“Vote blue, no matter who” is just not cutting it anymore for many Democrats.

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     With a little under a year before the 2024 Presidential Election and the most recent New York Times-Siena College Poll results showing President Biden trailing in key battleground states, two political commentators are asking the question: “Where have all the Democrats gone?”

 

     John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, co-authors of the book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes,” discussed what they believe to be the answer to this very question at Politics and Prose on Sunday, Nov. 12.

 

     To truly answer this question, Judis and Teixeria go back to 2016, when political divisiveness began to emerge in the mainstream.

 

     In the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, many democrats were surprised by the results, Teixeira said.

 

      “People didn't really want to understand why Trump had won that election, they wanted to think, and it comforted them to think it's all racism and xenophobia,” he said. “‘The people who deserted the Democrats were responding to Trump's racism and xenophobia, and that's all we need to understand, and we don't need those voters, we don't want those voters.’”

 

     Teixeira believes that in dismissing this loss and attributing it to bigotry, democrats lost sight of a key demographic – the working class.

 

     Judis also credits the change in the Democratic party’s platform and base to a decline in organized labor, with just 10% of workers in 2022 belonging to a union, a sharp decline from its peak of one-third of the American workforce in the 1950s, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury.

 

     “It rooted the party in economics, in issues that a lot of, again, working-class people cared about,” Judis said. 

 

     The increase in the importance of progressive social issues within the party’s platform could also be a reason for this decline in working-class Americans, Judis and Teixeira said, as many have become divisive. Overall, political polarization has increased on both sides, changing the main issues on both partys’ platforms.

 

     “So you have both parties really gravitating towards their extremes, and the way in which elections get decided is whose extremes are salient,” Judis said.

 

     As political polarization has increased over the last decade, bipartisanship and tolerance for differing opinions has decreased significantly. Judis and Teixeira believe this lack of tolerance for conflicting opinions to be what has turned away many voters in the middle.

 

     “The issue of tolerant discourse, you know, sort of debating policy on the basis of reason, logic, and evidence is key, and that liberalism that has taken over huge sectors of the Democratic party and its infrastructure to me is just an anathema, and of course we see the same thing on the Republican side,” Teixeira said.

 

     Megan McArdle, Washington Post columnist and the moderator for the discussion, also believes this divisiveness to be harming democrats seeking to garner support among voters.

 

     “I personally am pretty pro-immigration, but I don't think it's necessarily racist to support less immigration,” she said. “I think that that kind of discourse, right, turning this into like ‘Are you a racist?’ well, if you're for a closed border, do you want to vote for the person who called you a racist?”