Rockville Centre Democratic Club

Talking Points

January 24, 2019

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The Democratic electorate has shifted sharply to the left, taking many politicians along with it — willingly and unwillingly.

Jan. 23, 2019

 

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley in Boston on Oct. 1 during a rally protesting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.Mary Schwalm/Associated Press

The most active wing of the Democratic Party — the roughly 20 percent of the party’s electorate that votes in primaries and wields disproportionate influence over which issues get prioritized — has moved decisively to the left. With all the attention that is being paid to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and other new progressive voices in Congress, this may not seem like news, but we are only just beginning to realize the full significance of this shift.

The Primaries Project at the Brookings Institution conducted extensive polling of 7,198 Democratic voters in the 2018 primaries and found that 60.4 percent described themselves as liberal, including 26.4 percent who said they were “very liberal.”

In its most recent analysis, Gallup found that from 1994 to 2018, the percentage of all Democrats who call themselves liberal more than doubled from 25 percent to 51 percent.

Over the same period, the percentage of Democratic moderates and conservatives fell steadily, with the share of moderates dropping from 48 to 34 percent, and of conservatives dropping from 25 to 13 percent. These trends began to accelerate during the administration of George W. Bush and have continued unabated during the Obama and Trump presidencies.

In recent years, the internal pressures to hew to the left, driven largely by Democratic primary voters, have steadily gained strength.

They include the determination to oppose all things Trump, especially his anti-immigrant policies, his racism and his religious bigotry; the rise of outspoken, well-educated liberals, many of them young; the #MeToo movement and Trump’s disrespect for women; the Occupy movement; the mobilization of anti-establishment voters by Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries; and the consistent exodus of more conservative white voters from the Democratic Party, supplanted by more politically liberal minority voters.

The anti-establishment faction contributed significantly to the large turnout increases in Democratic primaries last year. Pew found that from 2014 to 2018, turnout in House primaries rose from 13.7 to 19.6 percent of all registered Democrats, in Senate primaries from 16.6 to 22.2 percent and in governor primaries from 17.1 to 24.5 percent.

Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, agrees with the analysis that core voters and activist leaders within the party are “moving leftward”:

Medicare for All, free college, a universal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage, an expansion of the EITC to the entire bottom half, workers on boards of directors, ending ICE, raising marginal tax rates to 70 percent are all big, bold leftist ideas and appear to be gaining currency.

These “big, bold leftist ideas” pose a strategic problem for liberals and the Democratic Party, Sawhill, who published “The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation” last year, wrote in an email:

In my view, it’s a trade-off between exciting the base thereby insuring higher turnout vs. broadening the base to include independents and Republicans that don’t like Trump.

Sawhill argues that if the goal of Democrats is victory, as opposed to ideological purity, they must focus on general election swing voters who are not die-hard Democrats.

One key Democratic target, Sawhill observes, is the “well-educated, suburban women, many of them Republican, who voted for Democrats in the midterms.” Once Trump is gone, she continued, “they could easily return to their natural home in the Republican Party.”

“Over the longer-term,” Sawhill continued,

as millennials and minorities become an ever-larger proportion of the party, it will have a natural constituency that supports a new and bolder agenda, but the concentration of those voters in urban areas that are underrepresented in our electoral system will be a continuing drag on the party’s prospects.

The extensive support among prospective Democratic presidential candidates for Medicare for All, government-guaranteed jobs and a higher minimum wage reflects the widespread desire in the electorate for greater protection from the vicissitudes of market capitalism — in response to “increasingly incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change,” as the political scientist Jacob Hacker put it in “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States.” Support for such protections is showing signs of becoming a litmus test for candidates running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

Polling by the Pew Research Center shows sharp movement in a progressive direction on key issues among many Democrats.

Take liberalized attitudes on immigration as an example. From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of Democrats who said the government should create “a way for immigrants already here illegally to become citizens if the meet certain requirements” grew from 29 to 51 percent, while the share who said “there should be better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws” fell from 21 to 5 percent.

Similarly, the percentage of Democrats who agreed with the statement that “racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks can’t get ahead these days” rose from 28 to 64 percent from 2010 to 2017.

Paul Starr, a sociology professor at Princeton, warns against putting too much stock in the ascendance of progressive Democrats. In an essay in the American Prospect, Starr argues that there were “two distinct developments” in the 2018 elections:

While progressives have gained ground in long-held Democratic areas, more centrist candidates have won the more competitive districts. This second development will limit how far to the left the party can go. The more the party expands into the suburbs, the more dependent it will be on those relatively centrist votes — and that dependence will become a constraint on the policies that Democrats are able to agree on.

In addition, while acknowledging the rise of the progressive wing, Starr pointed out that a separate December 2018 Gallup survey found that 54 percent of Democratic voters would prefer their party to become “more moderate,” while 41 percent said they would like the party to become “more liberal.”

Along similarly cautionary lines, David Graham wrote in the Atlantic last November:

There’s clear leftward movement among Democratic voters on a range of issues, and there are more progressive candidates running than ever. But this doesn’t amount, at least yet, to the socialist groundswell that advocates pine for and critics fear. The actual policy positions, and number of leftist officeholders, will remain limited — at least for now. What happens in 2020 could be more telling.

Graham’s conclusion:

The Democratic Party is moving left, but it might not be clear quite how far left for two or even six years. The revolution is coming more slowly than its champions hope and its critics fear.

Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, noted in an email that the leftward

movement is across the board on policy, ideological identification, and values, but remains furthest left on specific policy. The public movement seems to be strongest on race and gender issues as well as any proposal tied to Trump.

Women, according to Grossmann, “are becoming a bigger part of the Democratic electorate and more supportive of women primary candidates.”

The 2018 primary elections revealed the deepening strength of an anti-establishment insurgent faction, largely young, white and minority urban voters who turned out in droves in Democratic primaries from Omaha to Tallahassee and from the Bronx to Boston.

Michael Capuano, a former mayor of Somerville, Mass. and a ten-term member of the House, learned the hard way how much the Democratic electorate has changed. As mayor in the 1990s, Capuano presided over the gentrification of the once scruffy, working class town. Initially, the city was grateful.

When Capuano first won election to Congress in 1998, he owed his victory in the 10-candidate Democratic primary to his hometown. He carried Somerville with 7,852 votes, more than the total vote for all nine opponents, 6,253, while losing to other candidates in Boston, Belmont, Cambridge, Chelsea and Watertown.

The impact of gentrification is striking.

By 2017, 61.2 percent of Somerville’s residents 25 or older had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30.9 percent nationwide. The median household income was $84,722, compared with $57,652 nationally.

Somerville had moved from downscale to upscale, not to the level of Brattle Street in Cambridge or Boston’s Beacon Hill, but still many steps up the ladder.

In the process, Somerville left Capuano, a white working class Democrat in the mold of Tip O’Neill, behind.

In 2018, twenty years after first winning his House seat, Capuano could no longer count on Somerville. Despite his deep roots — his father had been mayor before him — the vote there was a wash. Capuano received 8,423 to 8,286 for his opponent, Ayanna Pressley, an African-American Boston city councilwomen.

Pressley swept Cambridge and Boston to crush Capuano, 60,046 to 42,430 districtwide.

The same pattern emerged in the widely publicized defeat of Joe Crowley, another 10-term incumbent, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary in a House district that straddles the Bronx and Queens.

Steven Romalewski, who runs the mapping service at the CUNY Center for Urban Research, wrote me by email that “Ocasio-Cortez did best in areas such as Astoria/Steinway and Sunnyside, which happen to be more white than other parts of the district,” a point he elaborated upon in a story quoting him posted on The Intercept:

You can also see that most of her votes, the strongest vote support, came from areas like Astoria in Queens and Sunnyside in Queens and parts of Jackson Heights that, number one, were not predominantly Hispanic, so they’re a more mixed population, and are areas where — this is kind of a term of art — are in the process of being gentrified, where newer people are moving in,

Grace Segers, writing in July on the City & State website, noted that Crowley 

fell victim to gentrification and that force may upend expectations in Democratic primaries throughout Manhattan and western Brooklyn and Queens. And the rise of younger voters who are newer to their districts and unattached to incumbents could power insurgent candidates throughout New York City.

David Freedlander, writing in Politico Magazine, captured the unanticipated voting patterns that gave rise to Crowley’s defeat. “Ocasio-Cortez’s best precincts,” Freedlander wrote, were 

highly educated, whiter and richer than the district as a whole. In those neighborhoods, Ocasio-Cortez clobbered Crowley by 70 percent or more.

Conversely, Crowley did best in “the working-class African-American enclave of LeFrak City, where he got more than 60 percent of the vote.” In fact, Crowley

pulled some of his best numbers in Ocasio-Cortez’s heavily Latino and African-American neighborhood of Parkchester, in the Bronx — beating her by more than 25 points on her home turf.

Jerry Skurnik, a New York political consultant, describes gentrifying communities outside Manhattan as experiencing an influx of “people who really want to live in Greenwich Village but can’t afford to.”

This younger, well-educated constituency — predominately but not exclusively white — is hostile to cautious establishment Democrats, especially to older white men, and they are determined to engineer an intraparty cultural and ideological insurgency.

The emergence in force in 2018 of these insurgent Democrats grows in part out of the Sanders presidential campaign. Sanders mobilized millions of voters, many of whom did not want the Democrats to nominate a candidate with deep ties to party regulars and to the major donor community.

Maps of primary voting patterns in 2016 and 2018 produced by CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Center for Urban Research show that Sanders beat Clinton in just a handful of New York City neighborhoods. Many of those Sanders neighborhoods are in Ocasio-Cortez’s district and they are the communities that provided her biggest margins of victory.

Sanders also carried Somerville in 2016, 12,247 to 9,016, where support for Capuano imploded two years later.

If the turnout patterns in the Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley districts are even modestly predictive, the Democratic Party may be changing in significant ways.

Tom Kiley, who conducted polling for Capuano, described in an email the shifting makeup of the Democratic electorate in the Seventh District of Massachusetts:

Mike did best among older, white, non-college educated Democrats who, for the most part, still described themselves as liberals or moderate liberals.

Pressley’s base, Kiley wrote, 

was overwhelmingly made up of liberal, college-educated, white voters, especially those under 45 who did not have a history of voting in off-year elections. We were expecting what we considered a robust turnout of 75,000 for the day after Labor Day. In fact it ballooned to over 100,000, largely on the strength of this younger white cohort.

While the Boston-Cambridge-Somerville district is far more liberal than the national average, Kiley argued that trends there are likely to be replicated in many regions of the country. “These new voters will have a major impact in the Democratic nomination process in many states,” he wrote:

The desire for change in general is huge, and Trump is a powerful accelerant. I have to believe these new voters aren’t going to just retreat after electing new members of Congress; they’ll come out in droves in the primaries next year. And they’ll be voting for change.

While primary voters are normally predominately committed partisans with a long history of voting, in the Pressley-Capuano contest more than half of the voters had no record of previous primary voting (24 percent) or were recorded as voting in only one previous primary (29 percent).

“If the Pressley campaign was banking on turnout, they certainly cashed in,” wrote Maeve Duggan, research director at the MassINC Polling Group, in an article posted on the website of WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station.

“Some 106,556 voters in the 7th Congressional District cast ballots in the 2018 Democratic primary, compared with just 61,725 in 2014,” she continued, “and among the district’s 2018 primary voters, only 37 percent had also voted” in 2014 primaries, according to voter file analysis.

Duggan and the MassINC Polling Group analyzed the demographics of the first-time voters and found:

They were predominantly women and young people: Fifty-five percent were women, and 66 percent were age 44 or younger (including 34 percent who were 18 to 29 years old).

The surge of young voters had a powerful impact, increasing

the overall proportion of voters 44 or younger from 25 percent in 2014 to 42 percent in 2018. Combining age and gender, women ages 18 to 29 made up the largest group of new voters, at 20 percent.

The new voters, she found, “were more likely to be Asian or Hispanic, compared with the 7th’s repeat voters,” but, she noted, the state’s only majority-minority congressional district “still has a predominantly white voting base.”

A July 2018 pre-election survey of voters in the Capuano-Pressley district conducted by WBUR-MassINC makes clear the importance of growing political participation among young voters. The survey found striking generational differences not only on the candidates but on issues.

18-to-29-year-olds favored Pressley over Capuano 41-23 while those over 60 backed Capuano 59-28. Asked if they would be more or less likely to support a candidate who “made abolishing ICE a major priority,” young voters said “more likely” by 48-18 while older voters said it would make them “less likely” by 25-23.

Both young and old supported a national health care program, but the margin of support versus oppose was larger (90-2) among young voters than among their elders (71-16).

In a postelection analysis of the Ocasio-Cortez-Crowley contest, the Global Strategy Group found:

White gentrified liberal areas went big for AOC and surged. Younger, white liberal areas contributed heavily to the margin of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory. Ocasio-Cortez won Hispanics.

At the same time, according to their analysis, voters Crowley thought he could depend upon — “expected people, especially older primary voters — did not show up.”

Joshua M. Zeitz, a historian whose most recent book is “Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House,” argues that contemporary Democratic progressives are not insurgents, but in full accord with party tradition.

In an essay in Politico, “Democrats Aren’t Moving Left. They’re Returning to Their Roots,” Zeitz argued that

What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds its antecedents in 1944. With the country fully mobilized for war, President Franklin Roosevelt called for “a second Bill of Rights … an economic Bill of Rights” that would entitle all Americans to a “useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” the “right … to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care” and the “right to a good education.”

Sawhill looks at the ideological shifts in the Democratic electorate less from a historical perspective and more as a response to contemporary economic and social dislocation. Among both conservatives and liberals, Sawhill argued, there is “an intellectual awakening about the flaws of modern capitalism” — a recognition of the failings of “neoliberalism, the idea that a market economy with a few light guardrails is the best way to organize a society.” This intellectual climate may result in greater receptivity among voters to more radical proposals.

The willingness of voters to support Democrats who are pushing initiatives like these will depend in large part, however, on the ability of candidates to assure the general electorate that their agenda is beneficial to all and not just to favored liberal constituencies. This will be difficult, given the fact that what is being proposed is a much larger role for government, and that those who are most in need of government support are in the bottom half of the income distribution and disproportionately minority — in a country with a long racist history. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was able to overcome this barrier twice, but the challenge should not be minimized.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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 Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.  @edsall

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