One of the most important trends in American politics over the last three decades has been the ongoing alienation and disenchantment of working-class (non-college-educated) voters from the Democratic Party and their move to the Republican Party. This trend began well before Donald Trump emerged as an unlikely but surprisingly credible spokesperson for working-class voters' interests and concerns. The Democrats long ago lost the support of a majority of white working-class voters, and now, by using the same strategy by which they won the white working class – appeals to cultural conservatism and often outright racism – Republicans are beginning to peel away support among working-class voters of color as well. This is yet another factor complicating the Democrats' chances in 2024 and Joe Biden's ability to remain President in the face of an aggressive, no-holds-barred challenge from Donald Trump. Political scientist and analyst Ruy Texeira appeared on CNN's Inside Politics program with host Dana Bash to discuss this on December 30, 2023.
Ruy Texeira on Democrats’ Losing the Working Class, CNN, December 30, 2023
Dana Bash: More than 20 years ago, two political scholars [John Judis and Ruy Texeira] argued that the Democratic Party’s coalition would control politics. And for a little while, it looked like they might be right. A left-of-center party with a diverse base elected Barack Obama as the first Black president in 2008 and won control of the House and Senate. But then the election of President Donald Trump upended some of those early-2000’s theories. So the question is, what changed? What went wrong with the Democrats with those predictions. And one of the experts and co-authors of a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Ruy Texeira, joins us now.
Thank you very much for coming in. So you point to two factions in the Democratic Party, what you call the “shadow party” of activists, and then the Silicon Valley and the Wall Street types. Can you explain these two factions, and how you think that they are actually problems for the Democratic Party?
Ruy Texeira: Sure. The way I think about it, Dana, is the Democratic Party in the broad sweep of the last 50 years has said a kind of a long goodbye to the working class. There’s a great divide that’s opened up economically and culturally between the working class and the college-educated in the last part of the 20th century. And like we saw the white working class move away from the Democrats in a big way. And then in the 21st century, we saw increased movement of the white working class away from the Democrats, and a sort of cultural identification of the Democrats with basically the sort of college-educated liberal-ish, and in many ways almost radical views on race, gender, crime, immigration and so on.
So the result of this is a movement of the working class en masse away from the Democrats. Now in 2016 Democrats thought, “Well, O.K., the white working class bailed out on us. But why did they do that? Because Trump is a racist, and we can’t reach these voters anyway, so who cares?” basically. But then the thing that happened – O.K., they lost the Presidency – but in 2020 we see non-white, especially Hispanic, working-class voters moving away from the Democrats. We still see that today in all the polling.
So in fact, if you really count the noses of who supports whom in this country, the Republicans are now the party of the working class. They get more working-class votes than the Democrats do. And if you look at any given poll, the Democrats will be up by about 10 to 15 points among college-educated voters and down 10 to 15 points among working-class voters. That’s a huge change, and it represents a party that is more dominated by these college-educated voters, elites. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood.
I mean, there’s a whole identification of the Democratic Party with a group of institutions – activists, foundations, academia, you name it – that all push the Democrats in a direction that’s away from the priorities and the culture of working-class voters. And that now shows in the polls.
Dana Bash: You also write about immigration.
Ruy Texeira: Right.
Dana Bash: You and your colleague John Judis wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, “While Republicans would eventually make opposition to illegal immigration their signature issue, Democrats went in the opposite direction – supported, surprisingly, by labor unions. The AFL-CIO’s abandonment of employer verification and sanctions undercut any attempt by the Democratic Party to stop illegal immigration, and soon Democratic activists became unwilling even to debate the issue.”
Ruy Texeira: That’s right. I mean, most Democrats don’t know this anymore, or if they knew it they’ve forgotten it. But Democrats were once the party that stood for controlling immigration. The Jordan Commission in the 1980’s basically was oriented to trying to damp down the level of immigration and having an E-Verify system so employers couldn’t employ illegal immigrants. And there was a sense that high levels of immigration basically constrict and constrain the low-wage labor market and undercut unionization.
But that really disappeared in the late 1990’s, and now in the 21st century you see Democrats identified, not exactly with open borders, but pretty porous borders and a lack of concern, as it were, with border security. And we see this in the Biden administration’s campaign, and we also see it – and this is very important, politically, right now – the Republicans and the Democrats are trying to cut a deal on tightening up border security –
Dana Bash: Yes.
Ruy Texeira: – versus Israel and Ukraine funding. They’ve had an incredible amount of difficulty doing this because Democrats – there’s a big faction of the party that does not want to compromise in any way on border security, because they feel border security is kind of like racism.
Dana Bash: Well –
Ruy Texeira: And that’s a problem.
Dana Bash: Yeah. I mean, the other issue is it’s not just border security. They’re trying to significantly overhaul some of the key asylum laws.
Ruy Texeira: Right. Well, that’s how you can tighten it up. By – because the asylum system is huge, in terms of the immigration problem.
Dana Bash: I just want to show our viewers some data –
Ruy Texeira: O.K.
Dana Bash: [Showed graph that displayed the percentage of white voters without college degrees that went for various Democratic Presidential candidates since 1992:
Bill Clinton, 1992: 39 percent
Bill Clinton, 1996: 44 percent
Al Gore, 2000: 40 percent
John Kerry, 2004: 38 percent
Barack Obama, 2008: 40 percent
Barack Obama, 2012: 36 percent
Hillary Clinton, 2016: 29 percent
Joe Biden, 2020: 32 percent]
– of how white voters went starting in 1992 through 2020. And the voters we’re talking about here are the ones that you write about: non-college-educated white voters. If you look at the data, in 1992 Bill Clinton, 39 percent. It makes your point that it was already a majority for Republicans. It hasn’t changed that much. Probably the low mark was iin 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, and it was up slightly in 2020. So it hasn’t – when you look at the coalition in and around Barack Obama, it hasn’t changed that dramatically since then, except around the margins.
Ruy Texeira: Well, one thing to note about the [Bill] Clinton vote is he actually carried the white working-class vote, because there were so many votes for [independent candidate H. Ross] Perot. So he actually carried the working class –
Dana Bash: Bill Clinton.
Ruy Texeira: He carried the white working-class vote in 1992 and 1996 by a point or two. So in a way, one way to think about what’s happened is that the heavily working-class Perot vote, on the Presidential level, which was for a third-party candidate, moved over time into the Republican camp en masse. And that’s not just at the Presidential level, but also a lot of Congressional seats and particularly a lot of Senate seats, where the Democrats are no longer competitive in a lot of these states. So that’s a lot about what happened to the Democratic coalition between the 1990’s and today.
And again, as I’m pointing out, in 2020 and now we see this movement of the non-white working class away from the Democrats as well. So you do see this coalition shifting, again, where Republicans are more of a working-class party than the Democrats. And that’s such a change from the historic image and practice of the Democratic Party in terms of politics today, I think.
Dana Bash: Yes, it’s definitely not FDR’s Democratic Party.
Ruy Texeira: It’s not his party anymore, and it’s not your father’s Democratic Party. It’s different. The question is, how competitive is it? Can the Democrats get where they want to go with this coalition?
Dana Bash: We’ve got to end this show now. We appreciate your coming – come back and we’ll discuss what the solutions are for the Democratic Party.
Ruy Texeira: I’d love to.
