Polls in swing states remain evenly matched, but for Democrats, the politics of hope, joy, and good vibes have been replaced with the politics of worry, fear, and dread.
Whether or not the momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris has stalled in the race against former President Donald Trump, she has certainly struggled to sustain the kind of media attention she attracted in the first month of her campaign. Despite everything that has happened to Trump, including a disastrous debate performance and a growing number of Republican officials endorsing Harris, the Republican nominee has maintained his strong standing within red America and is holding his own in the swing states.
The area above all others that should concern Democrats is the economy. Polls show that the Republicans maintains a distinct advantage on the issue, which along with immigration matters most to voters. The party of former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson has long struggled with class as a major fault line. As New York Times columnist David Leonhardt documented in his book Ours Was the Shining Future, it has suffered a steady drift of white, non-college-educated working Americans toward the Republican Party. The political scientists Matthew Grossman and David A. Hopkins have demonstrated in Polarized by Degrees how Republicans have become the party for white voters without college degrees, deeply distrustful of highly educated Americans, who align with the Democrats.
Most troublesome to Democrats, recent data is showing that a growing number of Black and Latino voters who don’t have college degrees are also identifying with the red map. According to the New York Times/Siena College poll, 74 percent of Black voters say they will vote for Harris, compared to 90 percent who went for Biden in 2020—though the president’s number had fallen below Harris’s before he dropped out. While Democrats still do much better with both constituencies, they depend, as Leonhardt recently observed, on “landslide margins.” However, it might be that those kinds of margins, at least in the near future, will be difficult to achieve.
Compounding matters for Democrats was the news that the Teamsters union and the International Association of Firefighters declined to endorse any candidate. This creates a permission structure for union members to support Trump.
For decades, the heart and soul of the New Deal coalition—working-class American families—have been looking in different directions, causing problems for the Democratic Party. Some remain loyal but frustrated or disillusioned; others cast their vote with the Republican Party. Too many voters wonder whether the political party that has stood for what historians Lizabeth Cohen and Michael Kazin called “moral capitalism” still believes in those animating values. And yes, some Americans are voting their racial, ethnic, and gender animosities, but the countervailing tug of an economic agenda promising long-term security is no longer working as well for Democrats as it once did. Showing extraordinary prescience, one Democratic Party leader sounded the alarm about exactly this situation 44 years ago.
August 1980 was another critical juncture for Democrats. The nation was in terrible shape. The economy had suffered from a decade-long combination of inflation, unemployment, and gas shortages. Confidence in the nation’s reputation had been shattered by Vietnam. Americans were being held captive in Iran. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.
After a campaign in 1976 running against a broken Washington establishment, Democratic President Jimmy Carter had been determined to break with his party’s ideological orthodoxies and traditional interest group alliances. As a product of the New South, Carter tackled issues such as conservation in ways that raised major concerns among core constituencies, notably his sudden decision to cut 30 federal water projects in the states of key Democratic senators, and veered away from staple policies such as public jobs in response to hard economic times. Wrestling with high inflation rates, Carter adopted an austerity agenda centered on tax cuts, deficit reduction, and—by appointing Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve in 1979—high interest rates. He sidelined the full employment agenda Democrats had pursued since Roosevelt’s New Deal. And as the strength of the conservative movement gained steam with the 1978 midterm elections, the president moved further to the center in anticipation of his reelection campaign.
Carter won his party’s nomination for a second time after bruising primaries against the 48-year-old Sen. Ted Kennedy, who won in 13 states. The brother of two deceased leaders, a president and fellow senator, Kennedy remained popular within the party despite a deeply problematic personal life that included fleeing from a car accident in which a 28-year-old woman named Mary Jo Kopechne died. As Democrats gathered in New York City for their convention in Madison Square Garden, Kennedy supporters pushed an open convention that triggered Carter’s allies to implement a rule binding delegates to vote in favor of the candidate their state had supported.
Kennedy was not done, however. He was set to deliver a speech that came as the tensions brewing among Democrats—between the centrism of Carter who argued that the party needed to move in new directions to survive and other stalwarts who argued that their basic party traditions needed to be front and center—had risen to the surface. It was a warning that a shift was coming, and that Democrats needed to be prepared.
Kennedy, wrote historian Neal Gabler in his biography of the senator, decided that he wanted his speech to serve as a staunch defense of “liberalism at a time when it was under siege.” His advisors, Robert Shrum and Carey Parker, settled into the couches of his suite in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for several days to work on the text. They consulted with experts such as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as well as Kennedy’s three sisters. Kennedy personally played a big role in drafting the message. “He had no doubts about where the Democrats needed to stand when it came to choosing sides between Wall Street and the Heartland,” biographer John Farrell noted.
The 32-minute address, longer than the original 15 minutes offered by Carter’s team, issued a strong warning to fellow Democrats: “I am asking you to renew the commitment of the Democratic Party to economic justice.” Trying to remind the room of what mattered, he characterized the party’s historic mission as “the cause of the common man and the common woman.”
Taking aim at the Republican nominee, Kennedy alerted voters that they should avoid falling for the ruse peddled by the GOP that their party would do more for working Americans than the Democrats. Kennedy quoted Roosevelt to remind the convention that Republicans had been making false promises for decades: “Most Republican leaders have bitterly fought and blocked the forward surge of average men and women in their pursuit of happiness. Let us not be deluded that overnight those leaders have suddenly become the friends of average men and women.”
Reagan’s right-wing conservatism was the main target of the speech, but Carter’s Democratic centrism was in the firing line as well. Kennedy’s attack on Carter was “implicit and indirect,” according to the Washington Post. For one, he went after the administration’s anti-inflationary policies, noting “we will never misuse unemployment, high interest rates, and human misery as false weapons against inflation.”
With Carter on his mind, Kennedy urged the delegates to embrace a party tradition that revolved around a “fair prosperity and a justice society.” He feared that his party would take the easy road by bowing to the electoral pressures generated by a rising conservatism: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
With the sound of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” blaring on the sound system, the delegates went wild, bursting out in applause for almost a half-hour. “Te-ddy!” the crowd chanted. “Faces reflected awe and wonder and tears filled the eyes or dribbled down the cheeks” of those watching, observed the Washington Post television critic Tom Shales. Even Carter’s advisors were impressed. Hamilton Jordan concluded that “We may have won the nomination. But Ted Kennedy had won their hearts.” Carter’s mother Lillian called it an “excellent speech” and couldn’t understand how he had lost. Even Carter admitted it was a “stirring and emotional speech.”
Yet Kennedy’s message would be lost. Four years after Carter lost to Reagan, Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale suffered a landslide defeat in the 1984 election. His traditional Democratic platform was rendered a losing formula for the party. For many Democrats, Mondale’s last stand in favor of New Deal liberalism proved that Kennedy was dead wrong. In 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis ran away from the liberal label, presenting himself as a problem-solving technocrat who eschewed ideological rigidities. He lost to Vice President George H.W. Bush. However, the centrist strategy worked in 1992, when former Arkansan Governor Bill Clinton—who had been part of the Democratic Leadership Council that championed this game plan—beat Bush and brought his party back into the White House.
In 1993, Clinton made a controversial decision that symbolized the shifting party winds. He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, accelerated the process of deindustrialization in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. As Democrats paid more attention to upper middle-class suburbanites and Wall Street donors, a greater number of working Americans concluded that their traditional representatives no longer cared about them.
Starting with Reagan, Republicans stepped into the void with a conservative populism that was long on emotional fervor and short on economic relief. At the same time the party embraced a supply side economic agenda that disproportionately benefited wealthy Americans and corporations, as well as pushing anti-union and deregulatory policies that stripped away rights for workers, the GOP claimed to be the party of the common man—just as Kennedy had warned they would.
The need for Democrats to pay more attention to the plight of working Americans is not the same as claiming that the party has not continued to do a great deal more than Republicans.
Just in the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has undertaken an aggressive program of federal investment in chip manufacturing that is bringing real jobs to areas where employment vanished decades ago, starting to turn the Rust Belt into a Tech Belt. Harris has put forward proposals to lower housing, child care, and health care costs that would result in meaningful savings. She has been speaking about these issues and to these concerns during her campaign, focusing in on structural cost challenges facing families, such as with housing and medical care.
Nor is there evidence that the increased focus among Democrats on civil rights, environmentalism, gender equity, and paths to citizenship for undocumented workers has created an inevitable tension for the party. All of these can work side by side with an agenda that boosts the economic standing of all workers. Indeed, this issue agenda can ensure that the pieces of the economic pie are evenly distributed among the many groups that compose our nation.
Nonetheless, the success of Trump in cutting into these constituencies should be a loud wake-up call to Democrats. If the party of Roosevelt and Johnson does not spend the next few weeks more aggressively outlining an economic agenda that can revitalize working America and make clear what the Biden-Harris administration has achieved, then they might end up once again handing over power to a leader who claims from the vistas of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago to be a champion of the common man.
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