Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
Supporters cheer for Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders at Valley High School in Santa Ana, California, February 21, 2020.
During some of the darkest days of the George W. Bush era, liberals contented themselves with one particular certainty: It was just a matter of time. Thanks to demographics, the GOP’s stranglehold on the presidency, the Senate, and the House would all eventually be broken. The country was getting younger and browner, and the Republican coalition of old white conservatives, increasingly cohered by racist messaging, could not hold. The GOP was on the edge of collapse, its support aging out and dying off. If the Democratic Party could get those young people and people of color to vote, they could win.
That, in broad strokes, was the optimistic argument put forth in 2002 by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority (excerpts of that book were published in this magazine). In it, Judis and Teixeira forwarded the thesis that the electoral map, in concert with a handful of outside factors, would inevitably come to the aid of Democrats, and push them permanently into a majoritarian position. It was a hopeful forecast in a grim political period.
The first national election cycle to road-test that theory didn’t yield the desired results. Bush defeated John Kerry, and Republicans held serve in the House and the Senate. But the forecast resurfaced as Bush faltered amid the disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis. In 2008, after Barack Obama rode a diverse coalition to the nomination, the emerging majority was hastily recast by some hopeful commentators as a “permanent Democratic majority.” Democrats scored runaway victories up and down the ticket.
But then, the Democrats lost massive ground throughout the Obama years. His triumph began to look more like a referendum of a thoroughly discredited GOP, not an unwavering Democratic majority. By the time of Trump’s election in 2016, the certainty of that demographic alignment was demoted back to “impending” status. And in the pages of the National Journal, Judis penned an article called “The Emerging Republican Advantage,” ceding the possibility that the Democratic majority had been a “mirage,” or at the very least, an overly hopeful projection.
Still, for roughly two decades, some Democrats have held fast to this understanding. Invariably, the electoral cavalry would come. For decades, they’ve been disappointed, as that swell of support has been stuck just beyond the horizon. But three contests in, that long prophesied Democratic majority, in some form, seems to have arrived. Unfortunately for the Democratic establishment, its candidate of choice is Bernie Sanders.
In his crushing victory in Nevada, as well as narrower triumphs in New Hampshire and Iowa, Sanders unlocked support of exactly this demographic. In every state, he dominated with young voters. In Iowa, voters under 30 jumped to 25 percent of the electorate, with roughly 50 percent supporting Sanders. He won under-30s in New Hampshire at the same rate, and 65 percent of under-30s in Nevada. His support with millennials far outpaces the rest of the field; his support with Gen Zs, almost all of whom are new to electoral politics since Sanders last ran in 2016, is arguably even stronger, with the support of groups like the Sunrise Movement and March For Our Lives.
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Sanders’s support from voters of color is similarly unrivaled. In Nevada, Sanders carried about 70 percent of the Latino vote. In the overwhelmingly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders carried the much smaller communities of color to much smaller victories, which proved critical in discrete areas, like the satellite caucuses of meatpacking plants in Iowa, filled with voters of color. Polls show that Sanders has now surpassed Joe Biden as the first choice of African American voters as well, though Biden carried them in Nevada.
This rising American electorate has finally grown in sufficient numbers to become a political force. Millennials now rival baby boomers as a percentage of the electorate, and one in ten voters is Gen Z (which at 45 percent nonwhite is the least white generation in the country). Meanwhile, Latinos have surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group. To boot, Trump has summarily driven minority support out of the GOP with gusto.
This rising American electorate has finally grown in sufficient numbers to become a political force. So are the Democratic strategists and apparatchiks pleased that their long-held wish has finally come true? Absolutely not! They’re outraged.
So are the Democratic strategists and apparatchiks pleased that their long-held wish has finally come true? Absolutely not! They’re outraged. The fact that demographic reality looks to be on the verge of giving the Democratic Party a candidate like Sanders has them up in arms. It has the establishment effectively saying, “We said we wanted engaged youth voters and voters of color … but not like that!”
Listen, for example, to Pete Buttigieg, whose coalition consists almost exclusively of older, whiter, more affluent voters. “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition,” Buttigieg said after he stumbled to just over 13 percent of the vote in Nevada. Sanders, who won nearly 47 percent, is clear evidence that this is in fact not a choice that the electorate agrees needs to be made, at least in the Silver State.
Of course, for all the criticism from the establishment of Sanders’s candidacy, his success has been largely to actualize the wishful thinking that mainstream Democrats have been banking on for the bulk of the 21st century. He’s drawn up new plays, but he’s running an offense that the party he often impugns has also embraced.
Now that the strategy has brought them to the brink of a democratic socialist nominee, these same Democrats have been quick to dismiss the viability of the approach. Even if Sanders is able to ride the emerging Democratic majority to primary victories in Texas, California, and elsewhere, it could never work in the general, various ex-Obama and -Clinton staffers have insisted to MSNBC, amid bouts of apoplexy from the network’s anchors. This is essentially the logic Michael Bloomberg is leaning on in his hope to secure the nomination from a brokered convention in July. Many Democrats are showing at least some willingness to fight the political inclinations of this constituency tooth and nail.
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However, if they just relented and let the process play out—allowing Sanders’s campaign to activate young voters, Gen Z college students and workforce millennials, the oldest of whom are now nearing 40, and voters of color, particularly Latinos—the party might finally have the loyal, activated base that it’s so long pined for. That loyalty could well prove lifelong, and produce the sustained victories that have eluded the party since the collapse of the New Deal order.
