Yes, there are more activist Democrats on twitter. So?
by digby
Bonus twitter content: my best guess is the figures in the piece grossly understate how unrepresentative political Twitter really is, based on a few unscientific Twitter polls from yesterday pic.twitter.com/FVAQmfKCB8— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 9, 2019
Here’s Nate Cohn’s unscientific twitter poll:
Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.
The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.
Even these results might understate the leftward lean of the most politically active, Democratic Twitter users, who often engage with political journalists and can have a powerful effect in shaping the conventional wisdom. In an informal poll of Democrats on one of our Twitter accounts on Monday, about 80 percent said they were liberal, and a similar percentage said they had a college degree. Only 20 percent said political correctness was a problem, and only 2 percent said they were black.
The relative moderation of Democrats who are not sharing their political thoughts on social media, and therefore of Democrats as a whole, makes it less surprising that Virginia Democrats tolerated Mr. Northam’s yearbook page. It makes it easier to imagine how Joe Biden might not merely survive questions about whether he touched women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, but might even emerge essentially unscathed.
It also helps explain why recent polls show that a majority of Democrats would rather see the party become more moderate than move leftward, even as progressives clamor for a Green New Deal or Medicare for all.
As I said, this strikes me as a realistic view of the party as a whole. Vast numbers of Democrats just don’t follow all the day-to-day intricacies of a changing political culture and on some level they don’t trust rapid change they don’t fully understand. That’s normal.
However, the left of the party, perhaps overrepresented on twitter, is the vanguard, breaking new ground and moving the party forward. It has always done this. Sometimes it overreaches or is outmaneuvered by the opposition. But it’s the duty of the vanguard to press forward, knowing that it is not a majority and accepting that progress is almost always two steps forward one step back at best. That combination of idealism and pragmatism is what cements lasting change. It’s not their job to be the voice for moderation. That’s what moderates do. It’s the job of everyone in the coalition to respect others and treat the outcome as legitimate.
Of course, twitter amplifies the voices of left-wing activists. It’s pretty obvious. Journalists should be aware of that too. It’s a legitimate voice of the Democratic left and it should not be dismissed. It’s influential with politicians and the public. But isn’t representative of the entire Democratic coalition and never has been.
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