Politics is about identity

Progressives may not be in charge of the Democratic Party, but they have branded it

The first principle of politics is to do no harm. The second is not to marginalize moderates.

Yet in America, both parties have been drifting the poles for decades — first, the Republicans, and recently the Democrats. But as Democrats have come to be defined by their more liberal flank and by their racial progressives, they have done worse electorally with groups they previously thought were a hard lock.

This is not so easy a problem to solve. But the problem is worth stating clearly.

I am thinking about this today because of a slew of recent columns written around the subject of Democrats’ losses with Hispanics last year — and the theory that progressives had something to do with it. Ron Brownstein has a long read in The Atlantic on the subject this week, and the usual subjects over at the Liberal Patriot newsletter are also writing rather hysterically about the problem. According to Ruy Teixeira, who blogs at the site:

Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more. The findings about relatively positive Hispanic attitudes toward police have been confirmed by poll after poll, as concern about crime in their communities has spiked.

Further, several political scientists are quoted in a new Times piece by Thomas Edsall as sounding similar alarms on how progressives (especially racial progressives) hurt the Democratic Party. So says Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard:

The advocacy groups and big funders and foundations around the Democratic Party — in an era of declining unions and mass membership groups — are pushing moralistic identity-based causes or specific policies that do not have majority appeal, understanding, or support, and using often weird insider language (like “Latinx”) or dumb slogans (“Defund the police”) to do it.

[The leaders of these groups] often claim to speak for Blacks, Hispanics, women etc. without actually speaking to or listening to the real-world concerns of the less privileged people in these categories. That is arrogant and politically stupid. It happens in part because of the over-concentration of college graduate Democrats in isolated sectors of major metro areas, in worlds apart from most other Americans.

Now, we would expect a certain variety of Democratic pundits to be pointing the finger at progressives, blaming them for the party’s recent losses eg in the Virginia governor’s race or among Hispanics from 2016 to 2020. But Jamelle Bouie makes a good point in another Times column published today. He argues that progressives are not, actually, the ones in charge of the party. In this view, instead of being hurt by its progressive wing, the party is being hurt by progressives and moderates who are united not in passing Joe Biden’s agenda but in squabbling over particulars — which ends up giving the impression that Democrats cannot deliver for the average American and drags the view of the party down.

But, to be honest, I’m not so sure anyone is hitting this nail right on the head. I want to offer an alternative explanation. In my view, Democrats are disadvantaged because both Republicans and moderate Independents have come to define themselves in contrast with an increasingly liberal Democratic Party — and the increasingly loud voices of its most progressive members. The identity part is crucial here: on one hand because they are hard to change, and on another because they determine so much of how we vote today.

Consider 2020 again. My analysis of polling from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study suggests that terms like “Defund The Police” and “LatinX” did correlate with whites and Hispanics voting for Republicans. But differences were rather marginal, changing the probability of a person voting for Trump by a quarter to a third of percentage point after accounting for everything else. Much more important was how a person viewed themselves ideologically; Whether they were liberal, conservative, or moderate. And attitudes towards liberal or conservative issue positions mattered just as much as any “progressive” branding issue.

So what are people really talking about when they say that activists and elites are hurting the party brand? Continually citing the Defund and LatinX issues gives me the impression these people are not thinking just about ideology, but also about attitudes about race. And that’s fair. Survey data from the 2020 election shows that attitudes towards Black Americans and immigrants were a much better predictor of which party someone voted for than their race alone. That’s because there are “racially conservative” Hispanic, Black, and Asian Americans, too — and they are moving towards the right. I wish these people would say more of this stuff out loud, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.

What’s really important, though, is that the punditry here has, in my opinion, offered an incomplete picture of the social, political, and psychological forces working against the Democrats right now. It’s not just that their rhetoric in policing and immigration alienates some people — it’s that along with the fact that most Americans are not liberals, and see themselves as non-liberals. That is an ideological identity, but also a group-based one. Many Americans identity as non-Muslims, non-LGBTQ, non-urbanite, non-Black, etc etc — all things which the Democratic Party brand has become increasingly associated with. The “problem” here for the Democrats is that many Americans do not identify with their party. And when those identities come to the forefront of the brain (such as after a raucous campaign season) and get mixed with all the other attitudes they have about politics and groups, it becomes increasingly hard to vote for them. And that’s the psychological process that has acted particularly on Hispanics over the past 4 years. As the other non-racial parts of their identity have become increasingly strong predictors of vote choice, they have gotten less Democratic.

This is where most writers on the subject stop. They describe the shape of the problem (“AOC BAD” or “LATINX BAD”) and, maybe, suggest a solution — perhaps that Joe Biden should say the Defund movement is bad. But here’s the hiccup: he said these things in 2020, and they didn’t matter! The loudest voices in the leadership of the Democratic Party said that looting and rioting were bad; that policing is hard and needs to be funded more for social work and non-violent response; and Biden even said during the campaign that the official policy of the US should be to secure the border and provide a path towards citizenship for undocumented migrants that are already here. So what else is there to do?

Well, in short, these things don’t buy you a lot identity-wise, even if they are the right policy prescriptions. That’s because policy positions can be overridden by symbols that are sent to voters. A white Midwesterner might see Biden saying looters are bad and secure the southern border, but they also see him, eg, running with a Black Vice President and holding meetings with The Squad in the White House — meanwhile, Donald Trump is calling for the national guard to go into their neighborhood and arrest or kill anyone “causing trouble.” Biden is calling for trillions in social spending, which they may favor, but in doing so is putting himself at odds with the best-known moderate members of the House and Senate — therefore making himself look like a progressive. The symbols of identity here are working against him.

So, what could he really do? Maybe he could go down to Mexico and have a speech endorsing the border wall? Ok, maybe that’s a good political or electoral one, but it might not be a good policy. Maybe he could call in the national guard the next time there is looting in a major city. Maybe he could hold rallies and televised meetings with white union workers, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012. Maybe he could even step down from the presidency and pass the torch to a white, more moderate, more racially conservative Democrat instead. And maybe that would all provide the right signal.

But there’s a big analytical problem here. And that is that we can’t observe the counterfactual. We don’t really know what Black turnout looks like in a world with a racially conservative, economically liberal Joe Biden. We don’t know what white urban turnout would look like, either. So we can’t really advise the president.

And that brings up a relevant point. A lot of the stuff you hear from people on these issues is, in the end, unverifiable. People cook up conclusions that fit with their ideological priors, which may even have effects in isolation. But politics does not happen in a vacuum. Actions will have unpredictable consequences — and candidates will get brands that they don’t deserve because of negative media coverage from outlets that don’t like them regardless of what they say. Predictions about what Democrats should and should not do in order to stem their losses with key groups come with huge margins of error. People don’t usually mention that, but I’m going to.

And this leaves us, in the end, with another description of the problem. That is that the Democratic Party has a lot of identities under its big tent. Racial identities, sexual ones; geographic ones and occupational ones; and, most importantly, political and ideological ones. And so long as there are conservatives and moderates in groups that used to vote Democratic despite them, Democrats are going to lose more voters than they gain. And a lot of that, yes, is going to be out of their control.

So what matters is what parties do in the meantime. Help as many people as you can. Hope it helps you in the next election. Try not to marginalize key voters, even if it means taking positions that you otherwise don’t want to. And — and this is the part most people are missing — pay attention to the group-based signals you do or do not send that are beyond the typical pail of policy preferences and issue attitudes. On this front, I think Democrats may be surprised what they can accomplish without compromising much on their beliefs.