Pollster and pundit Ruy Teixeira gives the best analysis of the campaign I have yet seen. Long, but worth reading and considering.  T

The Wall Street Journal

Opinion

The Weekend Interview

A Democrat Ponders a ‘Thumping Rebuke’

Ruy Teixeira says the party went wrong when it abandoned ‘progressive centrism’ and embraced a hard-left cultural ideology.

By Tunku Varadarajan

Nov. 8, 2024 4:27 pm ET

Did you feel the joy on Tuesday night? Ruy Teixeira sure didn’t. He held his nose and voted for Kamala Harris, but he found her “distinctive policy ideas, to the extent she had them, questionable. I was definitely not a big enthusiast, but I voted for her anyway.” His “historical loyalty” to the Democratic Party meant that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump. “A lot of the obvious things that bother people about Trump bothered me too,” he says. Mr. Trump is “a bit too chaotic and unpredictable, and it seemed risky to me.” Mr. Teixeira didn’t buy into “all this baloney about how he’s going to institute fascism, but Trump did make me kind of nervous.”

Mr. Teixeira, 72, is a longtime Democrat who is distraught about the direction his party has taken. In 2002, he and John Judis published “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted a dominant future for his party. It didn’t come to pass. Two decades later he resigned from his fellowship at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank that had become a cauldron of woke conformity, and joined the center-right American Enterprise Institute, of which I am also a fellow.

In a Zoom interview from his home in Silver Spring, Md., he says the ideological impulses that made his old workplace intolerable were the same forces that “consigned Kamala Harris and the Democrats to defeat in the election.”

“Millions of people,” he says, “swallowed their nervousness about Trump and said, ‘Well, he’s unpredictable. Maybe a bit of a risk. But I don’t want to see another four years of the Biden-Harris administration.’ ” These “normie voters”—working-class Americans who aren’t “enclosed in the professional-class bubble”—cost the Democrats the White House and the Senate majority.

They were turned off by a party that has veered sharply away from its “greatest strength, which is uplifting the working and middle classes. The Democrats are no longer the party of the people. They’ve lost touch with the working class.” With the Democrats having embraced identity politics, the Republicans are “the party of the working class in this country now. Who’d have thunk it?”

Mr. Teixeira cites a 2023 book, “Party of the People,” by GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, and says that the Republican-leaning “populist, multiracial, working-class coalition” is “a real thing, and it’s here to stay.” He says we’re seeing “the decline of racial polarization and an increase in class polarization.”

That’s a horror story for the Democrats. Mr. Teixeira, whose father was a Portuguese immigrant, says the Democratic values that repel blue-collar Americans of all races have opened a rift with the elites who reside in postindustrial “ideopolises.” Ms. Harris and her party were “heavily overindexed on liberal cultural issues, and were even using a language that was inimical to a lot of these voters.” The Democrats “pooh-poohed concerns about crime and immigration, and thought their ‘enlightened’ views about race, gender, abortion and climate were saleable to most members of the voting public.” Mr. Trump’s comeback proves they weren’t.

The Democrats have come to regard white working-class voters as “reactionary and racist,” Mr. Teixeira says. Those voters already defected to Mr. Trump in 2016, but what killed the Democrats this year was “losing nonwhite working-class voters hand over fist.” Mr. Teixeira notes that Barack Obama “carried the nonwhite working class or noncollege voters by 67 points. Harris has carried them with 33. That’s a halving of the margin among those who should have been the bulwark, the core, of the Democratic Party.”

The outcome doesn’t surprise Mr. Teixeira: “It was clearly in the cards that they could lose.” What does surprise him is the extent of the loss and the “uniformity of the rightward movement across geographies and demographic groups.”

The startling voter results back him up. Mr. Trump appears to have carried all the swing states. He improved his margins in red states and reduced the Democratic advantage in blue ones. He made particular advances among Hispanic voters, carrying traditionally Democratic Texas border counties including Starr, which had voted Democratic in every election since 1892. He also took Florida’s Miami-Dade, which hadn’t gone Republican since 1988, and heavily Puerto Rican Osceola, where Joe Biden led in 2020 by nearly 14 points. His improvement among black voters, especially men, helped close the gap in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee and push him over the top in their three key “blue wall” states.

Mr. Trump could become the first Republican since 2004 to break 40% in California. Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, a measure to toughen penalties for shoplifting and fentanyl crimes, and ousted progressive San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón.

The defeat was “a more thumping rebuke” than Mr. Teixeira expected. But the party “really did piss people off on immigration and crime. They became identified with boutique ideas around race and gender that never really sold well among ordinary working-class voters.”

Consider what he calls the “trans question.” Hardly anyone noticed that in 2020 Joe Biden tweeted that “transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” But a Trump campaign ad reminded voters that in 2019 Ms. Harris answered in the affirmative when asked in a questionnaire if she backed taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala’s for they/them. I’m for you,” the ad said. Mr. Teixeira calls the ad “highly effective.”

While there may not be “a lot of trans one-issue voters out there,” Mr. Teixeira says, the subject “symbolizes the out-of-touchness that we’re talking about, the sort of cultural boutique outlook that people think is just weird.” Imagining himself as one of those normies, Mr. Teixeira adds that the “idea that you want me, an ordinary voter, to believe there’s no friggin’ difference between a biological man and a biological woman just doesn’t play.”

Abortion is another issue on which the Democrats miscalculated. Mr. Teixeira allows that beating the drum of Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in 2022, might have helped “at the margin.” But Mr. Trump “undercut the Democrats to some extent by saying he wanted to leave the question to the states and that he wouldn’t pass a national abortion ban.” Ms. Harris, meanwhile, was unable or unwilling to accept any limits. “So basically we’re talking about up until the time the baby pops out, right? We know from the data that that’s not what most voters feel. They’re very nervous about abortions in the last trimester.” Mr. Trump significantly improved on his 2020 performance among women as well as men. “Abortion wasn’t going to neutralize the immigration issue,” Mr. Teixeira says—never mind the economy.

Mr. Teixeira explains the party’s strategy by suggesting that it was “overinterpreting the results of the 2022 midterms and other special elections, where abortion did appear to be a pretty salient and useful issue for the Democrats.” But that points to another problem for the Democrats. Mr. Teixeira says they “are now low-turnout specialists. Their coalition has become skewed so much toward the most activated, educated voters that the lower the turnout is, the better off they are.” That’s a big change: “When they were the party of the people, they wanted as many voters to turn out as possible. It was once said that it was those naughty Republicans who just mobilized the rich white people.”

At the same time, working-class voters are “not on board with the Democrats’ climate catastrophism,” Mr. Teixeira says. “They are not anti-fossil-fuels the way that most Democrats seem to be these days.” Climate shibboleths, “a matter of almost religious faith among dominant elements of the Democratic Party,” have distorted policy priorities to an extent that makes voters angry.

“They think this is not good. They see that the whole clean-energy-transition obsession has not been good for capitalism writ large,” Mr. Texieira says. “The most important thing Democrats should be for is, basically, prosperity, for upward mobility, for dynamic economic growth, for getting rid of some of these stupid regulations that prevent people from doing stuff.”

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” was predicated on the party’s maintaining a “progressive centrism”—an ideology that, in Mr. Teixeira’s telling, lasted roughly from Bill Clinton’s first term to the beginning of Barack Obama’s second. Then Black Lives Matter and other manifestations of a “shadow party”—nonprofits, advocacy groups, the academy, parts of the media—began to dictate the Democratic direction. Sen. Bernie Sanders was “the last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class.” An independent who sought the Democratic presidential nomination, “Sanders was considered a big threat to Hillary [Clinton], so she decided she would run to his left on cultural issues.” The party has remained rooted there ever since.

The good news for Democrats is that Mr. Teixeira sees no emerging Republican majority. Although Mr. Trump appears to have captured the working class, Mr. Teixeira attributes that as much to Democratic failings as he does to the Republican leader’s own allure. “We’re now in this weird interregnum stalemate,” he says, “which is unusual in American politics. Neither party is truly a majority party against which the minority party is arrayed.” America will “toggle back and forth between the parties. Nobody’s made an offer to the American people they can’t refuse.”

In other words, what will determine outcomes is “the things that people don’t like about the other party, which then makes them vote for the party that isn’t that party.” In that kind of election, however, “the negatives of the Democrats become more salient than the Republicans’.”

How do the Democrats pick themselves up and return to the fray? “Some political entrepreneur,” Mr. Teixeira says, “has to realize that the Republicans have a lot of problems, right? Trump has problems. They’re not a united party on economics, and many other issues. There’s a clear avenue for Democrats to pose an alternative to them.”

This election should make clear that they can’t do that “without moving to the center on cultural issues.” The Democrats have to be “for law and order. We have to be tough on the border. We can’t just be saying ‘illegal immigrants are great.’ ” He points out that Mr. Biden had to walk back his inadvertent use of the word “illegal” in reference to a criminal migrant in his last State of the Union Address. “He apologized publicly,” Mr. Teixeira says. “That was an indicator of how crazy things have gotten.”

The party also needs to “give up on this equity baloney and start talking about equal opportunity, and fairness, which is what people really believe in.” He pleads: “Go back to Martin Luther King. He had the right idea. You ought to judge people by their character, not the color of their skin.” He cites Bill Clinton, who had “a lot of great instincts on a lot of this stuff. An important aspect of his career is that he ran and won in a place like Arkansas. And that’s really different from running and winning in California, or New York, or Illinois.”

“Clinton was used to talking to people who didn’t agree with him. And I think Democrats need to discover that again. They need to ask themselves, ‘How do we talk to people who don’t agree with us?’ ”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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Appeared in the November 9, 2024, print edition as 'A Democrat Ponders a ‘Thumping Rebuke’'.