Democrats have a ‘both/and’ choice
The pattern of public reaction to President Trump at the end of his first 100 days in office is sharpening the choices facing Democrats over the party’s road to recovery.
Though Trump’s agenda has unified Democrats in near-term opposition, clear fault lines have emerged in the party’s long-term strategy to regain power.
On one side are those affiliated with Sen. Bernie Sanders; they argue for a biting message of economic populism intended to recapture working-class white voters who stampeded to Trump in 2016. On the other are party strategists who favor a more centrist economic message aimed at reassuring whitecollar suburbanites drawn to the party mostly around cultural issues.
Sharp polarization about Trump looms over this debate. Polls show that he retains an intense, even visceral, hold on the coalition of older, blue-collar, non-urban and evangelical whites who elected him. This week’s ABC/Washington Post poll found that 96% of adults who said they voted for him in November do not regret their decision.
But the same surveys also make clear that Trump is facing unprecedented resistance beyond that ardent base. His approval rating is stuck around 40%, far lower than any other president at the 100-day mark. Trump’s numbers are especially anemic among millennials and minorities, and far below the usual Republican performance with college-educated whites. Polls also show most Americans oppose many of his key policy initiatives, from building a border wall to repealing President Obama’s climate-change regulations.
These numbers suggest that Trump, who carried only 46% of the national popular vote, faces enormous headwinds in building sustained support from a majority of Americans. Indeed, he’s the only newly elected president in Gallup’s polling — it started tracking presidents during the Truman era — who never reached 50% job approval in his first 100 days.
The Democrats’ postelection debate has mostly focused on how the party can win back blue-collar and older whites who defected to Trump in 2016, particularly in the Midwest. But given the president’s inability to expand his support, the more relevant question may be how Democrats can consolidate the roughly 55% of Americans who have consistently expressed unease about him. That question turns the party away from Trump’s workingclass base toward those whitecollar whites (especially women), minorities and millennials expressing the most discomfort about him.
Whenever a political party faces an “either/or” choice, the right response is almost always: “both/and.” This Democratic crossroads is no exception. Geographically that means the party, in races for Congress and the White House, must regain ground in the working-class Rust Belt states where Trump outperformed other recent GOP nominees and the more diverse, younger Sun Belt states where he slipped.
“In the long term, the future for the Democratic Party is Florida, Arizona, Georgia, eventually Texas,” said Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann. “But given the map for 2018, and even 2020, I think relying on just that and not fighting in [the] Midwest states is a mistake.”
Yet even while Democrats acknowledge the need to contest both fronts, they face genuine choices about where to place their largest bets. Matt Bennett, senior vice president for public affairs at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said the party’s principal opportunity is with white-collar suburbanites alienated from Trump. He points to the usually Republican House district in suburban Atlanta where neophyte Jon Ossoff faces a June runoff election, after approaching 50% in the primary. Such places “can deliver majorities [for Democrats],” Bennett said, “if we have a message that really lands.”
The Sanders camp envisions a very different road map. Ben Tulchin, Sanders’ 2016 pollster, said Democrats are less likely to recover by trying to court ordinarily Republican-leaning, college-educated suburbanites than by energizing millennials and recapturing working-class whites with Sanders-style economics. “It’s much harder to win over someone who votes Republican consistently than someone who voted for Obama twice and voted for Trump once,” Tulchin said.
The risk in Sanders’ approach is that higher-octane economic populism may fail to dislodge Trump’s hold on working-class whites while simultaneously alienating white-collar whites. In 2018, Democrats can straddle this divide by nominating edgy populists in blue-collar districts and reassuring centrists in white-collar ones. But the choice looms much larger for 2020.
Any Democratic nominee will need to do better than Hillary Clinton at motivating the minorities and millennials most hostile to Trump. But beyond that, the party’s next presidential primary could diverge between populists best suited to reconstruct a blue-collar coalition (think Sens. Sherrod Brown or Elizabeth Warren) and choices more acceptable to white-collar suburbanites (perhaps Sens. Cory Booker or Mark R. Warner).
With Trump still connecting so deeply with much of workingclass white America, a strategy centered on rallying younger, diverse, white-collar voters might seem the path of least resistance for Democrats. But that, of course, is what Hillary Clinton also thought in 2016.