Did the Democratic Majority emerge after all?

Did the Democratic Majority emerge after all?

By Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com. 

March 31, 2021. 

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) walks to start a press conference at the US Capitol on March 10, 2021 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

I had Ruy Teixeira on the Weeds last week, mostly to talk about Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters in 2020 and his new project, The Liberal Patriot.

But Teixeira is probably still best known for his 2004 book with John Judis, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which is one of those books that’s widely referenced years after publication but typically in a kind of caricature form. Obviously, the Democratic majority that Teixeira and Judis forecast — driven by the growing nonwhite share of the electorate and the increasing liberalism of college-educated professionals and big metro areas — did not exactly emerge.

Nevertheless, the big demographic trends that the book is about did emerge, and they played out roughly the way they forecasted.

Some other things broke less favorably. But broadly speaking, I want to defend the relevance of the book’s main ideas.

The baseline matters

Let’s start with the title, which was a deliberate reference to Kevin Phillips’ 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority.”

Phillips’ thesis was that the superficially close race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in 1968 concealed the larger crackup of the New Deal coalition (as witnessed by the strong vote for George Wallace), and that Republicans were now prepared to become the dominant party.

The GOP then went on to win four out of the next five presidential elections, control the Senate from 1981-86, and control the House never.

This was broadly considered to be a vindication of Phillips’ thesis, because even though the Democrats had the upper hand in Congress to preserve their majority, they had to give a lot of ground. The Carter administration did not have any huge signature legislative achievements, instead thwarted by nearly unified Republican control of the government. And in 1981, House Republicans formed a de facto coalition with a faction of conservative Democrats known as the “Boll Weevils” to pass some major bills, including Reagan’s signature tax cut. What’s more, in contrast to today’s emerging political norms, Democrats during this period mostly deferred to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush on the cabinet and judicial appointments. The deference wasn’t universal (see Robert Bork), but it was also broad enough that decades later people still remember Robert Bork rather than say “cry more cons, if you want to confirm judges try winning the Senate.”

I think that’s a useful baseline-setting, just to remind us that the “Republican majority” that emerged during its period of emergence was itself a sometimes tenuous thing.

Since the Judis/Teixeira book came out:

Democrats won three out of five presidential elections.

Democrats controlled the Senate 2007-15, and then again 2021-present.

Democrats controlled the House 2007-11 and again 2019-present.

That’s a stronger congressional result than Republicans had in the era of the “Republican majority.” And while it’s a weaker presidential result, that’s only because Trump won in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote.

What’s more, Democrats won a majority of the House vote in 2012. And they won a majority of the Senate vote in 2016 and 2018.

Judged by how many people voted for whom, it’s a decent Democratic majority that emerged:

Excel table showing winners of Presidency, House, and Senate by party during election years

Now of course that’s not the system we have, so Democrats’ actual results are less impressive. But to me, this looks like the Judis/Teixeira thesis ended up wrong for a mostly unexpected reason — the growth in the geographic skew of the electoral system.

That’s especially true because policy has been evolving to the left during this period.

Policy has shifted to the left

Back in 1999, Senate Republicans blocked Bill Clinton’s effort to appoint an out gay man to be Ambassador to Luxembourg just because he was an out gay man. Literally no other reason was given.

By 2004, the United States has an out gay ambassador to Romania (Michael Guest) confirmed by the Senate, but George W. Bush is campaigning on the idea that we needed to amend the Constitution to prevent courts from saying there is a constitutional right to marriage equality.

By 2008, the issue has become dicey enough that John McCain isn’t talking a lot about the federal marriage amendment but Barack Obama is still saying marriage is between a man and a woman.

By 2012, Obama endorses marriage equality and still wins Iowa and Ohio.

By 2016, it’s the law of the land. Trump doesn’t really talk about it, and the policy debate has moved onto the “T” part of LGBT rights.

It’s a very dramatic transformation, though by the same token, it’s one that hasn’t been matched on other issues. And certainly many people feel the country has moved to the right on economics. You could maybe make that case if you use some baseline from the far distant past, but if you take 2000 as the baseline for the Democratic Majority’s emergence, then it’s clearly wrong.

Thanks to state and local minimum wage increases, for example, the average minimum wage is actually the highest on record, even though the federal minimum wage has stagnated.

The welfare state has also expanded considerably during this period.

Medicare benefits expanded under George W. Bush, and then the Affordable Care Act kicked off a major round of Medicaid expansion.

We’ve had (depending on how you want to count it) two or three rounds of EITC expansion.

There was a big SNAP increase nobody talks about in 2008.

The Child Tax Credit has gotten larger and also more generous to families with very low incomes (and at least temporarily, it’s getting even more generous thanks to Biden).

This has not transformed the United States into France or Sweden. If you look at government social benefits as a share of GDP, you’ll see this was drifting up under Bush, spiked because of ARRA and the Great Recession, but then plateaued under Obama at a new, higher level that Trump did not reverse. Then came the CARES Act and the pandemic, and it exploded (first chart). If you cut out the CARES era, the Obama expansion is more notable (second chart).

graph of federal government current transfer payments: government social benefits: to persons/GDP

The number is going to jump up again as Biden’s Rescue Plan phases in, and then down as it phases out. But if Biden is able to accomplish anything at all in terms of making ARP ideas permanent, then the number will settle at a higher level than its Obama/Trump plateau.

In other policy areas, the incarceration rate has fallen and the Black/white gap in incarceration rates has fallen faster. Environmental rules and clean technology have advanced, leading to large falls in airborne lead (93%), carbon monoxide (65%), nitrogen dioxide (51%), ozone (21%), and about a 40% reduction in fine particulates, depending on exactly how you measure. And whether looked at on a consumption or a production basis, our greenhouse gas emissions have fallen pretty sharply, especially since Obama took office.

graph of production vs. consumption-based CO2 emissions in the US from 1990 to present

Now on all these things, you could say “it’s not enough.” And it’s not enough! There’s too much pollution in this country, too much child poverty, too many people lacking health insurance, and too many people locked up in cruel conditions.

But again, it’s not like the conservative movement achieved all its goals during the Republican Majority era. The point is they won a lot of elections, and the arc of policy bent in their direction. During the past 20 years, the opposite has happened — Democrats mostly won, and policy mostly bent in their direction.

Predictions are hard — especially about the future

To me, one big lesson of revisiting the book is that it’s a reminder of just how difficult it is to make accurate forecasts about politics.

I think Judis and Teixeira got so many big analytic points right. But their book is mostly remembered as wrong because its topline forecast was, in fact, wrong, and it was wrong for two subtle, interrelated reasons. One is they didn’t appreciate the extent to which the growing liberalism of college-educated professionals living in big metro (one of the big things they predicted correctly) areas would, over time, actually change Democratic Party ideology in a way that repelled non-college white voters who’d been okay with Al Gore. The other is they didn’t account for how this would intersect with the skews of the electoral maps.

This all really comes together on immigration, which has become a sharply partisan issue in a way that it just wasn’t at the time they wrote their book.

Here was the 2000 Democratic platform on immigration:

We must punish employers who engage in a pattern and practice of recruiting undocumented workers in order to intimidate and exploit them, and provide strengthened protections for immigrant workers, including whistleblower protections. Doing so enhances conditions for everyone in the workplace. We believe that any increases in H1-B visas must be temporary, must address only genuine shortages of highly skilled workers, and must include worker protections. They must also be accompanied by other immigration fairness measures and by increased fees to train American workers for high skill jobs. The Democratic Party is committed to assuring an adequate, predictable supply of agricultural labor while protecting American farm workers who are among the poorest and more vulnerable in our society. We reject calls for guest worker programs that lead to exploitation, and instead call for adjusting the status of immigrants with deep roots in the country.

And here was the 2000 GOP platform:

The education reforms we propose elsewhere in this platform will, over time, greatly increase the number of highly qualified workers in all sectors of the American economy. To meet immediate needs, however, we support increasing the number of H-1B visas to ensure high-tech workers in specialized positions, provided such workers do not pose a national security risk; and we will expand the H-2A program for the temporary agricultural workers so important to the nation's farms.

You can see an embryonic form of today’s divide in the Democrats’ “call for adjusting the status of immigrants with deep roots in the country” — i.e., today’s path to citizenship.

But in the 2000 version of the debate, the Republicans are calling for an increase in H-2A guest workers and the Democrats are proposing amnesty for the existing undocumented population as an alternative to that. Meanwhile, Republicans back more H-1Bs while Democrats sound more skeptical.

Clearly, the implicit forecast that the terms of the immigration debate would remain similar was wrong. But this stuff is hard to predict!

What’s next?

All this is why I try not to make big predictions about the future of politics.

I think one can say very firmly that the odds are not on Democrats’ side in terms of retaining congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms. That’s just a pretty crude extrapolation from the history of midterms, but what else are you going to go with? And then, you can see from the 2024 map, a 50-50 vote split will lead to a Republican trifecta. Heck, a 51-49 vote split will probably lead to a Republican trifecta.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to get a Republican trifecta in 2025; it’s just that we can now see that elections happen on a slanted playing field.

But if that trifecta emerges, what happens next? The honest truth is I have no idea. I think it’s clear from 2018 and 2006 (and even in some ways 1982) that any time Republicans try to actually roll back the welfare state, they provoke a massive backlash. But with a larger majority, they might succeed in doing it anyway. Would success provoke a bigger backlash than failure? Will the next Republican president be even less beholden to free-market ideology than Trump and not even try?

It seems to me that it’s basically impossible to know. So much of contemporary politics is shaped around Republicans continually pursuing an economic policy agenda that isn’t popular — that’s something that hasn’t changed since Teixeira and Judis’ writing. But why shouldn’t it change? And if it did change, does that count as a win for progressives, or will it usher in a new Republican Majority era?

I don’t want anyone to dunk on me in 2035, so I just won’t offer a clear prediction.