How Democrats Sold Out The Working Class
The Democratic Party is being gentrified into oblivion
After losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton variously blamed Wikileaks, Bernie Sanders, misogynistic voters, white women, former FBI Director James Comey, and, above all, the Russian government for her defeat. Many of her supporters, not least those in the media, lept to embrace her excuses. Just as many of Trump’s supporters convinced themselves that the Biden campaign stole the 2020 election from their candidate, Democrats have found comfort in explanations for their failures that place the blame on others.
But Clinton’s defeat was, in fact, the culmination of a slow decay that first took hold within the Democratic Party half a century ago.
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, who two decades ago anticipated the rise of the electoral coalition that elected Obama to two terms in the White House in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority, have watched the Democrats squander the legacy of the New Deal by alienating working-class Americans in favor of the college-educated professionals of America’s big metropolises. In their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, they document how the party became something alien to the working-class voters who were once its heart and soul.
To give you a sense of the dominance the party once asserted, consider this old political joke they tell in the South. It probably has many versions, but it goes something like this:
A group of kids are sitting in a classroom in Georgia discussing the New Deal. The teacher asks, who gave us electricity? The kids reply, Roosevelt did! The teacher asks, who gave us this shiny new school house? The kids reply, Roosevelt did! Finally, the teacher asks who gave us the earth we live on? A kid replies, well, God did. Another kid yells out, get that kid out of here, he’s a Republican!
The point of the joke was that Franklin Roosevelt once held deity-like status in the American South. During the 1936 election, he won 87 percent of the vote in Georgia, reducing Republican Alf Landon to a vanity candidate.
Every nearby Southern state, despite the region’s famed conservatism, handed its electoral votes to Roosevelt, who campaigned on vastly expanding the federal government’s programs aimed at delivering jobs and services to the working poor. In that election, the Republicans won only Maine and Vermont.
But the politics of that South, and indeed the entire country, would be unrecognizable to the one we have today. Far from holding together their New Deal coalition of farmers, urban laborers, the working poor, and others who benefited from public investment, the Democrats today are increasingly becoming a party of upwardly mobile professionals and creatives.
The party has shed much of its traditional working-class base, which has started to show up in its legislative priorities. As one example, the party is fixated on erasing student debts held largely by the top half of the income distribution while doing little to rein in administrative bloat and abusive practices by the nation’s colleges and universities, who are among its most loyal supporters.
The white working class exodus from the party has been particularly severe, putting states like Ohio – which former president Barack Obama won twice – out of reach for the party. In 2020, less than a third of white working men – the very backbone of the old New Deal coalition – voted for Biden – and that was an improvement over the meager 23% of white working men who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But Democrats may find a blueprint in rebuilding their previously broad coalition by looking back at the South.
In that region, Democrats lost a unicorn this week – one of the rare Democrats who was able to build a voter base broad enough to win in an otherwise conservative region.
Louisiana Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards stepped down to hand power to his successor, Republican Jeff Landry. With his departure, the Democratic Party no longer has any governors in the Deep South.
Edwards served two terms as the governor of the state, but thanks to term limits wasn’t able to run again.
A poll from earlier this year found that Edwards had the approval of 54% of Louisianan likely voters, far higher than the 36% who approved of President Biden.
What explains Edwards’s unique success in the South, especially among white working-class voters who over the past couple of decades have fled the party in droves?
Joshua Stockley, a political scientist and specialist on Louisiana politics at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, pointed to his background as exemplifying an older breed of Southern Democrat: rural and culturally conservative but also concerned about economic inequality.
“He’s the son of a sheriff, comes from a line of sheriffs [in] a somewhat rural part of Louisiana with an uncanny appreciation for injustice,” Stockley said in an interview.
Edwards embraced many positions that were taboo among the national Democratic Party. He signed into law one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the country in the summer of 2022, before Roe v. Wade was overturned. He also carved out a moderate position on guns, supporting expanded background checks but opposing many of the gun bans Democrats elsewhere argue for.
While Louisiana political watchers we spoke to argued that Edwards’s cultural views are a product of personal conviction – he’s known as a devout Catholic – the governor offered his own explanation of his politics after winning the 2015 election.
“We are an extremely populist state, but there are some bellwether issues,” he said at the time. “If you’re not pro-life and if you’re not pro-Second Amendment, too many people in Louisiana will not hear the rest of your message. And so you can be 100 percent in sync with them, but they’re never going to support you. And it just so happens that I am pro-life; I am pro-Second Amendment. I’m very populist in some ways as well. And that message was successful.”
That year, Edwards won 56% of the vote. The following year, Clinton notched just 38% of voters in the presidential election.
And while Edwards used that power to curtail abortion and protect gun rights, he also pursued the unfinished mission of Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition. Shortly after taking office in 2016, Edwards moved to expand access to Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of poor Louisianans, using funds provided by the Affordable Care Act.
He called the Medicaid expansion the “easiest big decision I have made” and touted statistics like tens of thousands of Louisianans getting screenings for conditions like cancer and diabetes since the expansion.
“His Medicaid expansion was actually not just popular amongst…minority populations but there’s a lot of populations, particularly rural individuals in Louisiana, and many poor rural residents who are white who lack basic access to both education and health care and infrastructure,” explained Stockley.
In a state Democrats hadn’t won at the presidential level since 1996, almost three quarters of Louisanans backed Edwards’s expansion of health care.
But with Edwards’s departure, the state Democrats weren’t able to come up with another candidate who had his mixture of culturally conservative and economically populist. The Louisiana Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate tried to move to the left of Edwards on abortion and he and much of the rest of the party were clobbered in the recent election.
The fate of Louisiana Democrats increasingly looks like that of the rest of the nation: it’s a party that can’t inspire enough working class voters – especially white workers – to win convincing majorities.
Reflecting on these trends in his state, Tulane University political scientist Brian Brox said in an interview that the Democrats have to start diversifying their political appeal.
“They can’t all be Nancy Pelosi and AOC if they want to win nationwide. There are tons of districts, not even necessarily Republican districts, there’s tons of purple districts where that just won’t fly, the Democrats have to decide collectively if they want to be doctrinaire or they want to be majority,” he said.
But there’s little evidence that the Democrats over all are willing to do that. As one example, there is only one self-identified “pro-life” Democrat in the entire Congress. The party is increasingly defined by upper-middle class professionals who are overwhelmingly culturally liberal and often economically detached from the voters who they are trying to win.
While it continues to win some elections through sheer momentum – and Republican incompetence – it can’t command the majorities it needs at the national level to enact long-held priorities like universal health care and increasing the minimum wage.
Why did this happen to the Democratic Party? What can be done to change it? Teixeira and Judis’ new book aims to deliver the answer.
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
