Americans Are Ready to Go Left

Few ideas are as central to the conventional wisdom of the Democratic establishment as the idea that moderation holds the key to victory. And few ideas are as utterly detached from reality.

In November 2019, fittingly speaking “to a room of wealthy Democratic donors… [Barack] Obama warned that the average American voter does not align with views from ‘certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.’” A few months earlier, the New York Times ran the headline “Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results.” Revisiting this logic recently, Nancy Pelosi again warned against going left for fear of losing the Georgia Senate races that will decide control of the Senate.

One problem with all these assertions regarding the dangers of moving left is they ignore a crucial fact of history: moderate Democrats aren’t very good at winning. Moderates have dominated the party since Bill Clinton’s presidency, and yet what has been the result? According to Mara Liasson, writing in 2016, “Every president sees his party lose hundreds of positions… but no president has come close to Obama. During Obama’s eight years in office, the Democrats have lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governors seats than under any other president.” As a result, by early 2016 Democrats found themselves with “fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s.” If this collapse of power happened under a President Bernie Sanders and Bernie then decided to give advice on how Democrats could win, he would be laughed out of the country.

The Democrats’ losing trend didn’t start with Obama. It was a continuation of what Bill Clinton, an even more conservative example of the Democratic “moderate,” had suffered during his time in office. As Josh Mound recounts, “Following eight years of Clintonism, Democrats had fallen to fifty-year lows in both the US House and Senate, dropped below twenty governorships for the first time since 1970, and controlled the fewest number of state legislatures in fifty years.”

The Democratic Party hasn’t always faced these results. During the time of the New Deal coalition, from FDR through LBJ, Democrats held unified control of the House and Senate for all but four years. Contrast that with their record from Clinton’s 1993 inauguration through January 2021: control of the Senate for 10 of 28 years and the House for eight of 28 years. Given this backdrop, claims by prominent moderate Democrats that the path to Democratic victory is through continuing to empower them and their fellow moderates warrant extreme skepticism. 

Another problem with moderates’ theory that only they can win, which is premised on the idea that America is a relatively moderate country, is that progressive ideas are actually quite popular among the American public. It’s true that not all progressive proposals have popular support—getting rid of the death penalty and abolishing ICE are net opposed by Americans, for example. Moreover, if asked to identify their ideology, Americans seem to lean right, with 37% of people describing themselves as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 24% as liberal in a 2019 Gallup poll. At the same time, though, the main progressive proposals being advocated today are unanimously popular, often overwhelmingly so. Although not exhaustive, the following data demonstrate this point.

Public Opinion on Progressive Proposals

• Medicare for all
  • 53% (KFF, 2020)
  • 69% (Hill-HarrisX, 2020)
  • 55% (Morning Consult/Politico, 2020)

• College for all
  • 61% (New York Times/Survey Monkey, 2020)
• College for all and eliminating all student debt
  • 58% (Hill-HarrisX, 2019)
• $15 min wage
  • 67% (Pew, 2019)
• Green New Deal
  • 63% (NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, 2019)

• Taxes
  • Wealth tax: 67% (New York Times/Survey Monkey, 2020)
  • 70% top marginal rate: 59% (Hill-HarrisX, 2019)
  • Increasing taxes on people earning >$400k a year: 67% (New York Times/Survey Monkey, 2020)
  • “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich?”: 52% answered “should” (Gallup, 2016)

[For more detailed data, the polling organization Data for Progress has done extensive polling on the specifics of progressive proposals. See their work here: www.dataforprogress.org]

This is not to say that running on a progressive platform will guarantee victory. While moderate commentators and politicians tend to focus on the claim that public opinion isn’t friendly to the left, the reality is that public opinion is not the most important factor in determining who wins elections in America. The simple reason: America isn’t all that Democratic. Plenty of factors demonstrate this point: 

• Money in politics
• Gerrymandering
• Voter suppression
• The Senate (two Senators per state means disproportionate representation of small population states; currently, as Nate Silver outlines, it also means “the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole”)
• The electoral college (which is responsible for giving Republicans two of the last six presidential elections despite their losing the popular vote)
• Elite ownership of media and think tanks

But there’s a vast difference between saying progressives can’t win because the public isn’t on their side and saying progressives might face an uphill battle despite having the strong backing of the public for their core platform. One of these claims gives cover to a Democratic establishment more interested in fulfilling the needs of its wealthy donors than advocating for poor and working people. The other gives hope that there’s a major opportunity for grassroots mobilization towards progressive ends.

Anti-Democratic politics have had a clear effect on the Democratic Party’s internal politics over the last several decades. In fact, the dominance of the moderate wing of the party is strongly intertwined with the party’s infection with big money. As Ralph Nader writes in his book To the Ramparts, “The Democrats long ago receded from the Truman days of ‘give ‘em hell, Harry!’ But their political castration occurred in the late 1970s, when the Democrats were persuaded by one of their own, Congressman Tony Coelho (D-CA), to start aggressively bidding for corporate campaign cash.” 

Along with the increasing reliance of the Democratic Party on big money have come attempts at suppression of the progressive wing of the party. A recent example was the DCCC blacklist—a policy started in 2019 by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to discontinue any business with “political strategists and vendors… support[ing] candidates mounting primary challenges against incumbent House Democrats.” Although the new DCCC chair has promised to end this blacklist, it represented an extreme version of something that has become commonplace in internal Democratic Party politics: the control of party primaries by the party establishment instead of voters. The DCCC has been thwarting progressives in this way for years. And on the Senate side, this pattern is seen in Chuck Schumer’s tendency to tip the scales in favor of centrist candidates in Senate primaries to ensure progressives’ defeat.

The gap that these developments have opened up between Democratic representatives and the Democratic base is remarkable. Take the divergence between the Democratic base’s support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and College for All and the backing for these policies by Democrats in Congress as an example. Medicare for All has 77% support among the base compared to 31% support in the Senate and 51% support in the House. The Green New Deal has 86% support among the base compared to 31% support in the Senate and 43% support in the House. College for All has 86% support among the base compared to 0% support in the Senate and 9% support in the House. [Support is calculated by Democratic sponsorship of a given bill. Full data and calculations can be found here.]

Listening to the base—and moving left—doesn’t mean that Democrats will automatically replicate the landslide victories of FDR in 1936 and LBJ in 1964. The reign of big money makes such a scenario unlikely. Moving left does, however, present more of an opportunity than any other strategy for Democrats to escape their electoral rut and push through sweeping legislation. While the power of the wealthy and the anti-Democratic features of U.S. politics are significant obstacles to the achievement of progressive goals, it is possible for grassroots mobilization based on solid majority support for the core of a progressive program to overcome these hurdles. 

In the end, the question of whether progressives will win boils down to whether we’re going to live in a democracy. Currently, we don’t, and while Democratic moderates may invoke public opinion in their attacks on progressives, the reality is that their power in the party rests on fundamentally anti-Democratic politics.

Conor Smyth ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at c.smyth@wustl.edu.