Date: October 18th, 2018 2:35 PM
Author: Overrated gold ticket booth marketing idea
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Democrats’ Left Turn Is Not an Illusion
14-18 minutes
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Like many overnight sensations, it has been years in the making.
Thomas B. Edsall
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
Oct. 18, 2018
Image
CreditCreditMark Makela/Getty Images
Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left, as liberals have displaced moderates. Self-identified liberals of all races and ethnicities now command a majority in the party, raising the possibility that views once confined mainly to the party elite have spread into the rank and file.
From 2001 to 2018, the share of Democratic voters who describe themselves as liberal has grown from 30 to 50 percent, according to data provided by Lydia Saad, a senior editor at the Gallup Poll.
The percentage of Democrats who say they are moderate has fallen from 44 to 35; the percentage of self-identified conservative Democrats has gone from 25 to 13 percent.
Well-educated whites, especially white women, are pushing the party decisively leftward. According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal on social issues has grown since 2001 from 39 to 61 percent. Because of this growth, white liberals are now roughly 40 percent of all Democratic voters.
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While a substantial percentage of Democratic minorities identify as liberals, those percentages have not been growing at anywhere near the rate that they have for white Democrats, so blacks and Hispanics have not contributed significantly to the rising percentage of self-identified Democratic liberals. Over the past 17 years, for example, the percentage of black Democrats who identify themselves as liberals grew by a modest three percentage points, according to both Gallup and the Pew Research Center.
In fact, white liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues.
Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.
Among white liberals, according to Pew survey data collected in 2017, 79.2 percent agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.” 18.8 percent agreed that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition,” a 60.4 point difference, according to a detailed analysis of the Pew data provided the Times by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University.
Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition — in other words, blacks are more conservative than white liberals on this issue.
Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.
79% of white liberals
60% of blacks
Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.
18
32
Agree with both, or neither; don’t know or didn’t answer
2
8
The dominant role of well-educated, relatively upscale white Democrats in moving the party to the left reflects the declining role of the working class in shaping the party’s ideology.
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Politically speaking, there are clear pluses and minuses to this trend.
On the positive side for Democrats, more educated whites are expected to play a key role in the party’s efforts to retake control of the House, especially in suburban districts. Women, in particular, have shifted by the millions toward favoring Democratic congressional candidates.
In 2014, women voted for Democratic congressional candidates, according to exit polls, by a 4-point margin; the Oct. 2 2018 Quinnipiac poll shows women supporting Democratic candidates by 18 points. Women this year are also the most active constituency driving Democratic mobilization.
On the negative side, conservatives are already seeking to capitalize on the ideological shift. President Trump has taken to portraying his critics as “an angry left-wing mob.” This headline in the right-leaning Investor’s Business Daily nicely catches the spirit of this effort: “It’s Official: Democrats Are the Extremists Today.”
According to Gallup, the leftward shift among Democrats is more pronounced on social issues involving race, gender and sexual identity than it is on economic matters.
In a detailed analysis, Gallup found that the lion’s share of the increase in support for socially liberal positions
has occurred among non-Hispanic whites. Whereas just 39 percent of white Democrats said they were liberal on social issues back in 2001-2005, that has risen to 61 percent since 2015-2017. By contrast, blacks’ views have hardly changed: 34 percent in the 2001-2005 period vs. 37 percent in 2015-2017.
In addition, according to Gallup, social liberalism grew substantially more among Democratic women than it did among men and more among college-educated Democrats than among those without degrees.
Separately, in a September 2017 analysis of polling trends, the Pew Research Center found that from 2000 to 2017 the percentage of white Democrats identifying themselves as liberal grew by 27 points, from 28 to 55 percent.
Black Democrats’ self-described ideology was very different, according to Pew. 28 percent said they were liberals, 40 percent identified themselves as moderates and 30 percent as conservatives.
A widely circulated report issued earlier this month provides further detail on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The study, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” was produced by a group called More In Common, which says it seeks “to build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division.”
The report identified the most liberal constituency as “progressive activists,” a constituency that is expected to make up a quarter of Democratic voters this year, according to Stephen Hawkins, research director at More In Common.
These voters stand apart with “the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status” of all the groups studied. They are “highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity in society, particularly with regards to race, gender and other minority group identities.” In addition, a third of progressive activists view political correctness as having gone too far, compared with 80 percent of the population as a whole.
There are a number of other areas where progressive activists differ from the average American, according to the More in Common study. Progressive activists are “more than twice as likely to say that they never pray (50 percent to 19 percent), “almost three times more likely to be ‘ashamed to be an American’ ” (69-24), eleven percentage points more likely to be white (80-69), and “twice as likely to have completed college (59-29).
Goldberg, the doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, has documented the changing character of the Democratic electorate in a working paper, “The 2016 Election and the Left’s Lurch Left.”
Using American National Election Studies data, Goldberg found that among white liberal women, the share identifying themselves as “feminist” rose from 45 percent in 1992 to 83 percent in 2016. For white liberal men, the percentage saying they were feminists grew from 34 to 59 percent.
Goldberg’s analysis shows a surge of racial liberalism among white Democrats. In 2016,
racial sympathy among white liberals soared to the highest levels ever recorded by the American National Elections Studies. Likewise, the proportion of those who believe that whites have ‘too much’ political influence and that racial discrimination is the foremost impediment to black mobility also crested in 2016.
White liberal racial sympathy was, in turn, by far the strongest among the most affluent white liberals, as accompanying graphic illustrates.
Lowest income third
of white Democrats
Middle third
Top third
Top 4%
LIBERAL
Systemic discrimination, past and present; society largely to blame
Bottom 16%
CONSERVATIVE
Blacks are responsible for their own condition
(shaded area)
1986
2000
2016
’86
’00
’16
’86
’00
’16
In case you are wondering how racial empathy is measured, ANES uses the responses to four statements to make its determination: “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve; “Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors; “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.; “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”
The shift of white liberals on racial empathy, Goldberg wrote, is part of a larger movement to the left among white Democratic activists:
Importantly, these drastic attitudinal changes coincide with surges in white liberal support for progressive policy positions, including higher immigration levels, affirmative action and government assistance to African Americans.
According to Goldberg, 2016 marked the first year on record that “white liberals rated ethnic and racial minorities more positively than they did other whites.”
The same pattern emerges on a host of specific issues. Take the case of immigration: 40 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of liberals surveyed by ANES supported increasing the level of legal immigration, which Goldberg reported to be “the highest proportion on record.”
While white liberals make up roughly 40 percent of the Democratic electorate, this faction includes a disproportionate share of the party’s activists and exerts a powerful influence on the party’s agenda, including the party platform. These voters also turn out at much higher levels than their numbers would suggest in primaries and caucuses.
One question is whether the recent heightened emphasis that white liberal Democrats place on social issues — as opposed to economic issues — contributed to the 2016 decline in minority voting and possibly to the long-term decline of Democratic support from the white working class.
In an email, Yascha Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, wrote:
One of the dangers for the Democratic Party — and the left-leaning parts of the establishment more broadly — is that they confound their actual audience with a small but highly visible group of activists.
Mounk argues that
a majority of Americans is horrified by hate speech; disgusted by the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants; and committed to the fight against sexual harassment. But a majority of Americans also feels that ‘call-out culture’ often attacks people for innocent mistakes and that some attempts to remedy racism actually serve to divide the country further along racial lines.
Strategically, Mounk contends,
If Democrats couch their fight against the evident injustices that still persist in our country in universal language that has deep roots in the American tradition, they have a good chance of winning elections — and making a real difference for the most vulnerable members of our society. If, on the contrary, they become captured in language games that are only understood by the most political and best educated progressive activists, they are likely to alienate a lot of potential supporters — including a large number of women and people of color.
In many respects, the issue of immigration embodies the Democrats’ problem.
According to Pew, Democrats share with much of the general public a positive view of immigrants. 65 percent of all Americans agree that immigrants strengthen the country compared with 84 percent of Democrats and 42 percent of Republicans.
While the immigration data suggests that Democrats should not have a significant problem with the broad issue of immigration on Election Day, the numbers mask a more subtle reality. Men and women opposed to immigration are much more likely to vote Republican on the issue than supporters are to base a vote for a Democratic candidate on a pro-immigration position.
That is one of the reasons that even after the backlash on Trump’s child separation policies, Republicans have continued to emphasize anti-immigration policies. Republicans are “painting Democrats as the ones pursuing an extreme immigration agenda that would fill the country with sanctuary cities’ where violent criminals roam free,” my news side colleague Julie Hirschfeld Davis wrote in The Times on Oct. 14:
Democrats have found that in politically competitive states, particularly ones that Mr. Trump carried in 2016, the attacks can easily turn crucial voting blocs against Democrats.
The ongoing mobilizing force of the immigration issue raises a question for Democrats that never disappears completely: how far can the party push an agenda of social liberalism while keeping the support of at least 50 percent of the voters, plus one?
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, wrote me by email:
The danger for Democrats is that the electorate overall is probably still a little right-of-center on social issues, and older voters who vote at consistently higher rates are decidedly conservative on social issues. To the extent that these issues define elections, especially Senate elections (where conservative rural voters matter more), Democrats are at a disadvantage.
The party’s strengthened social liberalism may help Democrats mobilize more left-leaning Gen Y and Gen Z voters (those between the ages of 18 and 28), Drutman pointed out, which would be crucial. But Drutman added a cautionary note for liberal enthusiasts: “Democrats have consistently been disappointed by hopes of mobilizing younger voters, particularly in midterms.”
And here’s another cautionary note: the very nature of political polarization suggests that even as liberals pull sharply to the left, conservatives are pulling sharply to the right, and it is unclear who will win the tug of war.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
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