“Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” is the question posed by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their 2023 book by the same name. The subtitle is “The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes”. Both authors identify in their biographies as progressives who are very critical of the failure of the Democrats to stop the defection of the working-class whites and minorities to the Republicans during previous elections.
“The Democratic Party has had its greatest success when it sought to represent the common man and woman against the rich and powerful, the people against the elite, and the plebians against the patricians” . Democratic leadership has erred by ignoring the interests and concerns of white blue-collar workers, their traditional support.
“The labor movement used to play a dominant role in Democrats’ shadow party and kept it rooted in working-class concerns, but it had to take second or third place during the Clinton and Obama administrations to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street together with various environmental, civil rights and feminist groups.”
Today, the shadow party includes the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, the NY Times, and MSNBC.
Issues that lost millions of votes for Democrats in 2020 were BLM’s “defund the police” and the demand for reparations for descendants of former slaves and those subjected to Jim Crow Laws. Ironically, “Between low-income whites and blacks, there are negligible differences in wealth”. The real issue is the top 1% of wealthy whites where the wealth differences between them and the poor of any race are enormous. The issue isn’t race as much as it is income inequality.
“The racial radicals who champion a guaranteed annual income for blacks, but no one else, don’t acknowledge this in their platforms.”. Regarding the demand for reparations: 12% of American blacks were born elsewhere, either in Africa or in the West Indies. Another 9% were born after 1965 when Jim Crow laws ended.
Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 due in part to the Radical Left’s support for defunding the police and her belief that allowing immigrants to cross our southern border was a winning issue among Latinos. It wasn’t. Hispanic Americans are nearly as anti-illegal immigrant as the general population.
Clinton lost the white blue-collar vote due to her speech where she stated half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views” (Time.com).
“In recent years, elections have increasingly been decided by which party can make the other party’s radical extremes or the politicians who represent those extremes the central issue”. Controversial issues like “gender affirming care” for children, transexual athletes in women’s sports, and even use of LGBTQIA+, which many Americans cannot even define what the letters mean, turn off many to the Democratic Party.
What Democrats need to do as well as Republicans is to find common ground that appeals to their voters. Democrats and Republicans each have only 28% of the voters, meaning that 41% consider themselves Independents. Neither side is going to win unless they are able to attract Independents in the upcoming general election. The Republicans are in the thrall of Donald Trump who is not trying to enlarge his base while the shadow party Democrats have lost track of political reality. This group is in the minority and their views actually hurt Democratic candidates.
It is interesting to note that President Biden has gained the support of organized labor–the U.A.W.—by publicly supporting their strike against the major automakers. Trump tried and has so far failed to get a Teamster endorsement. Biden also successfully signed a multi-billion-dollar bill that increases employment for the working class in infrastructure projects. Biden’s political approach is a return to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s winning political coalition of the Great Depression era.
Biden has also pleaded with the Republicans to give him a law that will close the southern border if immigrant numbers grow too high on a given day. Trump and Speaker Johnson have declared any House immigration bill “dead on arrival”. They want illegal immigration on the southern border in order to criticize Biden during the campaign for being “weak”. It’s likely Biden will use Trump’s own words against him—if Trump actually wins the Republican nomination.
Whether or not you think Biden is too old to be president, his actions on the border issue, white blue-collar issues, and the traditional Democratic coalition reflect political reality. Moderation usually wins presidential elections, not extremism from either side of the political spectrum.
