What Democratic Disagreements on Tactics Obscure
What Democratic Disagreements on Tactics Obscure
When arguments over tactics are just covering up for ideological disagreements.
Democratic political data and analytics
Since the Obama 2012 campaign, both the Democratic and Republican parties have invested heavily in building data infrastructure and analytics teams to assess political trends, measure campaign efficacy, and forecast future elections1.
This has led to a series of impressive innovations in how campaigns contact voters, forecast turnout and candidate support, and measure public opinion. Democratic campaigns have been supported with new technical expertise, experimentation (driven by the Analyst Institute), and modeling techniques that have radically improved program efficiency.
Understanding and measuring the electorate, and the effects that the campaigns have in changing opinion, are important for the simple reason that measurement (in all its forms) is crucial to understanding the world. Even better, as this data builds up over time, future campaigns can learn from the previous ones.
Moderates are in Control
In a trend not unique to politics, improvements in analytics and polling have also been accompanied by an increased reliance on it to provide not only descriptive data but normative guidance for elections and politics. Specifically, this has manifested as an argument that I’ll summarize in broad terms:
The voters that matter are moderate, “cross-pressured” about policies, and are generally opposed to changes to the status quo;
Democrats push away these voters by moving left at the behest of donors, college-educated liberals, and activists;
As a result, Democrats should only say or do popular things and should avoid “identity politics”.
This is rooted in some empirically observable trends2 but arrives at misguided and vague strategic guidance. #1 is demonstrably true, many voters tend to hold few views at all, or incoherent ones. If they’re partisans, they defer to party leaders for their positions, and if not, their positions are the results of their surroundings, the media, and their material conditions. Most people just don’t have strong opinions on politics or policy because they’re worried about other things.
The second point is harder to prove empirically and leads to an extreme conclusion. In fact, it’s easily refuted if you’ve ever worked for a political party or organization. Like in any bureaucracy, leadership is considerably more moderate than the staff – in the case of the Democratic party, much of the executive team and elected leadership predates even the Obama-era of politics (don’t believe me? See for yourself).
Believing the party is too far left leads nominal progressives, absurdly, to oppose unionization for Congressional staff, claiming it’s out-of-touch, despite many of the same people previously advocating for more congressional staff pay (the median salary in the House is $59,000, in a city where you need to make at least $20,000 more to be comfortable).
In reality, parties are a complicated and dynamic system of giving and taking, negotiations between people with different interests and preferences, and electoral branches led by a moderate set of leaders: Jamie Harrison (DNC), Sean Maloney (DCCC), and Gary Peters (DSCC).
It becomes very evident that moderate Democrats wield power when we examine the legislative proceedings and agenda in congress since the 2020 election. Moderates successfully derailed the president’s legislative agenda (including a number of popular policies) and ended the wildly popular poverty-decimating expanded Child Tax Credit. A moderate approach appeared to dictate the supreme court nomination process.
What Popularism Hides
Most importantly, the resulting conclusion #3 is misguided. Fundamentally, politics is about improving the status quo, which definitionally requires changing minds – political preferences do not appear in vacuums, and voters don’t assume them out of thin air. They’re the products of a complex series of relationships (that no newsletter will fully document) driven by social movements, material conditions, and the media.
The point of politics is to work and advocate for a normative state, one that doesn’t exist yet. In fact, a politics that is fully responsive to public opinion at any given moment would be irrational and largely unchanging.
Popularism tends to be overwhelmingly vague: “say popular things” is extremely hard to disagree with. But it obscures what appear to be disagreements on policy, to name a few:
We can’t criticize the police because that costs us votes.
We can’t talk about gun control because that costs us votes.
We can’t talk about climate change because that costs us votes.
We can’t defend expansive abortion rights because that costs us votes.
Political candidates should probably avoid advocating for the full defunding of police but that doesn't mean that BLM advocates can’t use that language3. Even if Democrats didn’t talk about these things, the terms of debate are co-determined by the media and opponents. If you’re running for office, chances are you’ll have to talk about something “unpopular.”
How this critique and advice ultimately comes off, as it did in a recent spat of pieces (Axios’ Squad politics backfire, NYT’s San Francisco ousters), is a vague attack on the left for its tactics as an indirect way of disagreeing about policy itself. It’s extremely hollow to say “of course, we’d love to talk about race if we could. But we can’t since it’s a bad tactic” without even offering evidence. As Jamelle Bouie pointed out in response to the Axios piece:
one fun thing you won’t find in this piece? literally any evidence of the key claims. no quotes from any member of the ‘squad,’ no examples, no nothing.
Why this is a problem
A small set of Twitter accounts (moderate, white, male commentators) hold a tremendous amount of sway with political leaders, the media, and Democratic institutions. In fact, they’re sometimes the same ones saying “twitter isn’t real life,” or lamenting that twitter and the beltway aren’t representative of the county.
Ironically, their analysis is self-fulfilling. They declare that progressives are using unpopular tactics, which influences media coverage, which then influences the way the progressives and their tactics are perceived by voters themselves. To quote David Shor, “Swing voters get their news from mainstream news sources, and mainstream news sources basically report on what political professionals and campaigns tell them.”
This is a problem in the current cycle, given that Democrats will likely lose seats no matter what. These popularist arguments offer both a lens through which the media can interpret political events, and are placating for the current moderate political elites making campaign decisions.
What ultimately matters are the cultural and media narratives surrounding campaigns and candidates. This is what I’d call “vibes,” the emotional values and attributes that the voters who genuinely change their minds associate with the candidates they’re voting for. Vibes are driven by the media coverage and voters’ social/familial networks.
Democrats need to focus on driving their national media narrative. It won’t matter if Democrats do popular things, like pushing for full employment, temporarily removing the gas tax, or blaming corporations for inflation if commentators frame those issues as bad economic policy. Maybe this looks like doing popular things? But I’d challenge you to find a Democrat who doesn’t think what they’re fighting for is popular.
In the long term, Democrats need to get better at party-building, organizing their existing constituencies, and adding new ones. This won’t happen through popular policy alone. Politics isn’t easy! We aren’t trying to win elections to stay in power – we’re trying to improve people’s lives. Polling and analytics are tools in that fight – but if something that is normatively good is unpopular, it’s on us to change voters’ minds.
This is studied and validated in academia and even anecdotally (people outside the beltway don’t really care about politics). In fact, research has emphasized that due to polarization, the increasingly rare swing voter has ironically become more important in swinging elections.
In the future I’ll write more about the need for a separate movement leader class from the elected legislator class, which resolves the conflicts between changing minds and getting elected.