"The Emerging Democratic Majority" came and went, according to one of the influential book's two authors. His logic would explain a lot, right down to why Grimsley Graham didn't do better in his state House race in Rogers.
Journalist John B. Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira finished "The Emerging Democratic Majority" in 2002. I never read this book, but watched it help make Democrats overconfident. Published at the peak of President George W. Bush's glory days, Democrats lapped up its forecast. Then the Iraq War and the economic crash of '08 hastened things. Democrats' belief that they couldn't lose led directly to the "Hope" and "Change," "post-partisan" euphoria that nominated Barack Obama.
It's not all the authors' fault that a great, rare opportunity was mistaken for certain, final victory. For the second time in my life -- Watergate was first -- the Democrats wasted a sure thing. But do trends favoring Democrats remain?
No, Judis writes in the National Journal. I highly recommend his article: http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-emerging-republican-advantage-20150130.
Some trends are obvious. After 2008, Democrats lost much of their remaining support among working-class whites. Then young voters became disillusioned. "The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among a group that had tilted toward Democrats in 2006 and 2008: Call them middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called 'the office economy.' In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college -- but not postgraduate -- degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000."
These people already had health insurance. Democrats did nothing for them after 2008, in this group's view. They were also the people Democrats like Graham counted on.
"The defection of these voters -- who, unlike the white working class, are a growing part of the electorate -- is genuinely bad news for Democrats, and very good news indeed for Republicans. The question, of course, is whether it is going to continue. It's tough to say for sure, but I think there is a case to be made that it will."
Democrats simply must hold their own with these voters to win. Instead, Democrats "dropped from a 50 percent-48 percent advantage among middle-income voters in 2006 to a 54 percent-44 percent deficit in 2014." Judis also finds the drop off to be serious in presidential election years, when Democratic turnout is strongest. The drop-off persists among better-off voters who are minorities, too.
Attacking income inequality will win this vital group back, some think. Judis' article never mentions their hero, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., by name but kicks her fans' rationale very hard:
"As a Washington Post poll showed last October, middle-class voters are less likely than white working-class voters or professionals to agree that America's system 'favors the wealthy.' Many of them work for businesses where their own success is bound up with the company's bottom line. That makes them less susceptible than white working-class voters or professionals to Democratic taunts about the '1 percent.'
"How middle-class voters react to this sort of populism was on display in 2012. Obama did manage to make inroads into the white working class in the North by running ads deriding Romney's sharp financial practices and his opposition to the auto bailout: In Ohio, Obama lost white working-class voters by only 46 percent to 44 percent in 2012 after losing them by 54 percent to 44 percent in 2008. But what helped with working-class voters hurt with the middle class. In Ohio, he lost college-but-not-postgrad voters by 54 percent to 44 percent after having won them by 51 percent to 48 percent four years earlier.
"Maybe such a trade-off would be worth it if left-wing populism could consistently win over white working-class voters en masse. The truth, though, is that Mitt Romney was a perfect target for these populist attacks in Ohio, and Democrats cannot expect to have such a useful foil in most elections."
Issues like abortion and guns only matter in extreme cases. As long as Republicans soft-pedal those, they win. Judis cites Arkansas as an example of that.
There's no clear path for Democrats. We're seeing that in Arkansas. Our first Republican-dominated legislative session since the 19th century is running smoothly -- because the Republicans erred first, the Democrats erred last, and the Republicans so far are determined not to err again.
Doug Thompson is a political reporter and columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Commentary on 02/14/2015