Kevin Drum looks at election demographics and concludes that Democrats are in a long-term pickle:
To put this more simply, recent evidence suggests that Democrats don’t just have a problem with the white working class anymore, but, increasingly, a problem with the working class, period. Unfortunately, this inevitably brings us around to the tedious—but important—question of whether liberals need to move toward the center on social issues.
Needless to say, the progressive wing of the party is massively resistant to this idea. During the election, my Twitter feed was jam packed with quixotic ideas for expanding the Democratic map: eliminating the Electoral College; admitting Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states; packing the Supreme Court; etc. This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, a desperate attempt to propose anything other than the obvious: embracing social policies that appeal to more people, especially those without college degrees. That’s Politics 101. I don’t know how this is all going to turn out, but I’ll bet it’s going to be a helluva fight.
Feel free to argue with Kevin’s conclusion but let’s just assume he’s right and Democrats need to embrace more appealing social policies, whatever that means. Here’s my first question: how do we find working-class voters who will listen? As I’ve argued before, there’s a major swath of rural voters who are lost to any form of persuasion because they are in a Fox/Facebook bubble. The same may be true for the voters identified in the pieces Kevin quotes in his post, which are white, latino and asian working-class male voters in cities as well as rural areas. Normally, one would talk message before talking how to deliver that message, but I think the smart move in the current political climate is to understand these voters’ media diet first, then talk about messaging. If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that voters beliefs about the Republican Party can withstand a heavy onslaught of reality and remain unchanged.
My second question is what it means to move to the center on social policy. My view is that it’s easy to say and hard to do, because two of the biggest social issues, guns and abortion, are almost completely black-and-white for those who are moved by them. If you say that abortions should be “safe, legal and rare” (which makes me want to puke, frankly) you’ve done nothing to appease a single-issue anti-choice voter. Similarly, saying that you’re for reasonable limits on gun ownership does absolutely nothing to appease someone for whom any limit on gun ownership is too much. Abortion, gun control, LGBTQ (especially trans) rights and a host of other social issues don’t really have a “center” from the perspective of the voters who care about them.
It may well be that there’s a group of male working-class voters who could be swayed by changes in messaging. But I also think Democrats need to do a hell of a lot more research on how to reach those voters before we just accept that moderating our message is the way to do it. And, if we find these voters are unreachable, we need to come up with other strategies to find reachable voters. I see people despairing because 67% of voters turned out in 2020 and Democrats didn’t cruise to victory. My take is that we have another third of the population to work on if we can’t convince working-class males to vote our way.
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