Democrats have stopped listening to America’s voters
The party is heading for a meltdown in the midterms but shows no taste for introspection
Edward Luce
President Biden speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One after attending the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California, last week. The Democrats are trailing badly in polls ahead of November’s elections. © Kevin Lamarque/ReutersHow can you tell if American cultural liberals have gone too far?
When San Franciscans throw them out of office.
Recent recall elections of San Francisco’s district attorney and education chief cannot be dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of America’s bluest city, which last elected a Republican mayor in 1959.
There is a reason Democrats are languishing in the national polls.
San Francisco is merely the writing on the wall.
Given the authoritarian instincts of today’s Republican party, the fact that Democrats are trailing badly ought to be an urgent cause of self-questioning.
The party is heading towards what polls say could be a sweeping defeat in this November’s midterm elections.
Yet there is little sign of introspection.
Everyone other than Democrats are to blame.
Voters are brainwashed into thinking Joe Biden is too old for the job of president, fed up with high petrol prices, overreacting to a shortage of baby formula, or simply too rightwing to reach.
There is a another explanation — that midterms are typically referendums on the economy and Democrats do not have an easily digestible economic message.
In contrast, voters think they know what the party believes about illegal immigration, defunding the police, transgender participation in girls sports and Zoom-biased teachers’ unions.
Most do not like these stances.
This applies as much to non-white as to white voters.
As Ruy Teixeira, a veteran political scientist, says: the Democratic brand is “somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to wide swaths of American voters, who might potentially be their allies”.
The fact that Teixeira is saying this ought to make Democrats take notice.
He was co-author of the seminal book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that racial trends would make Democratic rule inevitable.
This remains an article of faith among election consultants.
Yet Texieira has changed his mind.
How could Democrats be alienating the people it needs to win?
A big part of the answer is that they have stopped listening to ordinary voters.
This would be less of a problem were the party’s leadership a cross-section of US society.
But its upper echelons are dominated by a white college-educated activist class that is used to talking with itself.
The days of knocking on the doors of potential new voters are largely over.
Since Barack Obama’s time, Democrats have been wedded to a digital model that downplays old-fashioned engagement.
This detaches the party from reality.
A corollary is that most Democrats believe that they just have to “get out the base”.
Exciting the base means catering to the party’s activists, who are a world apart from the median voter.
Alison Collins, the head of San Francisco’s education board who was ejected earlier this year, said that “‘merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centred on white supremacist framing”.
Such thinking drove Collins to switch San Francisco’s biggest selective school from merit-based application to a lottery system.
Liberals nationwide are pushing to end standardised tests altogether.
Yet most voters, including African Americans, reject this as the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The activist left also glosses over America’s rising crime wave.
Urban homicides have risen by more than 40 per cent in the last two and a half years, which is a big reason voters say the US is on the wrong track by their most consistent rising margins since the early 1990s, when America was suffering from its last crime wave.
Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s district attorney, was thrown out of office last week for declining to prosecute repeat offenders.
Though Boudin was right to complain that US prisons are filled with people who do not belong there, such empathy is no answer to the insecurity people feel when they walk out of their homes.
The left is also missing a trick on the Supreme Court’s likely upcoming reversal of Roe vs Wade, which enshrined the federal right to abortion.
Liberal issue groups, most infamously the American Civil Liberties Union, said the move would be most damaging to marginalised groups, such as indigenous peoples and the LGBTQ community.
Women, who account for more than half of voters, were not even mentioned in the ACLU’s tweet.
Today’s parlance for mothers is “birthing people” who “chest feed”.
Such terms could only thrive in a cloistered world.
Successful politics is about winning converts.
Stamping out heresy is a bad way of doing that.
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