Please Democrats, do not drive away all moderate voters
I could never vote for Donald Trump. So I ask Democrats: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?
According to a recent Gallup poll, 35% of Americans call themselves conservative, 35% call themselves moderate and 26% call themselves liberal. The candidates at the debates this week fall mostly within the 26%. The party seems to think it can win without any of the 35% of us in the moderate camp, the ones who actually delivered the 2018 midterm win.
The progressive narrative is dominating partly because today’s progressives have a forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it. And because no moderate wants to face progressive fury by opposing it.
It’s also dominating because the driving dynamic in this campaign right now is not who can knock off Joe Biden, the more moderate front-runner. It’s who can survive the intense struggle between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others to be the surviving left-wing alternative. All the competition is on the progressive side. Biden tries to remain above it all while the whole debate pulls sharply leftward.
The party is moving toward many positions that drive away moderates and increase the chances the nominee will be unelectable. And without much dissent.
First, there is health care. When Warren, Sanders and Kamala Harris raised their hands and said that they would eliminate employerbased health insurance, they made the most important gesture of the campaign so far. Over 70% of Americans with insurance through their employers are satisfied with their health plan. Only 13% of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren, Harris and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13% policy idea. Trump is smiling.
Second, there’s the economy. All Democrats apparently decided to run a Trumpstyle carnage campaign. The economy is completely broken. It only benefits a tiny sliver. Yet 71% of Americans say the economy is very or somewhat good.
Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus inflicting the Trumpian right. They take a good point — that capitalism must be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it as if they want to undermine capitalism altogether.
Third, Democrats are in dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now many candidates sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.
Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist vs. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1%. This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.
But the big divide in America is not between the top 1% and the bottom 99. It’s between the top 20% and the rest. These are the highly educated Americans who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to ensure outsiders can’t catch up.
If Democrats run a populist campaign against the business elite, Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things.
Finally, Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They point to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants, and the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the moral case against Trump includes hitting him from the right as well as the left.
Trump rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity. Democrats rarely make this case because defending tradition sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.
The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left, it can’t win in the fall.
Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.