Punching Left

Popularism is a solution, pitched by moderates, in search of a problem.

A reader recently asked for a more detailed critique of the popularists, digging into the points of contention we have with them because as Matt Yglesias and Simon Bazelon have pointed out, they don’t see much on which to disagree with us.

The short answer is that I agree we need to win states like Wisconsin as long as the electoral college exists, but I disagree that moderation is the way that’ll happen. Punching left is fine if you can win, but it sucks if you still lose!

To begin, a few overarching critiques of popularism, borrowed heavily from Osita Nwanevu:

1. Popularity, and by extension popularism, is hard to measure and define

2. Popularism blends tactics and ideology and acts as a vector for ideology

3. Popularists sometimes suggest unpopular things

To those, I’d add a few more concrete disagreements:

1. Data/analysis is used as a gatekeeping mechanism to present false certainty

2. The short-term fortunes of Democrats aren’t salvageable with popularism

Popularity and popularism are hard to define

Both popularity and popularism are, despite their promise, still subjective. Popularity is a spectrum, and deciding when something is popular enough to pursue is something a lot of smart operatives and pollsters spend hours debating. Some policies are strong because of strong support among Democrats, while others benefit from weak opposition among Republicans. How you measure an issue’s support really matters too.

It’s also well documented that public opinion aligns itself quickly as partisan leaders signal on an issue (e.g. Trump on foreign policy or Obama on same-sex marriage). Popularity, then, seems to exist as a fleeting ideal, available only before parties have indicated how they stand and heavily dependent on how you measure it.

Finally, popularism is vague itself. The justification is circular or tautological: “popular actions are the ones that win because they’re popular.” Not everything that is right is popular, nor is everything popular right (majorities still oppose affirmative action). As a tactic it’s hard to engage with since the core idea of “doing popular things” and its diagnosis of dire structural disadvantages for Democrats are easy to accept. Popularism is an electoral best practice – do things your voters like, avoid what they don’t, and try to win with 50% plus one vote.

Popularism is a vessel for ideology

As Matt Yglesias points out, “the hard part is priorities,” which is exactly right. The actual business of choosing which popular things to pursue and what makes something popular is ideological. 

Each of us approaches polling with a set of prior norms and political ideals and we filter the incoming polling through those perspectives. Popularism conflates the idea of risk/reward trade-offs with, often, a moderate or centrist normative priority list of policies. It’s hard to find an issue without at least one poll showing its popularity so we’re just back to fighting about what we should try to do as Democrats. 

The popularists aren’t arguing for popular policy, they’re arguing for moderate ones¹. As we’ve argued before, the tactical disagreements are usually obscuring ideological ones, and basically only damage the democratic brand. More specifically, their standard is: “how does this policy or candidate appeal to white non-college voters?” Popularism tries to marry aspects of the modern political agenda to a 90’s era of political strategy² that leads to some pretty bad policy outcomes.

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper

Occam's razor: their positions are not actually popular

nytimes.comThe Vanishing Moderate DemocratTheir positions are popular. So why are they going extinct?

Popularists sometimes suggest unpopular policy

Because it’s a vessel for ideology, popularists also propose unpopular policies. David Shor advocates for the expansion of the Senate, adding at least D.C. and Puerto Rico with two senators each (I do too). Matt Yglesias supports expanding the housing supply by severely restricting single-family zoning (I do too).

They’d probably argue that these are worthwhile endeavors (aha, a hint of ideology!) and that part of popularism is knowing what to emphasize publicly and what to save for Secret Congress. But the reality is that most important policies can’t be kept secret for long, so eventually voters' views of the policy will sort along partisan lines.

Popularist gatekeeping

I think the left generally does a bad job of inviting folks in (usually there’s some kind of leftist literature litmus test). But popularism has a similar flaw that comes from the heavy overlap with the “election Twitter” crowd, which prides itself on a nominally empirical approach to politics. But empiricism is hard, often still subjective, and subject to rapid change as our electoral conditions shift!

You’d be surprised how many public claims from popularists, based on data, are privately disputed with in-house analysis at progressive organizations and campaigns. Take, for example, the claim that the protests were costly for Biden – evidence pretty clearly points to the opposite.

Claims that extremist candidates suffer electorally don’t base their measurement on policy measures, but they do show negative effects. We still need more evidence for the electoral effects of moderation – and it’s worth considering if other Democrats suffer when their peers moderate (especially when popularism does seem to believe that candidates inherit their party’s brand). This is all subject to the media’s coverage too.

Education polarization is real, but there is evidence this trend preceded and continued through Obama’s campaigns contrary to some of the popular narratives. A more powerful effect (which gets less media play) is racial resentment, and there is strong evidence Trump polarized voters’ racial attitudes. 

Finally, the claim that “most Americans are moderates” is misleading. Many would argue that the view that ideological self-identification is a bad indicator of vote choice because it’s a bit of a myth. Stimson, progenitor of Americans as “symbolically conservative but operationally liberal” wrote a second book on the complexities of ideology and argues that “using ideological self-identification as a measure of the concept ‘ideology’ is misleading at best.”

What does this mean?

Let’s examine the counterfactual: what would a popularist trifecta look like? Most of the legislation would look the same, save some symbolic votes on policing and voting rights. Manchin and Sinema would likely still obstruct most of the policy goals on ideological grounds, and inflation would still be the elephant in the room.

This thought experiment isn’t that hard, because I think we’re already doing popularism but it’s not working. We’re playing defense in the Senate and the Supreme Court. Our leaders already try to do popular things³, but they lack the charisma to sell it. If police funding, expanding oil production, or popular infrastructure investments were all we needed to get out of this mess, we’d be headed for a rosy midterm!

Even Manchin, who handily out-polls Biden in West Virginia, is a bad popularist: waffling on medicare drug price negotiation, opposing legalized marijuana, and blocking climate spending. Some of you are probably thinking “this is also Chuck Schumer’s fault since he and other Democrats were bad negotiators with Manchin,” and you’d be right. These examples illustrate what I argue above: ideology leaks in, as it does with everyone. No politician can calibrate themselves perfectly to the polls, so popularism falters as you drill into specifics and elected officials’ beliefs and issue priorities begin to play a role.

Chris Hayes @chrislhayes

@davidshor @mattyglesias @zengerle This is clarifying! It points to what I think is the single biggest problem for this line of thinking that is terrifying to me, which is that it has an enormous Iraq War Problem.

Chris Hayes @chrislhayes

@davidshor @mattyglesias @zengerle It’s not that people just forgot it! The Iraq war happened: consultants all said vote for it. They were probably right, based on polling. It was a substantive and political disaster, and the most remarkable presidential campaign since Lincoln happened bc of opposition to it!

Every major Democratic senate and gubernatorial campaign is holding close to popularist prescriptions because they don’t really have much of a choice (they’re testing every ad, policy, and speech) and popularism’s tactical recommendations boil down to political common sense. It’s for this reason that warnings about Democrats blindly stumbling into disaster, among practitioners, ring hollow. There’s even an entire set of professionals dedicated to finding the most persuasive language and modeling which exact voters to target!

Doing popular things isn’t enough to either accomplish moderate policies some prefer or insulate the movement from the GOP’s structural advantages. Indications are that Biden and congressional democrats not only go into this midterm with a thermostatic disadvantage but they’re also being saddled with the blame for inflation. The Federal Reserve is willing to plunge us into a recession to tame inflation, and I’m sure voters will love that too.

There’s so much more to this picture but the point is issue prioritization isn’t the solution or the problem.

We’re screwed, let’s be screwy

So here we find ourselves, backs against the wall. In the words of FDR, I think it’s time for some “bold, persistent experimentation.” We have nothing to lose – the midterm is going to cost us our majorities despite our popularist efforts, so let’s try something other than ideas from the Clinton era. Frankly, these arguments about new tactics and new policies are much more interesting than how to win the marginal voter!

We need to find ways to reverse education polarization, win over disaffected white men, and provide meaningful livelihoods to everyone. If the same people who complain about “wokeness” are realizing the brutal reality of the right-wing project through the Roe decision, let’s capitalize on that! Candidates should try new ways of engaging with labor, communicating with constituents, trumpeting their successes, and offering hope for the future.

There’s a reason there are cultural perceptions of Democrats as soft and Republicans as tough – all we do as a party is wring our hands! Since we don’t have good extra-party infrastructure, the party will have to do while we wait for the Amazon Labor Union to take over. 

But for the love of God, let’s at least do something. Maybe it's liberalism that builds. Maybe it’s a more federalized party structure with experiments conducted by candidates and parties at the local level (maybe we’ll get a new Nonpartisan League)⁴. At the non-federal level, this means parties and movement organizations doing the work to change voters’ minds on issues – Florida can focus on climate change, Nebraska can form agriculture coops, and Arizona can pioneer solar energy. This would let us have our cake (advancing the issues we care about) and eat it too (win over voters) while de-nationalizing policy.

At the federal level, the status quo is popular until it isn’t – Obamacare was on the brink of destruction⁵ and then Trump started pledging to do something even better. One easy step would be to eliminate the filibuster (something moderate, popularist Senators oppose) so that Democrats could more easily accomplish current goals, more bipartisan proposals would advance, and McConnell would be forced to reckon with his caucus’ unpopular proposals coming up for votes.

The popularism movement is under-equipped to meet the moment, and we need a diversity of tactics accompanied by a broad movement to tackle the impending rise of fascist authoritarianism. It’s coming whether we say “defund,” or not.

1. Here’s a thread on why Matt Yglesias believes in moderate policies on their merits. This piece in The New York Times has a number of consultants going on record advocating for more moderates.

2. David Shor: “When I go back now and think about the fights between the analytics team and the consultants, about 80 percent of the time, they were right. There was an old conventional wisdom to politics in the ’90s and 2000s that we all forget.”

3. I don’t think it’s possible to return to the 2012 era of politics, but Biden is a much more moderate choice in 2020 than Hillary was in 2016. His core appeal was electability, on the basis of moderation, and his presidency has largely been focused on trying to do popular things.

4. In many ways, we could stand to learn from the right-wing movement here. They use ALEC and local groups to trial policies locally to build momentum at the federal level. They also coordinate closely between state and federal groups, letting the federal groups inherit battle-tested policies from the states. The Dobbs decision was decades in the making.

5. Even this is debatable, many Republicans ran on protections for pre-existing conditions because the law became popular!