Reading the Biden surge
Democratic elites are losing touch with Democratic voters
As the Democratic Party in 2019 begins to wake up to the fact that its intellectual and activist vanguard is deeply at odds with both its voting base and the vast majority of its elected officials, the politics of Washington and the 2020 primary are shifting in unexpected ways.
In Congress, Nancy Pelosi survived a campaign in which more than three dozen Democratic candidates, nearly all running in conservative or moderate districts, refused to endorse her for House speaker. Ms. Pelosi, in turn, has embraced the large wing of newly elected centrists that gave her the majority. She has repeatedly dismissed Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez and her peers as irrelevant.
“When we won this election, it wasn’t in districts like mine or Alexandria’s … those are districts that are solidly Democratic. This glass of water,” she said at one event, hoisting a glass, “would win with a D next to its name in those districts.”
In an interview, she repudiated socialism (“I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party”), and when asked about the faction associated with Ms. OcasioCortez, she replied, “That’s like five people.”
Ms. Pelosi keeps making this point so insistently and even rudely because, perhaps, the media have kept missing it. Only half of House Democrats support “Medicare for all,” and slightly fewer representatives support the Green New Deal. (Ms. Pelosi’s assessment of the latter — “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it” — summarized its very dim prospects.) Meanwhile, Ms. Pelosi has broken from the left on other high-profile controversies.
She has refused to initiate impeachment hearings or hold a vote specifically condemning anti-Semitism following Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments accusing Israel supporters of foreign allegiance.
College-educated white Democratic voters have shown a growing concern about structural bias in American society: a transformation owed to social progressives, who tend to be the most skeptical about nominating a white man for president. To them, the struggle against racism and sexism correlates with a belief in increasing representation of women and people of color. Many Democratic voters, on the other hand, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. If racism and sexism are so endemic, they’ve decided, then beating Donald Trump requires nominating a white man. “You’ll always hear, ‘There’s no way a woman can win this,’ and they go back to Hillary,” one voter told The New York Times. “Even among my female friends.”
Most of the party’s presidential candidates took the claims of the ascendant left at face value when they undertook their campaigns. Candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren designed their platforms as if they had to compete ideologically with Bernie Sanders. Several of them have already advocated Medicare for all or the Green New Deal, which could expose them to withering attacks from Mr. Trump if they win the nomination. None of their left-leaning plans stands a chance to pass Congress under the next president, even in the best-case scenario. All of them poll badly. (Medicare for all sounds popular until you tell people it means eliminating private insurance, at which point it grows unpopular.) The candidates seem to have overestimated how much left-wing policy voters actually demand.
Democratic voters might be dissuaded from nominating their former vice president if they hear more about his long record or if he repeats the undisciplined campaigning that led to defeats in both of his previous presidential campaigns. But it is already clear enough that he is supplying something much closer to what the party’s electorate wants than either the political media or the other candidates had assumed. A Democratic Party in which Joe Biden is running away with a nomination simply cannot be the one that most people thought existed. Some of Ms. Harris’ advisers, the Times recently reported, are urging her to stop mollifying activists and embrace her prosecutorial past.
It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized. Corey Robin, a left-wing writer who has previously heralded the left’s impending takeover of the Democratic Party, recently conceded he may have miscalculated. “We have nothing like the organizational infrastructure, the party organization, the intellectual and ideological coherence or political leadership we need,” he wrote. “I don’t see anything on the horizon like the cadre of ideologues and activists that made the New Deal or Reagan Revolution.”
It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized.