Democrats could be headed into the wildreness for the next decade, David Shor tells Ezra Klein. Democrats in North Carolina have experienced that for much of the last decade. So it bears attention that the data analyst sees this as the last opportunity Democrats will have to pass an expansive agenda. Use it or lose it. Because they are likely to lose control of the Senate and not get it back for some time:
Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.
Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.
It is.
To be sure. Especially among the wokest of the woke. These peace-loving, anti-gun folks want nothing better than to browbeat “stupid” conservatives into submission with the power of their superior command of the facts. It’s not an approach likely to win friends and influence people out where Democrats need to expand their vote totals. Deep canvassing (listening more than talking) not focused on specific elections might help, but it requires a serious commitment of time.
Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.”
Klein offers much more to consider in his column about Democrats’ longer-term fate. But let’s move to the short term.
Jordan Weissmann (Slate) thinks that with their narrow margin for error in the Senate, Democrats need to lock in wins now that will last. Trying to pass everything on their wish list will fail. Trying to shorten the time window for a raft of new programs to lower the cost will leave them prone to expiring under a House and Senate soon to be controlled by Republicans. Some in the progressive caucus who want to go big or go home could go home with nothing or see their victories undone in a few years. Moderates want to see fewer programs funded for longer so they might endure:
To some extent, which approach you prefer really boils down to whether you’re a political optimist or pessimist, as well as your level of risk aversion. The underlying assumption among progressives seems to be that many of these programs will be so popular that Republicans won’t dare let them expire if their party retakes power in Washington—that, or Democrats will be able to run and win on renewing them. The moderates generally seem less hopeful, worrying that the GOP will in fact be happy to sit on its hands and let a paid leave or pre-K program vanish. (Manchin’s view is a little different: Ever the budget hawk, he’s suggested that once programs are in place, they’ll become “ingrained,” so Congress should fully finance them from the start.)
It’s not objectively obvious who’s right in this fight. Democrats probably shouldn’t count on popular policies sweeping them to another congressional majority in a difficult midterm year where they’ll be facing freshly gerrymandered maps. At the same time, once new government benefits are in place, it really can be hard to dislodge them—see the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act after promising to do so for a decade.
On the other hand, think about just how close Republicans seemingly came to repealing Obamacare. And, to borrow a point others have made, think about how much simpler it might have been if all Republicans had to do was sit back and let it disappear. Maybe timing these programs to expire in 2025, right along with the GOP’s tax cuts, would give Democrats negotiating leverage. But it’s also entirely possible that Trump’s party will have a trifecta in Washington by then, allowing them to renew their tax cuts while letting Biden’s programs fall by the wayside. Or, if Biden is still president, perhaps conservatives would just try and damage him by letting the tax cuts and social spending programs expire together. Who knows. The GOP is full of loons and nihilists these days, and planning a legislative strategy partly around the hope that they’ll come to a responsible bargain in a few years’ time seems a little Pollyannaish.
Watching these negotiations is as frustrating as watching a staring contest. Somebody has to blink. But more importantly, Democrats have to deliver something for average Americans before, as Shor warns, their chance slips away. That’s not exactly visionary, but given the realities of the situation, it may be the best we can do.