Opinion | Democrats Don’t Have a Shortcut Out of the Wilderness (original) (raw)
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Guest Essay
Democrats Don’t Have an Easy Way Out
Dec. 11, 2024
Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
The weakened condition of the Democratic Party leaves it ill prepared to defend itself against a Republican Party determined to eviscerate liberalism and the left.
Evidence of the fraught state of the party can be found everywhere. Pew Research asked Democrats and Republicans whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of their party after the five presidential and midterm elections from 2016 to 2024. Republicans in 2024 were more optimistic, 86 to 13, than after any of the previous four contests, including Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Among Democrats, optimism fell to 51 percent, while pessimism rose to 49 percent, well below the 61 to 38 for Democrats after the 2016 election.
Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a leading candidate to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, acknowledged this erosion of political clout in a memo to party leaders:
For the first time in modern history, the perception that Americans have of the two major political parties switched. The majority of Americans now believes that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and that the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites. It’s a damning indictment on our party brand.
Polling suggests that Trump is ideologically closer to the median voter than Kamala Harris. Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, conducted a post-election survey asking voters to place themselves, Harris and Trump on a scale ranging from zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative). The mean response was 2.45 for Harris, 7.78 for Trump and 5.63 for all voters.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, voiced serious doubts by email about the ability of the Democratic Party to compete successfully with the Republican Party:
A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy. Every Democratic president from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden won the White House by voicing the fears and defending the interests of the working and middle classes. Democrats cannot credibly claim to represent the ideals of American democracy and peel support away from Trump’s anti-elite, populist G.O.P. without reimagining what it stands for and who is in its coalition.
The Democratic Party is perhaps more rudderless than at any time since Bill Clinton’s presidency. Its leadership is aging. The party seems culturally out of touch to many Americans. Its brand is associated with championing niche interests, and the party — despite some crucial electoral victories — has ultimately failed its overarching mission since 2015 of defeating and defanging the MAGA movement.
In addition, Dallek went on to say, the centrality of anti-establishment themes in the MAGA movement makes opposition to it all the more difficult:
The Democratic Party faces a heavy burden: It has to defend democratic institutions in a time when these institutions are reviled by a large majority of the American electorate. Its message to the public that it is a bulwark of democracy failed to resonate with voters in November. In order to defend democracy, then, it must find ways to appeal to a majority of the American people on the bread-and-butter issues foremost in people’s lives.
When Franklin Roosevelt called on the United States “to become the ‘arsenal of democracy,’” Dallek wrote,
he persuaded citizens that protecting democracy was in their own self-interest: It was key to Americans’ prosperity, freedoms and their children’s future. He helped explain to the public how antidemocratic threats imperiled their livelihoods. Today’s Democratic Party has not yet found a way to make this case stick.
The pressure on the Democratic Party to assume the role of democracy’s defender has arrived at a difficult time. Not only was the outcome of the 2024 election supremely deflating, but also many of the party’s institutional allies are struggling to deal with setbacks.
- Controversies over pro-Palestinian demonstrations and expressions of antisemitism have forced the resignation of presidents of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. From 2015 to 2024, the share of adults with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell from 57 percent to 36 percent, while those with “very little” or “none” rose from 10 percent to 32 percent, according to Gallup.
- The two liberal cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, have experienced sharp post-election declines in viewership. Forbes reported on Nov. 29 that “MSNBC’s prime-time audience has dipped 53 percent since the week before the election,” closely followed “by a 47 percent drop by CNN — while Fox News has largely held on to its audience since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.”
- In city after city, voters have ousted liberal district attorneys — many with campaigns backed by George Soros. Many if not most of those prosecutors pressed for no-bail policies and for the abandonment of prosecuting selected misdemeanors.
What’s more, these cracks emerging in the institutional pillars of the left accompany weakening Democratic support in three of its crucial constituencies: minorities, the young and urban voters.
Trump and his allies are more than willing to kick an adversary when he or she is down. Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, described by email the probable Republican agenda:
Authoritarians tend to target certain institutions to cement their control: typically the media, higher education, the bureaucracy, the legal system and the military. To varying degrees, Trump has promised to control, purge or punish all of these groups. He has pledged to remove woke bureaucrats and generals, and to protect free speech in the media and on campus by punishing organizations deemed to be outliers.
Moynihan stressed that “this is not about wokeness or free speech; it is about Trump using government powers to engage in selective punishments and purges on a scale we really have not seen before.”
Perhaps most striking is Trump’s plan to excise a broad swath of the top ranks in the military, the crucial arm of government constraining or allowing authoritarian methods by the president.
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