You will discern a number of themes you have heard before in Michael Barone’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on why the predicted Democratic majority hasn’t emerged, at least not yet:
The Democrats lost to Donald Trump and may do it again. How did the world’s oldest political party, which has won four of the past seven presidential elections and received popular-vote pluralities in two more, find itself in this pickle?
One symptom of the party’s ailment is that its four top-polling presidential candidates in national surveys are in their 70s and No. 5 is a 38-year-old former mayor of a city of 102,000. Why haven’t others risen? Where are the candidates with demonstrated appeal to critical segments of the electorate? One answer is that over the past decade the Democrats have had a tough time electing candidates beyond heavily Democratic constituencies.
The decision to enact ObamaCare in 2010 despite its obvious unpopularity—forced through by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over President Obama’s doubts—not only cost Democrats the House but helped prevent the election of Democratic senators and governors in marginal states and produced Republican legislative majorities that dominated redistricting after the 2010 census. It may be reasonable for a party to risk seats to achieve a major policy goal. But the 2010 losses were massive, and current Democratic complaints about health care suggest ObamaCare hasn’t been a policy success.
The Democratic Party has always been a coalition of out-groups. For almost a century after the Civil War it was an awkward alliance of Southern segregationists and Catholic immigrants. Until the 1930s, it had a hard time finding plausible presidential candidates because most of its prominent officeholders were Southerners or Catholics, then considered unelectable nationally. But in 1932 they had a New York governor who was firmly Protestant and a fifth cousin of the popular Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.
Today, with its four top contenders from the heavily Democratic Northeast—Delaware, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York—it has a similar problem. Delaware and Vermont were competitive states when Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders first sought office in the 1970s. But neither man has faced a competitive statewide race in decades.
Representing a one-party constituency tends to breed habits of complacency, which have been exacerbated by widely circulated prophecies that demographic changes will give the Democrats a reliable national majority. A careful reading of these “ascendant America†prophets— Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in 2002, the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein and pollster Stanley Greenberg more recently—makes clear that these trends don’t operate automatically.
To prosper from demographic change, a party has to address the issues of the day convincingly and field candidates with appropriate strengths. It also needs to avoid unnecessarily alienating old constituencies. An acquaintance with history shows that when a party gains support from one growing group, the opposition party can gain even more from groups with opposing views even if they’re getting smaller.
That’s what happened in 2016. Rising percentages of Hispanics and Asians and the increasing liberalism of college graduates and unmarried women were supposed to help carry Hillary Clinton to easy victory. Instead they were offset by sharp declines in Democratic support from white voters without college degrees in Rust Belt states from Pennsylvania through Iowa, and in Florida with its many Rust Belt retirees. And as the New York Times’s Nate Cohn argued persuasively that year, noncollege whites are a significantly larger share of the electorate than exit polls have indicated—even if their numbers are slowly declining.
including that non-competitive districts make you complacent and complacency makes you stupid. One of the effects of being concentrated in the cities in safe districts is that it allows you to overestimate your strength.
One factor that Mr. Barone misses is that the very same criticisms could be made of the Republicans. They, too, are geographically concentrated and mostly are elected from non-competitive districts. What the polls tell you more than anything else is that both parties are declining while those who don’t see themselves in either political party are increasing as a proportion or the population.
Update
I had intended to conclude the post above with this thought but it slipped my mind this morning. Many years ago I heard an amusing take on the effect of television on politics to the effect that in California a political party was two people and a television set. Social media has resulted in a continuation of that process with a difference. They have resulted in a sort of perpetual Festivus, celebrated with the airing of grievances and feats of strength, typical among the feats of strength being ganging up on people with whom you disagree. I do not think this is a benign trend and it is clearly disrupting the political parties.
In political science Duverger’s Law is that first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts fosters the emergence of two party systems. Our system certainly appears to support that hypothesis. The uncomfortable conclusion is that however unrepresentative or, indeed, fractional our political parties may be without major structural reform we’re stuck with the political parties we have.
Democratic career politicians have to decide, to dance with the one that brung ya, or chase after other demographics with more exotic beliefs, genders, or skin tones. What they are trying to do, flatter fringe group voters by mocking what they believe is a dying demographic isn’t working.
I wholly agree with Dave regarding the decline of both parties. The increasing polarization between the R’s and D’s has only accelerated ideological dissatisfaction that seems to trigger people to re-register as a decline to state, putting them in that growing class of “Independent†voters.
The problem with the mantra ‘Demography is destiny’ is the false assumption that once a Democrat always a Democrat so that Democrats can take their future votes for granted while pursuing further micro-slices of demography (most of whom would vote Democrat anyway). People change their beliefs and ideologies over time, some become more liberal, more, because they have accumulated some wealth and fear to lose it via a stroke of the pen, more conservative. Accusing those who no longer vote your way of being traitors to their demography isn’t going to get you their votes back, and worse, might irritate some who currently vote for you.
IIRC what the research has suggested is that major life changes, e.g. marriage, having children, buying a home, death of a parent, etc. may evoke a change in politics.
Another issue is that, although a lot of new Americans may be socialists, they’re also social conservatives. That suggests that changes are in store for our politics.