From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Democratic centrists bitterly complained that Jesse Jackson and his progressive allies were pushing the party too far left.
“We were losing because the people weren’t buying the message we were selling,” Al From, the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, then the leading moderate Democratic group, told Time magazine in 1992.
Jackson, in turn, called the D.L.C. the “Democratic Leisure Class.”
Using the leverage of his Rainbow Coalition and the support he gained through presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, Jackson pushed the party conventions to adopt more liberal stances than the nominees wanted. Now, some 40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.
White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.
This internal upheaval results from the changing demographic characteristics of white Democrats, especially the rising percentage of whites with college degrees, and the shifting focus of the liberal agenda from racial and economic equality to culture war issues of identity politics, sex and gender, and personal autonomy.
“If we go back to the 1980s,” Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, wrote by email in response to my inquiries, “the Jesse Jackson forces were the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.” But, Lee said,
Black voters today are no longer on the party’s left flank. Since the late 1990s the share of white Democrats identifying as liberal roughly doubled, from about 30 percent to 61 percent, while Black Democrats moved only modestly.
Ideological shifts in the Democratic Party are to a considerable extent the story of the changing shape of the coalition, Lee continued:
In 1992, most of Bill Clinton’s supporters were white voters without college degrees, who now make up about a quarter of the Democratic coalition. White college graduates are now more liberal across the board.
As culture war issues have become more important to the partisan divide, the differences between Black and white Democrats on these issues become more important. Black Democrats are more religious and more traditional on cultural issues than white Democrats.
The moral and cultural gulf between Black and white Democrats has grown steadily. A November 2025 Pew survey found 75 percent of Black Democrats believed with “absolute certainty” in God and 65 percent prayed daily, compared with 29 percent and 24 percent of white Democrats.
Along similar lines, a 2022 American Enterprise Institute study found that white liberals favored “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services” by 71 percent to 27 percent; Black voters were much more closely split, 53 percent to 44 percent; and Hispanic voters were opposed, with 40 percent for shifting funds to social services and 57 percent against doing so.
The internal Democratic divide is particularly acute on cultural, gender and sexual issues.
A January 2024 YouGov survey found that white Democrats were “significantly more likely than Black Democrats (52 percent vs. 26 percent) to believe that societal acceptance of gay, lesbian and bisexual people has not gone far enough.”
The split is larger on transgender issues. In January 2023, Pew posted research that had asked voters to state whether someone is a man or a woman “is determined by sex assigned at birth” or “can be different from sex assigned at birth.” Black Democrats chose “assigned at birth” 66 percent to 33 percent. White Democrats chose “can be different from sex assigned at birth” by an even larger number, 72 percent to 27 percent.
These differences are part and parcel of a larger ideological shift among Democrats over the past 26 years.
At the start of this century, combined Pew and Gallup data shows relatively similar percentages of liberal identification among white Democrats (34 percent), Black Democrats (25) and Hispanic Democrats (29).
By 2024, however, according to the Brookings Institution, 63 percent of white Democrats identified as liberal, a 29-point increase — far more than the 14-point increase for Black Democrats, to 39 percent; and the 12-point increase for Hispanic Democrats, to 41 percent.
Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion.
Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing four major issues on which “Black voters have indeed become a moderating force compared with white liberals”:
Crime: A 2024 American Enterprise Institute survey found that nonwhite working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.
Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in D.C., socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.
Patriotism: Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.
Racial preferences: When asked if Black people should work their way up “without special favors,” white liberals were about 12 points less likely to agree than Black voters.
The pro-affirmative action stance among many white liberals, in contrast to the moderate positions of Black Democrats, is striking, as Kahlenberg pointed out:
The insistence of white liberals on racial preferences has a very negative effect on Democrats. In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of U.C. Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas — including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza — in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates.
They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.
The reversal of ideological positioning of white and minority Democrats is closely connected to the class conversion of the Democratic Party from the party of the working class to the party of well-educated whites.
Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a centrist think tank, contended in an email:
The great class inversion in the Democratic Party is a huge driver of this shift in dynamics. Even as recently as 2008, Democrats were a working-class party, as seven in 10 voters in our coalition didn’t have a college degree. By 2024, that share fell by 16 points, corresponding with equal growth in the proportion of college-educated voters in our tent.
The result?
Erickson:
Today’s white Democratic voters bear little resemblance to the white Democrats of Jesse Jackson’s era. They are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.
Jackson used to say that parties need two wings to fly. He was right, but it turns out that voters of color are now leading the moderate wing of the modern Democratic Party.
At the same time, Erickson’s analysis points to a Democratic split with the so-called post-material wing dominated by white liberals and a Black-Hispanic minority wing more concerned with bread-and-butter issues:
According to 2024 A.P. VoteCast Data, when asked to rank their level of concern on top issues in the 2024 election, white progressives expressed the most concern about “the effects of climate change,” at 75 percent, while nearly 70 percent of Black, Latino and white noncollege voters were most concerned about the cost of food and groceries.
Similarly, there was a nearly 30-point gap between white progressives (45 percent) and Black (71 percent), Latino (75 percent) and white noncollege voters (83 percent) who viewed the situation at the border as an important factor in their vote. When it came to the issue of crime, Black (57 percent) and Latino (55 percent) voters were nearly twice as concerned as white progressives (28 percent).
The shift from the downstairs party of the last century to the upstairs party of today, which I have written extensively about in the past, complements and reinforces this ideological reorganization.
The racial, ideological and class alterations of the Democratic Party have created a damaging dynamic both internally and in competition with the Republican Party.
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, described this process in an email:
The Democratic Party has definitely moved left. It is now dominated by college-educated and relatively affluent elites who have given disproportionate attention to cultural issues such as immigration, abortion, D.E.I., guns, gender identity and race.
This has helped to drive less-educated working-class voters with more traditional values into the Republican camp. Although racism persists, many Trump voters are not racist as much as they resent the emphasis that Democrats have given to this issue.
The white working-class voters who favor Republicans are struggling economically but don’t feel that their struggles are given the same attention as racism and other cultural issues. They are a large group that feels disrespected, distrusts government and feels like their own economic challenges are being ignored.
The ascendance within Democratic ranks of culturally liberal well-educated whites has, in turn, intensified tensions with Black, Hispanic and other minority Democrats, Sawhill wrote
As for Black Americans, they remain a mainstay of the Democratic Party but they do tend to be more moderate than well-educated whites.
For example, a majority of them, especially those under 40, supported the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action in higher education in 2023. Many Black men, for both cultural and economic reasons, voted for Trump in 2024 although some now seem to regret that decision.
Democrats, Sawhill contended,
have a huge opportunity to unite the working class across racial lines, but to do so, I believe they will have to focus much more on inequalities of wealth and power, and put a stronger emphasis on economic issues such as work, wages and the cost of living while simultaneously embracing more mainstream or less-contentious cultural values in many areas.
Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, has been a leader in the struggle to strengthen Democratic centrism for four decades. His take on the evolution of politics over those years:
In 1988, Jesse Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination on a coherent and comprehensive social democratic platform. It thrilled readers of The Nation and would easily have found favor on the European left. But it made Jackson the wrong answer to the big strategic question facing his party then: how to halt the steady defection of more socially traditional blue-collar voters that was unraveling the New Deal majority.
They didn’t see a place for themselves in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. That’s why he won mostly Southern states with lots of Black voters but struggled in the Wisconsin primary.
Over the last two decades, Marshall continued in his email, “Democrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads,” noting “that between the 2012 and 2024 elections, the party’s performance among nonwhite working-class voters fell by 37 points, while improving among white college grads by 17 points.”
Now, Marshall added,
the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.
The problem for Marshall and others who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.
They vote, donate and participate heavily in party organizations more than any other major bloc. They dominate or exert disproportionate influence among party activists, primary voters, campaign staffs, advocacy organizations, the media, nonprofit leadership and donor networks.
It may well be that the internal power lies with those who are happy campers just where they are, and that the party as currently constructed cannot and will not dig itself out of the hole it’s in.
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