For the last nearly half-century, and particularly in the wake of Ronald Reagan, the default political posture of Democratic voters has been fear. Specifically, fear of appearing too liberal or radical. Like a mantra, many Democrats will cite McGovern and Mondale and Dukakis as examples of what happens when Democrats drift too far left.
I mention this because lately there’s been some discussion, especially among the shapers of conventional wisdom, about how some of the leading Democrats running for president are running too far to the left, and that nominating such Democrats risks blowing a very winnable election again an unpopular incumbent. The conventional wisdom holds that the candidate who stands a best chance of defeating Donald Trump is a safe, experienced, centrist candidate who will not scare away moderate, suburban voters.
And the polls seem to support the conventional wisdom. The safe, centrist candidate, former VP Joe Biden, beats Trump in virtually all head-to-head polls, often by comfortable margins, and almost always by larger margins than his Democratic rivals. Furthermore, Biden leads virtually all polls among Democrats as to who they want to be the party’s nominee, again usually by comfortable margins.
So it would appear that both the general electorate and the Democratic primary electorate support the conventional wisdom.
But of course, there’s a few problems with the conventional wisdom. For one, the Democrats’ failures between 1968-1988 were not as simple as “we were too liberal”. Those failures were indeed driven by the wholesale flight of working class and rural Whites to the Republican Party due to the Democrats’ passage and implementation of civil rights legislation and programs to help poor Blacks, and the embrace of the anti war cause by some in the party.
If supporting civil rights and programs for the poor, and opposing a misguided, unwinnable war were liberal positions, then many of the Democrats in the 1960s were indeed guilty of that and that drove away many working class and rural Whites, groups who were instrumental to the dominance of the New Deal Democratic Party from 1932-1968. By abandoning the Democrats, these groups made the Republican Party the new dominant party, first at the presidential level, and gradually at the legislative and state levels.
But the American electorate of today is not the same one that existed between 1968-1988. To give an example, in 1988 Dukakis lost White voters 60-40, which was roughly the same numbers Obama lost Whites by to Romney in 2012, 59-39. But whereas Dukakis won just 10 states and lost the popular vote 53-45, Obama in 2012 won 29 states and won the popular vote 51-47. The reason was that in 1988 Whites made up 85% of the electorate, while in 2012 they made up just 72%. Put simply, as the country has gotten less White, it has become less conservative and indeed more liberal.
The other historical error in the conventional wisdom is that our losses between 1968-1988 were entirely due to the Democratic presidential nominees being too liberal and radical. Perhaps McGovern could be portrayed that way (which I still would disagree with), but Humphrey in 1968 was the Vice President and very much a part of the Democratic establishment. Mondale was a former VP who also was the establishment choice and made balancing the budget his central campaign issue. Dukakis ran as a competent manager and somewhat boring problem-solver. These were no wide-eyed liberals. In fact they were seen at the time by party bigwigs as the most electable, safe candidates we could run.
As for Jimmy Carter, the lone Democrat to win between 1968-88, he ran and then governed essentially as the first New Democrat, a Southern centrist much like the next Democrat after Carter to be elected. Carter lost because of double-digit inflation, a double-dip recession in 1979-80, and the Iran hostage crisis, not because he was too liberal.
In other words, this notion that Democrats got creamed because they were too liberal is misleading and an oversimplification. America between 1968-1988 was a very conservative country, and pretty much any candidate Democrats ran probably would’ve gotten portrayed as “too liberal”.
Now let’s look at the state of American politics since 1988. Beginning with the 1992 election, Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections. While it could be argued that Bill Clinton was proof that running straight down the middle was the way to go for Democrats, the evidence since then has been less clear.
In 2000, 2004, and 2016 Democrats ran who they believed to be the safest, most mainstream, electable candidates they could in Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, and all three times they lost. Meanwhile in the two elections Democrats won, they ran a Black, urban senator with a Muslim-sounding name who ran on an ambitious, progressive policy agenda and who most Americans believed to be liberal.
It should be noted that in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the Democratic Party and particularly the party establishment initially rallied around Hillary Clinton, thinking her to be the safest and most electable candidate. And it should be noted that the knock against Obama by many Democrats at the time was that Obama, being a relatively inexperienced Black politician with a Muslim-sounding name, was too risky and too liberal. In the end enough Democrats decided to roll the dice instead of going with the safe pick, and we were rewarded with a Democratic president who was the first president of either party to win more than 50% of the popular vote in consecutive elections since Dwight Eisenhower.
Yet in 2016, with the prospect of Donald Trump looming, many Democrats retreated back to their default posture of fear, and they went with who they believed was the safe, electable pick in Hillary Clinton. While Clinton did win the popular vote, she did so by just 2 percentage points, which was close enough for Trump to walk away with the electoral college.
The debacle of 2016 and the subsequent horrors of the Trump presidency it seems has further entrenched this sense of fear among Democrats, which I believe is a big reason why Joe Biden is leading the Democratic field. You can see this fear in this poll result from Fox News:
However, it is also the case that Democrats are a bit conflicted. Because while Biden continues to lead the field, there is also a significant number of Democrats who are opting for bolder, more liberal candidates. In virtually every poll, the Democrats who are in 2nd and 3rd place are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both Democrats promising radical changes to our political and economic systems.
And if the most recent polls are to be believed, Warren in particular is really beginning to catch fire (full disclosure: I’m totally in the tank for Warren). In the Fox News poll I’ve cited, Warren has shot up 8 percentage points, from 12% in July to 20% now, putting her 11 points behind Biden. In the most recent YouGov poll, Warren now also garners support from 20% of Democrats, which puts her just three points behind Biden in that poll.
Warren’s crowds have become among the biggest and most enthusiastic of all the Democratic contenders, and her crowds are consistently larger and more enthused than the ones Biden has been drawing. Despite not doing fancy fundraisers with rich donors in The Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, Warren through a surge of small donations last quarter raised almost as much as Biden who has relied mostly on big money donors as his small-donor fundraising has been anemic.
Warren has received rave reviews not only for her performance on the campaign trail but for her debate performances as well, with a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that 28% of Democrats believed she did the best job at the debates, with Biden coming in second at 15%. In the same poll, on the question of who had the best ideas, Warren was the clear favorite getting 32% while Biden came in second at 17%.
But at the same time, despite Warren being seen as having the best ideas and the best debate performances, the same Quinnipiac poll still showed Biden leading the field comfortably, with Biden getting 32% and Warren coming in second at 21%. The reason? According to the poll, 50% of Democrats said electability was the most important factor in selecting a nominee, with 46% saying that sharing the candidate’s views mattered most. And the poll showed that among Democrats, 49% said Biden has the best chance of beating Trump in the general election, with just 9% saying the same of Warren.
In fact this very phenomenon, of Democrats being impressed and enthused for Warren, but many fearing whether she is electable, was the topic of a story the New York Times did recently titled “Many Democrats Love Elizabeth Warren. They Also Worry About Her.”
Few candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters, too, from the thousands who turned out for her speech at the Iowa State Fair last weekend to the supporters in this western Iowa city who repeat her catchphrases, wear her buttons and describe themselves as dazzled by her intellect and liberal ideas.
Yet few candidates also inspire as much worry among these voters as Ms. Warren does.
Even as she demonstrates why she is a leading candidate for the party’s nomination, Ms. Warren is facing persistent questions and doubts about whether she would be able to defeat President Trump in the general election. The concerns, including from her admirers, reflect the head-versus-heart debate shaping a Democratic contest increasingly being fought over the meaning of electability and how to take on Mr. Trump.
Interviews with more than three dozen Democratic voters and activists in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina this summer, at events for Ms. Warren as well as other 2020 hopefuls, yield a similar array of concerns about her candidacy.
These Democrats worry that her uncompromising liberalism would alienate moderates in battleground states who are otherwise willing to oppose the president. Many fear Ms. Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry would allow Mr. Trump to drown out her policy message with his attacks and slurs against her. They cite her professorial style and Harvard background to argue that she might struggle to connect with voters from more modest circumstances than hers, even though she grew up in a financially strained home in Oklahoma.
And there are Democrats who, chastened by Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, believe that a woman cannot win in 2020.
“I think she’s terrific but my questions about her are, can she get elected with the negativity, with all the stuff that’s thrown at her?” asked Rick Morris, a New Hampshire carpenter who attended a house party for Ms. Warren there last month. “Usually in the primary I vote for whoever I like the most, but this one I will put in electability.”
To be clear, I get this fear, particularly with regard to the sense that Hillary Clinton’s defeat meant the country isn’t ready for a woman president. But there are reasons to believe our fears are not totally justified.
For one, there is the fact that Warren beats Trump in most of the head-to-head polls out there, and in the Fox News poll she beats him by 7 points. The same poll shows that despite fears that Warren is not likable, her favorability is at +6, with 46% viewing Warren favorably versus 40% viewing her unfavorably.
To put this in some perspective, Warren’s favorability right now is considerably better than Hillary Clinton’s favorability at this point in 2015. Warren is currently at even favorability in the most recent YouGov poll whereas in YouGov’s August 2015 poll, Clinton was 8 points underwater. Or look at this from Democratic pollster Will Jordan, showing that Warren’s average favorability over 6 weeks from July to August is at +1 (just a point behind Biden’s), whereas Clinton’s average favorability over the same time span in 2015 was -6:
Which brings me to my next point, namely that Warren is a much different candidate than Clinton. Warren is generating buzz and drawing large, enthusiastic crowds whereas Clinton in 2016 was, like Biden, drawing pretty modest and reserved audiences for a frontrunner.
Warren is running on bold, imaginative, and transformative ideas, and on taking on the political and economic establishment, whereas Clinton ran essentially as the candidate of the establishment. On policy, Clinton ran on small-ball, technocratic tweaks like increasing capital gains taxes for assets held for less than six years and tax credits to encourage corporations to adopt employee profit-sharing plans.
Also, for all of Clinton’s detailed plans, there was no coherent narrative or overarching theme to them at least that I (and apparently many others) could discern. The same simply cannot be said of Warren, who obsessively manages to weave her detailed plans back into her message about the economy and government being rigged by the rich and powerful.
In other words, Warren, unlike Clinton in 2016, actually holds the promise of something truly different, of a real change in how we do business. This is a crucial difference because 2016 was a change election, as 2020 will have to be if Democrats wish to win. For Hillary Clinton to run as a status quo candidate as she did in 2016 was going directly against the prevailing political mood. Warren is most certainly not doing that.
Furthermore, 2016 was a change election during a populist age not only in American politics but all over the world. Since 2016 there has been popular unrest around the world from the left and right against governing elites and establishments, driven in large part by a sense that government and the economy are rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. While many liberals still deny it, Donald Trump was very much an expression and manifestation of that populist wave sweeping the globe.
But Trump is now the incumbent, meaning it will be very hard for him to run as a change candidate since, given he and his party are in power, he is now the status quo.
Go back and look at the incumbent presidents — Hoover, Ford, Carter, Bush I — who have been defeated in the past 100 years, and you will see that in each case the challengers who defeated those presidents presented themselves as change agents who would shake things up and upend the old order. Look at our last two presidents — both men who were initially deemed not electable, both promised dramatic changes. Look at the populist era we still are living in.
When you put all those things together, history and the dynamics of our political age seem to be telling us that what is needed to defeat the current incumbent is someone who is promising to truly change the game. Given all that, it would appear that someone like Elizabeth Warren, as seemingly unlikely a candidate as she is, fits the bill quite nicely.
By comparison, Joe Biden does not fit the mold of past change candidates. Insofar as Biden is promising “change”, he is merely calling for changing things back to the way they were before Trump. In other words, Biden wants to trade the current status quo for the previously existing status quo.
Tempting as that might be to many Democrats and even some moderate Republicans, even if Trump were to go away the forces that gave us Trump would still remain. According to a recent University of Chicago/Associated Press poll, some 66% of Americans believed major structural changes to the US government are needed. The poll also found that:
Political independents are about twice as likely as Democrats and Republicans to say the entire U.S. governmental system needs replacing (22 percent compared to 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively). About 61 percent of Democratic respondents, and 52 percent of Republican ones, want major changes.
Most respondents — about 70 percent — said they feel they have too little power and influence in Washington.
The dissatisfaction with Washington stems largely from the public’s view that significant issues are being mishandled, according to the poll results. Majorities of respondents believe that the government is ineffectively tackling reducing income inequality (73 percent), addressing climate change (62 percent), ensuring access to health care (61 percent) and reducing crime (54 percent).
In short there remains deep dissatisfaction with how things are going in this country. Again, we are living in a populist age where people are clamoring for big changes and have been disillusioned with how things have been run long before Trump.
Many Democrats, despite their Trump-induced preference for a return to normalcy, also seem to get this. The same Fox News poll that showed 60% of Democrats preferring a return to normalcy also showed that Democrats were split nearly in half about whether they wanted a candidate to simply build on Obama’s legacy or one who would take a new approach:
This, I believe explains why although Biden continues to lead, a significant faction of Democrats are opting for candidates like Warren and Sanders promising dramatic change. In their hearts, many Democrats want and feel like we need a new approach, but their brains are telling them that a new, untried approach is too risky.
But to that I would counter by again pointing out the recent history of so-called safe, centrist, electable candidates. Take a look at all the losing presidential nominees of both parties since 2000 — Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney, Clinton. All were considered by conventional wisdom at the time to be their party’s most electable and safe picks. Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections were won by Obama and Trump, both candidates who the conventional wisdom originally held to be unelectable or very unlikely to be elected.
Judging by all that, if the safe, electable centrist Joe Biden were to somehow unseat Trump, he would in fact be the aberration in the recent history of American politics. In fact, if you go back much further into history, the last time an incumbent was knocked off by a safe, electable establishment candidate seeking to restore the old order was Grover Cleveland in 1888 when he reclaimed the presidency from Benjamin Harrison who’d knocked him off in the election of 1884.
In fact, looking at the last 100 years or so of American history, the only times we elected the sort of safe, centrist, establishment type embodied by Biden were 1920 when we elected Harding who literally ran on returning the country to normalcy; 1928 when we elected Hoover to continue the prosperity of the 1920s (lol); 1952 when we elected Eisenhower as a steady hand on the wheel amidst the Cold War and postwar economic boom; and Bush I, to continue the Reagan era.
What these presidents all had in common was that they ran in open elections where there was no incumbent, and during relatively normal political times. Our current era is anything but normal, as demonstrated by the very abnormal incumbent we will be running against.
My point with all of this is to highlight the fact that the conventional wisdom, that safe, centrist, and electable is the way to go for Democrats this year, is not backed up by history, nor is it consistent with the populist political era we currently live in. Yes, the polls show Biden doing best against the incumbent president, but the same was said of all the supposedly electable losers in our recent past.
To name another prominent example of this in our less recent past, Republican Thomas Dewey was the heavy favorite going into the 1948 elections, and all polls showed Dewey beating the incumbent Truman handily. Dewey was seen as the most electable Republican, he was considered safe, experienced, and centrist. And he ran his campaign as safely as possible, spouting platitudes like “Our future lies before us” and seeking to offend as few people as possible. Meanwhile Truman, while unpopular in the polls, ran as a rabble-rousing populist, campaigning tirelessly and spiritedly on a whistle-stop tour that criss-crossed the country. Of course, in the end Truman won by generating a groundswell of enthusiasm among his followers, while the bland, inoffensive, electable but utterly uninspiring Dewey went down to ignominious defeat.
Well, guess what? Our current safe, experienced, centrist frontrunner also seems to have an enthusiasm problem:
Joe Biden raised $4.6 million online on his first day in the 2020 presidential race, surprising doubters who thought the former vice president couldn’t run a modern campaign. But since then Biden’s online fundraising has tumbled — looking more like flash-in-the-pan opponent Beto O’Rourke than top-tier rivals like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
More than 60 percent of the $13.2 million Biden has raised online came in the first week of his campaign, which launched in late April, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. While other top candidates spiked early and then gradually raised more money online as the 2020 campaign has carried on, Biden’s pattern is similar to O’Rourke, who roared into the race with millions raised in his first day but has trickled off since then, watching his standing in the polls erode as the people who flocked to his 2018 Texas Senate campaign stop mashing the “donate” button with every email.
Unlike O’Rourke, Biden has enjoyed a steady stream of high-dollar, in-person events with big donors to bolster his finances, putting him among the top Democratic fundraisers in 2020. But the online totals are a sign that Biden has not built enthusiastic grassroots support for his presidential campaign, despite his lead in the polls.
To conclude my diary, I’d like to bring us a little closer to the present. Some of you folks may or may not have heard of pollster Stanley Greenberg, but if you haven’t he became famous for studying and identifying the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats, through his study of working class White voters in Macomb County, Michigan following Reagan’s landslide 1984 re-election. Greenberg’s work heavily influenced the thinking behind the centrist New Democrats who emerged in the wake of landslide Democratic defeats in 1984 and 1988, and he ended up becoming Bill Clinton’s pollster in the 1992 election.
You would think if anyone would be validating the conventional wisdom about the need to run safe and to the middle, it would be one of the originators of that political approach. But here’s what Greenberg is saying about 2020:
“Candidates who look like they are cautious, modulating, have their foot on the brake are missing the moment,” said veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who is coming out later this summer with a book on how both parties have been refashioned in the Trump era.
The moment, according to Greenberg's polling and focus-group work, has left voters of all stripes clamoring for disruption. Cultural and ideological currents in society—more profound than any given day's Trump uproars—are giving progressives a better opportunity than they have had in decades to play offense.
Whoa, talk about having a change of heart. And why is Greenberg having a change of heart?
“The country is so far away from where it was under Bill Clinton,” Greenberg said in an interview. “People are desperate for government to show it can do big things.”
To be clear, this is not to say that Biden is likely to lose or that radical candidates like Warren or Sanders are far more likely to win. Trump’s approval is so bad that any Democrat running theoretically has a good chance of winning. And if the economy strengthens, any of the Democrats may lose given the fanaticism of Trump’s base.
What I am saying is that should someone like Biden — a safe centrist representing the establishment promising a return to normalcy — win the presidency, it would be the glaring anomaly in the last four decades of American politics. Indeed it would be the glaring anomaly in the current world we’re living in. You know, the one where Ukraine has elected a comedian as their president, where an authoritarian like Rodrigo Duterte is President of the Philippines, where a left-populist in AMLO is President of Mexico, and where Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of the UK, and Donald Trump is President of the United States.
My point ultimately is that no matter what your ideological leanings and no matter who you support, what you definitely should not be doing is voting out of fear. Vote for who you believe in, who inspires you, who you agree with on the issues, and so on. But you should not vote for someone because he or she is the “safe” pick. The reality is that there are no safe picks, and in fact if history is any indication the supposedly safe, centrist picks are no more likely (and arguably less likely) to win than candidates who are considered by conventional wisdom to be unsafe or radical.
Be not afraid, Democrats.