change jobs and careers (and thus geographic location); and a general homogenization of society–all of these trends suggest that the South (or any other region) will be less distinct two generations from now, just as it is less distinct today than it was two generations ago.
All that said, there is both a weak and a strong case to be made for why Democrats are, based on differences in regional demography, far better served by focusing last on the South. The distinction between the weak and strong cases is temporal: The weak case is that, right now, the South is demographically less amenable to Democratic success; the strong case is that, moving forward into the foreseeable future and based on demographic projections, the South will remain least amenable and on some counts become even less so.
The weak case is easy to make, and the strong case is not much harder to defend. Let’s look at some of the differences in regional demography, with the implications for ideological tendencies and partisan behavior. I cannot distill in this post all or even part of the data contained in the book’s fifth chapter, and so the explanations here will lack specifics and details. But the underlying data, along with charts and figures and sources, is available in the book.
Gender: Democrats do better among women than men, a fact that is true among all voters, and even when African Americans are held aside. But in the South, especially among white voters, the “gender gap” is close to nil. There were five states in 2004 where Kerry did not enjoy a gender gap, either because he broke even or did worse among women than men; three of those five were in the South. Kerry won white women nationally by three points, but lost white women by 11 points in the South. The fact is that a gender chasm would have to open up in the South for the Democrats’ advantages among women to make much difference, because women–and specifically white women–vote very similarly to their fathers and brothers, husbands and sons. This is far less true outside the South, which accounts for and produces the gender gap nationally. Women, who are already a majority of college graduates and law school students, continue to further feminize the American electorate with each passing election cycle. This trend generally bodes well for Democrats in the near and medium term, and especially outside the South where the gender gap is real and demonstrable.
Race: Democrats win among every major non-European ethnic minority in America, save Cuban-Americans. The Democrats’ share of support is particularly high among African Americans (about 90%), Native Americans (80-90%), and Latinos (60%, but a growing worry in the Bush era). Even Asian Americans, who favored Bush41 over Clinton by 24 points in 1992, went for Kerry over Bush by 17 points in 2004. Holding aside African Americans for a moment, notice that the most of the geographic concentration for these groups is non-southern—almost exclusively for Native Americans and Asian Americans and, but for Florida and Texas, Latinos as well. Half of African Americans live in the South, but the sad irony is that some of the blackest states vote Republican by overwhelming rates. (Note the statewide officials who represent Mississippi, the blackest state in the Republic.) As for whites, Al Gore carried the white vote outside the South in 2000, and Kerry came close to doing so in 2004. George W. Bush (70%) and Ronald Reagan (71%) got basically the same share of the southern white vote, but Bush won narrowly whereas Reagan won in a landslide. Why? Because there are fewer white voters overall, and Kerry did far better among non-southern whites than Walter Mondale did. Democrats do not have a white voter problem generally; what they specifically have is a southern white voter problem. As Native Americans are mobilized, Latinos achieve citizenship and voting-age eligibility, the strong case for a non-southern majority grows stronger. In the South, however, the African American share of the southern population has been shrinking: Nine of the 11 southern states had higher shares of African Americans in 1950 than they do today–and a tenth, Louisiana, just witnessed a major displacement of its largest African-American community in the wake of Katrina.
Age: Democrats got a real boost in 2004 from young voters, not only because they voted strongly Democratic (as they often do) but because turnout among voters 18-25 (or 18-30) increased dramatically over 2000 rates. Kerry won the youth vote nationally by nine points, despite losing it by one point in the South. On the other end of the life cycle, Democrats have traditionally done well among seniors (Gore won them, but Kerry lost them). What’s more, the next generation of seniors includes the post-Baby Boomers who are more socially liberal than their parents, as authors like Leonard Steinhorn have shown. There are plenty of Snow Belt retirees in the warm southern climates, sure. But get this: Moving forward, the projected growth rate for 65+ populations will be faster in the eight Interior West states than the South between now and 2020. The Midwest will lag behind the South’s aging population growth, however, and so the hope for turning this purple region blue will be hard to actualize on the strength of senior votes.
Religion: The media talks incessantly about the political power of the evangelicals, who constitute roughly 24% of the country. Yet they rarely mention that the share of people who are self-described agnostics/atheists/non-denominational has doubled from eight percent in 1990 to 14% in 2001 and, based on that trend, surely has reached 15% or 16% today. This transformation is the result of the steady replacement of older, more religious voters with younger, more secular voters. Yet the South remains, as ever, the most religious region of America. Perhaps the inter-regional variances in religiosity and church attendance will diminish somewhat over time, but not much. That said, the more libertarian and less religiously conservative West is far less amenable to Republicans’ religious-based appeals, and in fact the growing dominance by evangelicals of western Republican parties is pulling them far too far to the right, providing a huge opportunity for Democrats that is already being exploited in places like Colorado. (But I recommend Ryan Sager’s analyses in Elephant in the Room for more about the self-destruction of western Republican parties.)
Family/marital status: Half of all women and almost half of men in America are unmarried. Because married voters turn out at higher rates, the unmarried are still a minority of voters nationally. Despite the emphasis on the importance of family values, the regional situation here is murkier because the divorce rates and share of unmarried persons are unusually high in the South, a fact that is true even when African Americans are subtracted out. But the key point is that “women on their own” (which means as-yet unmarried, divorced, separated, widowed and lesbian women) cast almost one in four votes nationally, and soon will be above that 25% threshold. And Democrats do well–Kerry won unmarried women by 25 points–among this growing bloc of key voters. As with age, the regional effects on marital status are not particularly pronounced, with one notable exception related to race: the rates of interracial marriage, which I submit indicate a potential for Democrats’ multi-racial coalition calculus. And, not surprisingly, given the shares of statewide non-white populations, the relative rate of interracial marriage rates is lowest in the South. As 2000 Census data make very clear, mixed-race marriages are more prevalent between Asians and whites, and Latinos and whites, than blacks and whites.
Occupation and socioeconomic class: The South has long been, and remains today, the least unionized region of the country. In the past half-century, the southern state with the highest share of union members/families was Alabama, which peaked at twenty-eighth; most southern states have been ranked and continue to rank in the forties, with the two Carolinas battling for a half-century for the inauspicious title of least-unionized state. The reason this matters is that the one exception to the Republican tendencies of non-college white males today is when they are union members or from union families. As the much-cited study by Andrew Gelman and his colleagues at Columbia show, in blue states the rich do not vote as Republican as red-state rich persons do. In the South, however, once African Americans are removed, that relationship between class and partisanship is mitigated—not because richer southern whites vote less Republican, but because poorer whites vote more Republican. Whether voting pocketbooks or prayer books, the result is millions of Republican white votes. This phenomenon is fading and should continue to as “new South” economic changes equalize income and wealth, and as non-native southerners move into the region for those “new South” opportunities. But profound wealth disparities in the South that might otherwise produce more Democratic votes in the nation’s poorest region are muted by cultural conservatism that results in Republican support among poorer whites that approaches the support among richer whites.
Community of residence: Turning to rural-urban-suburban-exurban trends, there is significant suburban growth in certain pockets of the South, the nation’s most rural region. But the key growth in “progressive-centrist” and inner suburban communities, as rigorously chronicled by the Strategist co-editor Ruy Teixeira, is occurring in and around cities west of the Mississippi River. (See Chapter 3 of Teixeira and John Judis’s book, The Emerging Democratic Majority.) There are emerging suburbs in the South that hold great promise for Democrats in the medium and longer term, however. Here is one criterion on which the weak (present) case is more compelling than the strong, long-term case. Still, places like Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Northern Virginia and Austin remain rare, and the locals do not always take kindly to the changes occurring around them. Native North Carolinians have created their own acronym for Cary, the bedroom community filled with transplants who came to work in the hospitals, universities and research parks in this “progressive-centrist” mecca–Contaminated Area: Relocated Yankees. That tells us a lot about the meaning of progressive-centrist growth in the South and its implications for a Democratic majority.
A final comment about the combined effects of these overlapping criteria: The near- and long-term changes that are both occurring now and should continue to accelerate in the future are happening faster in “Rim South” states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Texas. Thus, partisan opportunities in the South will generally arise first in the Rim South before the Deep South. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Mark Warner-Tim Kaine elections in Virginia prove the point. Despite the attempt by self-interested consultants to depict Warner’s win as a testament to a Democratic revival among rural voters, the truth is that both Warner and especially Kaine won because of changes occurring in the urban-suburban corridor that connects the Washington suburbs, Richmond and Norfolk.
Overall, then, in a country that is becoming less white, more feminized, less traditional in its family structures, more secular and more suburbanized, how does it make sense to prioritize the targeting of what are often referred to as the “NASCAR men”: white, non-college-educated, rural, married, Christian men from the South? If a marketing executive explained the prevailing national trends and concluded that the company ought to target the consumers least likely to be interested in the company’s product–and worse, that their size within the market was shrinking with each passing day–he’d be instructed to clean out his desk by day’s end.
Following his candidate’s popular vote defeat in 2000, Karl Rove promptly announced that the GOP would find and cultivate the four million evangelicals who failed to turn out. The politics that has followed–epitomized by the anti-gay-marriage ballot measures and Supreme Court appointments–confirms the effectiveness of the Rovian approach. So how is it that Democrats, upon losing the popular vote in 2004, must turn their opponents’ base by focusing on southern white men and women? This is absurd advice, and strategically myopic.
The truth is that the Pollyannaish predictions of centrist consultants have not served the Party well. In 2004, Democrats gained outside the South while losing ground inside the South, and at every level: relatively in presidential returns, and absolutely in terms of seats won in both chambers of Congress and in the state legislatures. That same pattern is already prevailing in the 2006 midterms, too, where the vast majority of expected gains for Democrats in gubernatorial and congressional races will come from outside the South.
There’s an underlying reason why: The demographic situation is different inside and outside the South. The split is neither perfect nor uniform, of course, but it is what it is, and denying it only risks losing the non-southern majority that awaits a party gutsy enough to build it. As regional demographic differences both present and future show, there’s a non-southern Democratic majority right in front of our noses, if the party will show the guts to see and seize it.

Dr. Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and a board member of the Democratic Strategist. A political columnist for the Washington Examiner, Schaller has published commentaries in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Salon.com, and The American Prospect, and has appeared on ABC News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and C-SPAN.

By Heather Hurlburt
We’re at an extraordinary moment in the political life of the Democratic Party. The Truman Project is joined by partisan and non-partisan advocacy groups as diverse as Democracy Corps, National Security Network, the Peace and Security Initiative, The White House Project, Third Way, and US in the World in offering national security messaging advice whose basic thrust is:

“The key is to both stand up for strong national security, while highlighting our values – including a core value that we must keep Americans safe.” (“A Progressive Battle Plan for National Security.”)

These groups span the spectrum from Lieberman staffers to MoveOn activists. Yes, their advice differs on many important details, and some would probably object violently to my lumping them in with others, but compared to 2004 or even 2005, the convergence is real. I can actually tell a candidate that there’s general agreement that he or she should come out strong on national security, not avoid the topic; present a specific, positive, new policy direction that draws on core American values; and then critique his or her opponent for being satisfied or complicit with the Administration’s incompetent, ineffective, unrealistic approach.
So why aren’t we hearing more hallelujahs? I’ll posit three reasons, some of which the Truman writers point out, all of which I’d like to see them – and their colleagues at other institutions – focus more on.
1. Democrats are deeply suspicious of messaging guidance.
An irate left-wing respondent on DemocracyArsenal.org, where I blog on these topics, recently compared me to a Nazi. That would be laughable if I didn’t often hear the same sort of thing, in politer terms, from my academic and activist friends who happily inhabit the left end of the Democratic base. We have a large group of core supporters who reflexively equate being thoughtful about how we frame our positions with being dishonest about our core values.
But that view is shared by the left and right wings of our party. One of the megastars of the Democratic foreign policy establishment blew up a strategy meeting earlier this year by declaring, more or less, “You can’t poll foreign policy. We just need to keep doing what we’ve always done.” I have had national security experts whom I respect deeply tell me that you simply cannot use metaphors of daily life to explain foreign policy to non-expert audiences – even as I see folks from Dick Cheney to Barack Obama do exactly that, sincerely and to great effect.
And it doesn’t seem that the campaign consultant community is convinced: even as we all churn out these great ideas for communicating effectively about security, I hear reports from the field that candidates are in fact being advised to turn away from national security and go back to an economic message.
So we have much more work ahead of us over time, to help our crack national security professionals, our base voters across the spectrum, and our political professionals understand what good journalists, novelists, artists and ad executives take for granted: that communication is only effective if your audience hears what you intended them to hear. Most of us have had the experience of an email, seemingly so straightforward in black and white, conveying the opposite nuance of what we intended. And it’s clear every day in politics that media and citizens alike often hear what they expect to hear.
That’s where research-based messaging guidance comes in – as one tool for helping candidates, national security experts and advocates do a better job of getting the message across.
On this, we could learn from each other: the actual language proposed in “A Progressive Battle Plan” would benefit from a scrub that asks smart communication questions like: do these phrases inadvertently direct listeners’ minds back to the positions of our opponents? Where there’s a wide choice of synonyms, do they use words and phrases that recent testing shows voters react to well? Does the order in which concepts are introduced help open voters’ minds to an alternative approach, or close them? In each of those areas, there’s good open source data and even more closely held data to draw on. (For some examples of what’s publicly available right now, click here or here.)
2. It’s a long-term problem.
This brings me to a point that Grinberg, Kleinfeld and Spence perceptively make: This is a long-term problem. They rightly note that their solution, offering an alternate “story line,” can’t be accomplished in one election cycle.
That’s not because Democrats aren’t good storytellers; it’s because we need to change the terms of the conversation so our story gets heard. Our target audience – independents, potential swing voters, disaffected voters and non-voters – has firmly established mental “shortcuts” about Democrats and national security. The media reinforces them because they are easy and evocative. A regular diet of local TV news and shout radio also reinforces conservative mental shortcuts: Government is ineffectual abroad as at home, the world beyond our shores is a dirty and dangerous place, the US is the only country that does anything, other countries and international institutions with a very few exceptions are fundamentally untrustworthy.
Any alternate story about the United States, our place in the world, and the safety of our citizens that stays true to our progressive values is going to bounce off those shortcuts until we start putting long-term effort into replacing them with other images, not just bombarding the ramparts with strategy after strategy.
In this longer-term arena, we need a broader strategy than the one Grinberg, Kleinfeld and Spence propose. We need to go back and pick up the foreign policy concerns – working with allies, leading with American values on issues such as poverty, genocide and the environment, building coalitions to solve problems from disease to trade – where the public agrees with Democrats but gets distracted by highly charged short-term talk of safety and threats. In between electoral cycles, Democrats and progressives can be building genuine links in the public mind between competence on the whole sweep of our involvement overseas and progress on the hard issues – instead of avoiding these issues and relying on spurious links at election time, and then wondering why they seem to favor Republicans (e.g. “draining the swamp.”)
With more time and oxygen, Democrats need to be crafting effective policies and smart messaging about the other insecurity voters feel – their place in the global economy. And there’s still more to do to back up the short-term national security machine Democrats have put in place in the past few years with a deeper bench of folks thinking equally interesting, but less politically tuned, thoughts that can be tossed around for years at a time.
The long-term challenge is to deny conservatives their monopoly on words, images and ideas surrounding national security. Democrats could do “everything right” for the next six weeks and still get beat by gas prices, terror alerts, and some quick progress in Baghdad that lets troop withdrawals be foreseen. Over the long term, we must aim to create a national environment where those Republican trump cards will be worth less, where we have more pathways into voters’ minds – a better campaign story on national security but also a better background story about how national security and international involvement fit into the lives of Americans.
3. It’s a systemic problem – voters are disillusioned with everyone.
Finally, I worry about a more fundamental problem. Voters are disillusioned with the Republican story line, no question, but there’s some evidence that they are preemptively disillusioned with the Democrats as well–that in fact the experience of watching most of our political class support a war that has gone so badly has soured Americans on the whole notion of principled US activism, whatever the principles, outside our borders. That is how I read the Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign Relations and other polls reporting American “isolationism” rising to levels previously seen at the end of Vietnam and at the end of the Cold War. Both of those times, public discontent produced a short period of policy retrenchment. But both times, the longer-term effect came when it was the forces of the right that came up with the new ideological and policy arguments that reengaged a plurality of Americans with the right’s own ambitious international projects.
While the folks whose job it is to win elections are right to worry about “standing on principle” today, we are in dire need for the best progressive minds – and the deepest-pocketed progressive funders – to start looking a decade or more down the road and talk to Americans about what our principles will look like and how they will be tested once Iraq is over, the next compromise on immigration has been reached, and the challenge of Iran and other non-status-quo powers has reached its next level. If we don’t start now to get the politics right, in the long run there simply won’t be the intellectual space to get the policy right.

Heather Hurlburt is Senior Advisor to the US in the World Initiative, consults as a political speechwriter and national security strategist, and blogs at democracyarsenal.org

By John Halpin
The Third Way authors provide a useful service in pointing out a problem that many progressive activists frequently fail to recognize. A political message that essentially says, “Here are 50 reasons why your life sucks,” is not a compelling way to attract anyone to the progressive cause let alone reach the all important middle-class voters who have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. Barring severe or sharp economic decline, attempts to browbeat people with negative statistics and a barrage of scary anecdotes will almost always lose out at the national level to a more hopeful and optimistic vision.
At the same time, the authors’ attempt to replace downer politics with a message about a “new era of middle-class opportunity” is ultimately insufficient for meeting the Democrats’ long term need for conviction, passion and a clear public philosophy and worldview. More specifically, the suggested frame of middle class opportunity suffers from three interrelated problems that reduce its impact:

• First, by eschewing pessimism in favor of optimism, the message does not acknowledge the truth about the condition of the middle class today (a truth readily acknowledged by voters themselves);
• Second, in renouncing populism as wrong and counterproductive, it fails to clearly articulate to voters how the political system itself, through GOP control, is rigged against the middle class; and
• Third, by focusing solely on the economic conditions of the middle class rather than on the success of the entire nation, the message fails to offer an inspiring vision for the future or to call on people to participate in a project that is greater than their own economic needs and self-interest.

Acknowledging economic truth
As Elizabeth and Jacob have convincingly shown, the middle class today faces a host of challenges that threaten its status and future prospects: rising income and wealth disparities; increased costs for basic needs like health care and housing; rising household debt; reduced social protections; and overall economic anxiety caused by the shifting of risk away from the government and private sector and onto the backs of the middle class.
These are not just arcane academic ideas captured in cool-looking graphs. As seen in numerous surveys over the past few years, these trends have a real impact on peoples’ lives and are causing identifiable problems for the middle class.
Interestingly, the Third Way authors defend their assertion that middle-class voters are feeling positive by drawing on numbers from a 2005 Pew Research poll entitled, “Economic Concerns Fueled by Many Woes: Gas Prices, Jobs, Housing, Debt Burden and the Stock Market.”
Far from stating that the middle class feels confident, Pew’s research clearly shows the opposite:

The public continues to be wary in its assessments of the health of the U.S. economy, despite recent improvement in some key economic indicators. Only about one-in-three Americans think the national economy is in good shape, and optimism about the future is markedly lower than it has been over the past three years. Closer to home, the percentage of the public rating its own financial situation positively has declined since the beginning of the year from 51 percent to 44 percent [emphasis mine].¹

When asked what is the biggest problem facing them today, Americans by a double-digit margin say “not having enough money,” “paying bills” or “making ends meet.” The high cost of health insurance comes in second.
The Pew poll does show that Americans-particularly those who own stock-are somewhat more optimistic in assessing their financial situation for the immediate future (51 percent report that their financial situation will improve some in the next year and 10 percent saying it will improve a lot). But when less than half of Americans rate their current financial situation positively, including a mere seven percent of Americans who rate their own personal financial situation as “excellent”, attempts to talk up the economy will likely fall flat.
Geography also matters in terms of what is happening to the American middle class. Recent data from Democracy Corps shows that citizens in hard-hit rural areas are deeply concerned about their economic status. Sixty percent of white rural voters in the July 2006 Democracy Corps poll agree that, “The economy is not doing well. Jobs are scarce, incomes stagnant, and benefits are being cut back.” Only 38 percent of rural whites agree with the countervailing sentiment that the economy is doing well.²
By a nine-point margin, white rural voters say they are more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate who states that “parents are working harder to keep up with the cost of living, taking them away from home and family”-an explicit acknowledgement of pressures facing the middle class-over a Republican candidate who focuses on lower taxes and traditional moral and religious values.³
Additionally, although middle-class voters may not be drowning in their economic sorrows as the authors suggest, there is compelling evidence that many voters are drowning in debt and facing real financial challenges in years to come.
Polling conducted by Anna Greenberg and Bill McInturff for the Center for American Progress and the Center for Responsible Lending shows that eight in 10 Americans (from across the ideological spectrum) believe that the problem of household debt is getting worse. One third of Americans report that their own debt has gone up over the last five years with another 36 percent saying it has stayed the same. Less than three in 10 say their personal debt has gone down.⁴
In more colorful terms, Americans report they are more worried about falling deep into debt than they are about being the victim of a violent attack or losing their home in a natural disaster.⁵
More importantly, by a 79 to 19 percent margin, the public believes the problem of rising household debt is an obstacle to middle-class families and not just an issue affecting low-income citizens.⁶ While personal spending decisions factor into rising debt, people are more likely to attribute their own rising debt load to external factors like the cost of living, the overall economy, and rising health care costs. The middle class squeeze that Elizabeth talks about is real. Americans in our poll acknowledge that rising costs on fundamental needs are driving them into unmanageable debt.
This does not sound like an American public content with either the overall economy or its own economic standing.
When one third of Americans report that they hold more than $10,000 of non-mortgage debt, and only 51 percent report that they are able to pay off their credit card bills every month, it is difficult to argue that people are “richer, more optimistic, and more firmly in control of their lives than they think,” as the Third Way authors claim.
These are not abstract facts and figures. These are actual sentiments of voters that progressives and Democrats are trying to reach. Rather than dismiss genuine economic anxiety as pessimistic, we must do more to show voters that we understand what they are facing in their daily lives-not through depressing stats and rants but through strong advocacy of universal programs and protections that provide both security and a chance to get ahead.
As President Bush and his various Treasury secretaries know all too well, the real disconnect lies in trying to argue these things away through overly generous interpretations of the economy and the state of the middle class.
The system is rigged
The Third Way authors’ dismissal of “what’s-the-matter-with-Kansas analysis” seems flippant and devoid of empirical evidence. I understand and basically agree with their implication that Democrats cannot just ramp up the populism and expect to crack 48 percent nationally.
However, the point of Tom Frank’s best selling book is not to denigrate voters as stupid and overwhelmed by economic false consciousness, but to highlight the ways in which the Republican Party successfully turned a once radical state into a rabid right-wing environment. It is no red herring to argue that the modern GOP is a venal and extremist entity that exists solely to enrich its corporate benefactors through taxpayer-funded kickbacks, all the while touting “American values” like discrimination against immigrants and gays and opposition to life-enhancing stem cell research.
If Democrats are unwilling to call this farce for what it is, then they have no business calling themselves the party of the people.
The GOP did solidify power in Kansas and other states through cultural appeals that had far more emotional resonance than the party’s real agenda of slashing taxes for the wealthy and giving corporate America free reign to abuse workers and pollute the environment. Third Way itself has an entire culture project designed to mitigate these appeals.
You do not have to believe in a full-scale, conscious culture war scheme designed to trick the middle class to know that every successful political party needs a powerful enemy. As Frank rightly describes, Republicans have benefited greatly in electoral terms from their trumped-up image of elitist liberals subverting the virtuous middle class.
Anger and distrust of others is a strong motivator for people and the American middle class has numerous reasons to be angry at those in power today.
Survey evidence strongly supports the notion that middle-class voters are irate with a Republican party that caters hand-and-foot to business and the wealthy. A scant 35 percent of voters in a July 2006 Democracy Corps poll believe that the Republican Party “puts the public interest first” while two-thirds say the party is “more for big business than the average person.”⁷ These numbers have been consistent for years.
However, as this same poll shows, only 48 percent of Americans believe Democrats are able to stand up to big special interests.⁸ The party is not likely to get very far in its populism if it is perceived to be complicit and timid.
The problem lies with a Democratic Party establishment that is unwilling or unable to call it like it is in a larger sense. Not just Shrum-style bashing of oil and drug companies, but clearly explaining to Americans how the GOP-controlled system is rigged against the middle class on everything from taxation and social spending to corporate welfare and military service. Progressives believe that government should serve-not exploit-the common good and ensure the protection and prosperity of all people. Despising government itself, extremist conservatives believe that government should function as a quasi-corporatist state where middle-class taxpayers funnel funds to business interests and the wealthy.
The American public understands that Republicans exist to serve those at the top. In arguing that Democrats should avoid stating the obvious, the Third Way authors seek to take away a powerful motivator for middle-class voters who are excluded from the corporate elitism of today’s conservative politics.
Fortunately, there is homegrown push back against both forms of Republican extremism-radical economic libertarianism and social dogmatism. The people of Kansas and other states are angry and on to the GOP’s chicanery. Nine Republican candidates in Kansas have renounced their party label this cycle and are now running as Democrats, including candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor. My friend and former colleague, Raj Goyle, recently moved back to his hometown of Wichita to take on a Republican stalwart in the state legislature who was the lone vote against the prohibition of marriage for children as young as 14 years old.
These are promising signs completely consistent with the themes outlined in Frank’s book and not just a political distraction as the Third Way authors claim. Democrats should be encouraged to fight this so-called populist battle rather than ignoring it and letting the other side get away with its corrupt and misguided behavior.
Vision and inspiration
The Third Way authors are correct to say that opportunity is an important part of the overall progressive and Democratic project. But, with all due respect, the likening of “a new era of middle-class opportunity” message to the grand visions of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy is too far-fetched to swallow. The presidents who gave us the Economic Bill of Rights, the Fair Deal and the New Frontier, respectively, provided a far bolder vision for America than merely helping middle-class kids get into college.
These progressive presidents argued strenuously for non-negotiable foundational rights to housing, old age protections, guaranteed wages, education, health care, and civil and voting rights. These accomplishments and unrealized goals are not something the Democratic Party should toss into the civic books because it has had a bad couple of election cycles. These ideas are precisely why many people are drawn to the Democratic Party.
As Ruy and I have highlighted in other work, the single biggest problem for Democrats is a double-digit identity gap that leaves voters with no clear impressions of the Democratic Party. Months away from the 2006 mid-terms, only 45 percent of voters believe that Democrats know what they stand for. Nearly 70 percent of voters say the same thing about Republicans.⁹
Although “a new era of middle-class opportunity” is seemingly innocuous, it is a philosophically mushy message that compounds perceptions of Democrats as feckless and risk averse.
Democrats would be wise to remember President Truman’s words from his 1949 radio address on Democratic Women’s Day:

The Democratic Party does not dodge issues or seek to gloss them over. We state them boldly. We propose concrete and practical action to solve them. Our program consists of measures which have come up from the grassroots-of ideas and proposals that have been discussed and hammered out among unions, in farm groups, in city councils, in county boards, and in State legislatures. Our program is as American as the soil we walk upon. It is a program unshakably founded on the principle that the power of government should be used to promote the general welfare. It is a program based upon the experience of the Democratic Party in using the power of government to establish actual conditions in which the people can achieve a better life for themselves and for their children. It is a program of what should be done and what our experience tells us can be done.

John Halpin is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on progressive theory, strategy and opinion analysis. His current research and writing is focused on developing and communicating a progressive public philosophy centered on the common good.

¹“Economic Concerns Fueled by Many Woes,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 1, 2005, p. 1.
²“White Rural Survey, Frequency Questionnaire,” Democracy Corps, July, 2006, p. 9.
³Ibid, p. 20.
⁴All the data in this paragraph come from “Center for American Progress/Center for Responsible Lending/National Military Family Association/AARP Frequency Questionnaire,” Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, April, 2006.
⁵Ibid, pp. 1-2.
⁶Ibid, p. 5.
⁷“Frequency Questionnaire,” Democracy Corps, July, 2006, p. 8.
⁸Ibid, p. 8.
⁹Ibid, pp. 7-8.