J.D. Tuccille: Rank-and-file Democrats are done with the party’s woke obsessions

Article content

Months after voters handed them an unexpectedly stiff loss — widely interpreted as a thorough repudiation by the electorate — Democrats are confused about which direction to turn. Or, more accurately, party leaders seem committed to going further in the progressive direction while the rank and file would like a whole lot less of that.

Writing for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait noted earlier this month that the recent Democratic National Committee meeting to select new leadership featured intricate explanations from the chair about gender-balance requirements for incoming officers. This occurred against a backdrop of “a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.”

Article content

Basically, if you were looking for a way to define the much-overused word “woke” in understandable terms, pointing at a video recording of the gathering would have done the job quite nicely. It also would have clearly illustrated what many Americans think is a big problem with Democrats.

In January, Doug Sosnik, a one-time adviser to former president Bill Clinton, pointed out that, as was the case in 1980, “the Democrats are a party controlled by elites, liberals and special interest groups. They are out of touch with America’s middle class.”

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, who once thought demography would guarantee Democrats a lock on political power, has revised his opinion after the increasingly progressive party lost ground with young voters, Latinos, Blacks and Asian Americans. He noted after the election that his party is out of touch with the majority of the country and that Democrats’ priorities and values are “those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap — and sometimes not at all — with those of ordinary Americans.”

Both Sosnik and Teixeira want the Democratic party to back away from the identity-obsessed left and address bread-and-butter concerns that drive most Americans’ decisions on how to vote. Importantly, many Democrats who aren’t prominent enough to attend Democratic National Committee meetings agree.

Article content

Article content

This month, Gallup pollsters found that Republicans, who were victorious in the recent election, are generally happy with where their party stands in ideological terms. A plurality of 43 per cent wants it to “stay the same” as it is now (up nine points from 2021), while 28 per cent want it to shift more conservative and 27 per cent would prefer it to become more moderate.

By contrast, a 45 per cent plurality of Democrats wants that party to become more moderate (11 points higher than in 2021). Twenty-two per cent would like it to “stay the same” while 29 per cent want to see their party become even more liberal than it is now.

Both parties have become more ideologically polarized in recent years in terms of self-identification and positions on issues. But Democrats have good reason to regret their direction because of the results of the election which showed that their party had drifted so dramatically left that it shed support.

Last June, Gallup found that Americans have become significantly more liberal on social issues and slightly more liberal on economics. But it added that all the change is “driven by U.S. Democrats; neither Republicans nor independents have become more liberal in their views over time.”

Article content

After the Republican election victory, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times crunched numbers and commented that “data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade. This has distanced them from the median voter.” He noted that the shift had taken place in areas including immigration and offering extra help to minorities.

Burn-Murdoch cited research by the Data for Progress think tank that found “political elites” who hold government authority or, like pundits and lobbyists, are in a position to influence government policy “hold views often well to the left of the average voter — and even the average Democratic voter.” As he observed, “this can create situations where policies and rhetoric alienate the very groups they’re aimed at.”

This didn’t escape the public’s notice. In 2023, Morning Consult pollsters reported that, by a nine-point margin, voters “see the Democratic Party as more ideologically extreme than the GOP.” Worse for Democrats, the pollsters discovered that the party’s erosion was “largely driven by worsening perceptions among its own voter base.”

Article content

That erosion continued into the 2024 election. Not only did most demographic groups vote more Republican (or, at least, less Democrat) than they had in the past, but as the New York Times noted, more than 89 per cent of counties in the United States shifted in favour of President Donald Trump and the GOP relative to their votes in the previous election. Importantly, while the Democratic Party has increasingly become a political organization of prosperous, left-leaning urbanites, Trump made “the best showing in urban areas for a Republican since 2004,” according to the Washington Post’s Youyou Zhou and Heather Long.

So, what Democrats have been doing isn’t working for them. Undoubtedly, that was true for their treatment of cost-of-living issues, which rose to the forefront of Americans’ minds during the Biden-Harris administration’s term in office and drove many voting decisions. But the Democratic party’s flirtation with hard-left ideology repulsed voters who saw the party and its officials obsessed with issues of identity at the expense of nuts-and-bolts matters.

Article content

It’s no surprise that many Democrats are reconsidering this ideological drift. A growing share of rank-and-file supporters perceive that their party has deviated too far from the mainstream to meet their immediate needs and attract a winning percentage of votes. They want the Democratic party to ease up on its leftward shift and move back towards the centre.

The big question is whether party leaders entranced with details of gender and racial identity and prone to mockery-worthy expressions of progressive dogma are willing to go along with voters’ preference for a little moderation. The Democratic Party’s future depends on the answer.

National Post

Article content