Kyodo
The jubilation at the White House after Biden’s election victory was confirmed belies the narrowness of the win and the likely political deadlock.
Like Walt Whitman, America’s two major political parties are large and contain multitudes. Unlike Whitman, they don’t contradict themselves—at least, not as much as they once did.
One hundred years ago, the Democrats were both the party of the segregationist, nativist South, and the Northern big cities packed with immigrants. Sixty years ago, they were still the party of the Jim Crow South, and also of the pro–civil rights North.
As for the Republicans, at the turn of the 20th century, they were the party to which big business went when it wanted to purchase a legislature, while at the same time, they were also the party to which “good government” reformers flocked to diminish the robber barons’ hold over the legislative process.
Today, while each party is still rife with complexity, each has largely come to stand for an increasingly distinct set of values that is shared by increasingly distinct publics. Democrats are urban, multiracial, disproportionately college-educated, and disproportionately young; Republicans are precisely the reverse: rural, still overwhelmingly white, disproportionately non-college-educated, and disproportionately older.
Consider, for instance, how each party’s level of support along the urban/rural continuum is the precise upside-down image of the other’s. According to the Associated Press/NORC exit poll (and I readily acknowledge the considerable flaws in this year’s exit polling, but I cite them only to compare their own numbers with their own numbers), Joe Biden carried the urban vote by a 65 percent to 33 percent margin over Donald Trump, while Trump carried the rural vote by a 65 percent to 33 percent margin over Biden. Biden won 54 percent of the suburban vote to Trump’s 44 percent, while Trump carried 55 percent of the small-town vote to Biden’s 43 percent.
Each party’s defining beliefs more neatly match their defining demographic characteristics than has commonly been the case in American political history. That largely explains why there was so little ticket-splitting in this year’s election. Most voting booths (much less mail-in ballots) no longer provide the option of pulling a lever that casts a vote for all of a party’s candidates, but most Americans vote that way regardless. Each party stands for a coherent set of values (one cosmopolitan, the other more white- and male-supremacist and arrayed against cultural liberalism) that doesn’t vary much from region to region or state to state. That’s why, to the Democrats’ dismay, the Democrats picked up Senate seats only in states that Biden won and lost all the races they’d hoped to win in states where Trump prevailed. (The sole ticket-splitting exception was Susan Collins’s victory in Maine, which Biden carried.) That’s why they lost House seats they’d expected to hold in districts that Trump carried.
One additional reason why it’s a bad time for down-ticket outliers—Democrats who represent otherwise red districts, Republicans who represent otherwise blue—is the decimation of local news coverage. A voter didn’t have to be particularly attentive in the past to know who their congressional representative was and what they stood for. But with the disappearance of local newspapers and the rise of nationally focused cable news, the distinct centrism of Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Republicans, if such still exist, tends to be eclipsed by the political identities of the national parties.
DEMOCRATS AND PROGRESSIVES HAVE LONG BELIEVED that they can break on through to the other side with economic issues that register across party lines. That’s a plausible belief if, and only if, they can make such issues so central to the party’s identity that they outweigh (or at least, aren’t outweighed by) the party’s commitment to other, less directly economic issues that have largely come to define the Democrats.
That’s no simple task, as some November election results and exit polls make clear. In Florida, for instance, fully 61 percent of voters backed a ballot measure to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15, while only 48 percent voted for Biden. Clearly, a large number of Trump voters supported the measure; just as clearly, that didn’t dent their support for Trump. Ballot measures to raise the minimum wage have been passed by voters in a host of red states; that suggests that such issues don’t shift voters from the blue column to the red in today’s America.
Similarly, the AP/NORC exit poll found that 69 percent of Americans, including 35 percent of Republicans, favored being allowed to purchase a government health care policy (aka a public option, not that the pollsters called it that). Making such issues more salient, and more prominent to voters’ sense of what the Democrats stand for, is a challenge Democrats have to address. For now, however, the defining issues and values that many voters associate with each of the parties are less economic than they are cultural and racial.
Democratic leaders should make popular economic-justice issues that win support in red states and districts the centerpiece of their identity and purpose.
Unions, of course, were once the institution upon which Democrats relied to boost awareness of the economic distinctions between the parties. However, as union membership has been eroded to barely a tenth of the workforce, following decades of employer opposition, labor’s capacity to define or redefine election issues or distinct party identities has diminished accordingly.
In November’s election, the hotel employee union UNITE HERE played a key role in turning out Latino and working-class voters for Biden in Nevada and Arizona. But the union’s impact was an exception to the rule in some other states. While the AP/NORC national exit poll showed Biden carrying the union vote by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin, its polls in some states showed little difference between the union member and non-member vote. (In Pennsylvania, the difference was 3 percent, and in Wisconsin a bare 1 percent.) Among their white working-class members, unions often don’t loom as large in shaping electoral calculations and attitudes toward the parties as Fox News and right-wing talk radio do.
MORE SHOCKING TO THE DEMOCRATS on election night was the Latino vote, which exit polls showed Biden winning by a little under 2 to 1, a considerably smaller margin than the Democrats had expected. The level of Latino support differed substantially from state to state, however, with (by the admittedly limited AP/NORC numbers) Biden getting 69 percent in California, 62 percent in Texas, 59 percent in Arizona, and 54 percent in Florida. Within Texas, Trump appears to have run even or a little better than even in the almost entirely Latino counties that stretch along the Rio Grande (way down from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 massive advantage in these counties), while decisively losing the Latino vote in the state’s major cities. The cities are home to a far higher percentage of Latino immigrants than the border counties, however, whose residents largely come from families who’ve been there for many generations.
We can posit some guesses as to why the Rio Grande Latino vote went the way it did. The high poverty rate there has led some residents to take jobs in what we might term Trumpian occupations, working in oil fields or guarding the border (“guarding” is, of course, a euphemism, but that’s the subject of a different piece). As a rather static and traditional community, the Rio Grande region also has some commonalities with the largely white rural areas of Central Pennsylvania or Southeast Ohio.
Some might assume that Trump’s white nationalism would keep the Rio Grande in the Democratic camp. But white supremacy isn’t the only traditional order that’s under attack in today’s America. As my colleague Paul Starr has noted, the supremacy of men over women, the native-born over immigrants, straights over gays, and the religious over the secular are also under attack, and the Democratic Party is seen as the party that’s furthering those attacks, if often less zealously than right-wing media claim. Each of these revolutions in power relationships has triggered its own counterrevolution, as all revolutions do, and the vast majority of the counterrevolutionaries have migrated to the Republican column, if they weren’t already there.
How then, do we explain California, where Latinos have pushed the state well to the left over the past quarter-century? To begin, the most prominent and politically effective Latino institutions in the state since the Latino population exploded with the wave of immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s have been Latino-led or heavily Latino unions. In their own street organizing and contractual campaigns and electoral work for Democratic candidates and ballot measures, those unions have shaped Latino public opinion. They’ve led movements for immigrant rights, higher minimum wages, more funding for public schools, and more access to affordable health care. On the considerable number of ballot measures to promote those causes over the past couple of decades, Latinos have approved them at rates even higher than those of Black voters. In so doing, those unions have raised the salience of economic issues and the identification of the Democrats with those issues within the state’s Latino communities. In Texas, no comparable unions exist (indeed, hardly any unions have a presence there). In Nevada and Arizona, while they’re still a relatively small presence, they’re sufficiently strategic and determined to have helped push those states into Biden’s column.
Associated Press/NORC Exit Poll
WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE TWO PARTIES, each a representative of a distinct world, neither commanding a political majority over the other?
The prospects for Republicans turning away from Trumpism are dim. The 73 million (and counting) votes Trump managed to turn out vastly exceeds anything any previous Republican was able to corral. It’s too big for less Trumpian Republicans to seek to move in a different direction, not least because the party’s zealots and their media allies wouldn’t permit it. A Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley, should they run for president in 2024, would doubtless raise other issues, but they couldn’t really repudiate the nativist and racist themes to which the Republican base vibrates and still win the nomination. They might bring back some of the college-educated Republican suburbanites who decamped to Biden this year, but they’d lose the backing of the bulk of the party to a Trump successor.
The Trump successor might be Trump himself. As I write, he’s been reported to be thinking about declaring his candidacy for 2024 as soon as the Electoral College anoints Biden this December. Such a move would effectively freeze the party in its current condition, turning any other Republican presidential candidate or proto-candidate into a heretic, and posing a genuine conundrum for Rupert Murdoch and big-time Republican donors who’d like to see the party move on.
Despite Biden’s success in reassembling the “blue wall” this November, Republicans’ long-term prospects in the Midwest look pretty good. As the nation as a whole grows more multiracial and college-educated, as millennials and Gen Zers move the electorate leftward, Midwestern states will largely resist these trends. Their young people will move away to more dynamic economies (for which reason immigrants will go elsewhere, too), and their cities will continue to shrink.
Democrats will have to meet this challenge not only by doing their damnedest to hold these states, but by trying to hasten the Sun Belt dynamics that enabled them to squeak to victory this year in Arizona and Georgia. Texas disappointed the Democrats this year, but even with the setback in the Rio Grande Valley, Biden still did better there than he did in Ohio and Iowa. Democrats are going to have to make long-term investments in North Carolina, Florida, and, yes, Texas if they’re going to become the majority party electorally. If the popular vote were determinative for president, of course, such concerns would be a good deal less acute, so organizing around the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would also be a worthwhile Democratic mission.
The Democrats’ advantage in the popular vote will continue to grow. Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t left because they’re young; they’re left because they’ve borne the brunt of the most dysfunctional economy since the 1930s, and because they’re far more racially diverse than older generations. Even as they swell the Democrats’ numbers (chiefly, in states that, unfortunately, are already blue), they’ll continue to highlight issues like racist police practices—as well they should, as well they must. The Democratic establishment’s response shouldn’t be to tell them to shut up, which is pretty much what party leaders like Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) have counseled. Rather, hard though it may be, those leaders should work to enact the kind of popular economic-justice issues that win support in red states and districts, and, more than just enact, to make them the centerpiece of the Democrats’ identity and purpose.
President-elect Biden at least partially understands that; whether he understands just how much appointees from the Wall Street wing of the party undercut the repurposing that the Democrats need remains to be seen. Even if he exceeds the Democratic left’s expectations, the party still faces an arduous future. As Democrats’ popular majorities continue to grow, so will Republican efforts to suppress their votes. Nothing about either party’s future is assured. The state of the parties is hostile equipoise.
