Democrats can’t fix their problems by November

Biden has been on a steady downhill track among young voters. In the spring of 2021, his first months in office, his approval rating in the Harvard poll was 59%, meaning it has fallen 18 points in the year since.

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Why has Biden been losing support among the young? Because he has not been an effective president. When asked why they disapprove of Biden’s performance, the largest group of respondents, 36%, named “ineffectiveness.” Another 14% said the president is “not following through on campaign promises.” Another 10% said Biden “does not share my values.”

Of course, Biden is also underwater with voters over the age of 29. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows his approval rate stuck at 40.8%, with his worst polls showing a rating of 35% and his best polls showing a rating of 45%. Even if his best polls are correct, Biden’s low approval marks point to a rough time for his party in November.

But Biden is just the leading indicator of the Democratic Party’s problems at the moment. The fact is, the party’s problems are much larger and more deeply rooted than Biden’s current travails. Some Democrats know that. The question is whether the party’s leaders will listen to them.

The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira has just written a new piece titled, “How to Fix the Democratic Brand; It Can Be Done, But It Won’t Be Easy.” The essay begins, “The Democrats and the Democratic brand are in deep trouble.” Teixeira argues the party should have realized something was terribly wrong after its loss of House seats in 2020. And it should have realized that it only managed a 50-50 tie in the Senate because of Trump’s destructive performance in the Georgia Senate races. But since Democrats won the White House, kept narrow control of the House, and gained nominal control of the Senate on the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, Teixeira concludes, a lot of party activists just didn’t see the signs of trouble.

“Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project,” Teixeira writes. He says the party’s problems fall into three categories. The first is culture, in which the party has lost touch with working-class voters and is now dominated by big-city, college-educated professionals who hold leftist views increasingly dominated by identity politics. They talk about “structural racism” in America and press for the exclusion of those who dissent. Teixeira goes through a list of Democratic positions that are turning off more and more voters across America:

Is America really a “white supremacist” society? What does “structural racism” even mean and does it explain all the socioeconomic problems of nonwhites? Is anyone who raises questions about immigration levels a racist? Are personal pronouns necessary and something the left should seek to popularize? Are transwomen exactly the same as biological women and are those who question such a claim simply “haters” who should be expunged from the left coalition (as has been advocated in the UK)? This list could go on. What ties the questions together is that they are closely associated with practitioners of identity politics or adherents of the intersectional approach, who deem them not open to debate with the usual tools of logic and evidence. Politically derived answers are simply to be embraced by Democratic party progressives in the interest of “social justice.”

The Democrats’ second problem, according to Teixeira, is economics. In that realm, many voters now see Democrats as obsessed with equity and marginalized groups to the exclusion of the broader working class. Obsessed by climate change, some progressives have even embraced wacky ideas such as “degrowth,” in which they advocate actually shrinking the economy to save us all from catastrophic global warming and our own wasteful lifestyles.

The party’s third problem is patriotism. As in, Democrats don’t seem to have enough of it. Teixeira quotes one liberal commentator who noted that “a remarkable and pervasive vilification of America [has] become not just widespread but de rigeur among progressives.” Their negative view of America exceeds those of their countrymen — not just white Americans but nonwhites, as well. Teixeira writes that “just 34 percent of progressive activists say they are ‘proud to be an American’ compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks, and 76 percent of Hispanics. This is a big, big problem.”

Teixeira obviously wants the Democratic Party to correct its course. But the change that is necessary on all three fronts, culture, economics, and patriotism, is broad and far-reaching. It will take a long time to put into effect. On those topics, at least, the party is beyond saving for this year’s midterm elections — and perhaps for the next presidential election, too. Perhaps the Republican Party’s problems will outweigh those of the Democrats and the Democrats will squeak by. There might be short-term reprieves, but not in the long term, unless Democrats change.

“A Democratic Party that occupies the cultural center ground, promotes an abundance agenda and is unabashedly patriotic has a real shot at domination given Republicans’ serious problems and weaknesses,” Teixeira writes. “Conversely, a Democratic Party that does not rebrand in this way dooms American politics to continued stalemate and polarization. That is not a pleasant prospect.”

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