After the debacle of the Iowa caucuses, the old quip attributed to Will Rogers seems just right: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
Actually, that broad Democratic coalition encompassing Southern segregationists, working-class union members and Northern liberals used to be one of the party’s electoral strengths. Today’s coalition is much less ideologically diverse, but the central challenge remains to bring it together and energize voters.
The most worrying news out of Iowa for Democrats is that the voter turnout was far below that of 2008, when Barack Obama brought people out in record numbers. The 2020 turnout looks a lot like 2016 — not a year to emulate. Many Democrats have pinned their hopes on opposition to Donald Trump to galvanize the party. Iowa suggests that negative energy is not enough. (Republican turnout, by contrast, broke previous records for an incumbent, according to the Iowa GOP.)
Pete Buttigieg has pointed out that every time Democrats have won the White House in the past 50 years, “it’s been with a new-generation figure who’s not been marinating in Washington for a long time.”
“Every time we’ve tried to go with the kind of safe, established, been-here-for-a-long-time kind of figure,” Buttigieg told GQ last November, “we have come up short.”
It is a reasonable conclusion. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama all won. Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton lost. (Michael Dukakis was an outsider who lost, suggesting that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition.)
The pattern also speaks to something distinctive about the party. As the saying goes, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” The Republican Party remains a somewhat disciplined group of people focused on winning. Consider 2016, when almost all the candidates running against Trump believed that if he were the nominee he would, in the words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, “destroy the party.” Once Trump was nominated, the party got squarely behind him, and today he enjoys a 94 percent approval rating among Republicans, according to Gallup.
Democrats, however, need to fall in love. They need someone to energize them to come out in droves. And that person has to feel like a transformative figure, someone who represents a new generation or new way of thinking. The problem with Buttigieg’s argument is not that he’s wrong about the history, but that his own candidacy — while remarkable and refreshing — seems to inspire older, whiter Democrats more so than younger and more diverse ones. The person most attractive to young Democrats remains Bernie Sanders.
The problems with Sanders are obvious. The country is not nearly as left-wing as he is. It is easy to get seduced by the idea that he represents a new wave, that young people are more open to his ideas, that we are entering a new world in which far-left ideas once considered unthinkable are now part of mainstream conversation. That same argument was made by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Britain’s elections last December — and the party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935. It’s not just in Britain. French Socialist Benoit Hamon pushed his party left and got only 6 percent of the vote in the 2017 presidential election. New York Times contributing columnist Anna Sauerbrey notes, “Across Western European countries, social democratic parties have gone from an average of well over a third of the vote in the mid-’90s to about a fifth in recent years.”
There are all kinds of explanations for why the left is doing poorly. The old base of working-class voters has been eroded. Many younger voters in Europe opt for Green parties. But above all, it seems to me, is the reality that the cutting-edge issues of today largely involve identity, chiefly immigration. Despite the global financial crisis, people are not embracing more radical left-wing solutions. In an age of uncertainty and change, they are moving not left economically but right culturally. When there is a choice, right-wing populism almost always beats left-wing populism.
Those who have succeeded in this environment have tended to be politicians who appeal to the center and feel fresh and authentic: France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Other countries with left-wing parties in power, often in coalitions, remind us that the political landscape is complicated and ever-shifting, and it’s hard to draw clear-cut lessons or rules.
One lesson is clear, however. This year’s Democratic candidate needs to energize the party’s voters and bring together its left and centrist wings. And no one has been able to do that yet.
Fareed Zakaria’s email address is fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group