Politico Magazine (Opinion)
By Bill Scher
June 21, 2015
Democrats
have been running away from the “liberal” label for a long time, but
recent polling shows that rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly happy
to pin the scarlet
“L” on themselves. It may seem counterintuitive, but the rise in
liberal pride is crucial to liberals building a long-lasting
relationship with moderates and cementing a post-Obama leftward
trajectory.
“Forty-seven
percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now identify
as both socially liberal and economically moderate or liberal,” Gallup’s
Frank Newport
announced on Thursday. That’s up eight points since 2008 and 17 points
since 2001. Earlier this year, the NBC/Wall Street Journal polling team
deduced that 26 percent of voters overall self-identify as “liberal,” a
four point spike since 2011. These new numbers
are in line with longer-term trends: last year Pew found a 26-point
increase since 1994 in “mostly or consistently liberal” Democrats.
As
a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama suggested he wished to emulate Ronald
Reagan in how he “changed the trajectory of America.” Is this surge of
liberal pride evidence
that Obama has succeeded in moving the center of American politics
leftward? Or has Obama, aided and abetted by the Bernie Sanders road
show, unleashed an epidemic of delusion inside America’s deep blue dots?
Former
Bush Administration aide Peter Wehner last month argued in a New York
Times op-ed that Obama moved the Democratic Party too far to the left.
While acknowledging
that the country is more socially liberal, Wehner points to polls
showing Republican edges on the economy and foreign policy. He touts
Republican election wins for the House, Senate and state governments,
staking the claim that “the Republican Party is the
governing party in America” while Obama is falling short of being a
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt-like transformational political figure.”
That’s
too dismissive of the liberal revival. Anyone can cherry-pick polls to
argue that their side is winning the ideological war. Wehner, for
instance, notes that “[s]elf-identified
conservatives significantly outnumber self-identified liberals.” But
that’s not exactly a new development—it has been the case for at least
five decades. And focusing on that data point obscures the fact that,
according to the NBC/WSJ poll, “conservative”
identifiers have tumbled four points since 2014.
Just
comparing “conservative” and “liberal” identification levels leaves out
the big kahuna: the “moderate” plurality. The ultimate question is: are
moderates increasingly
overlapping with liberals, and moving the country left?
On
one hand, throughout Obama’s presidency less than a quarter of
Americans said “they trust the government in Washington always or most
of the time”—ratings that are
at historic lows. And Obama’s biggest liberal policy achievement, the
Affordable Care Act, has long struggled to attain majority support.
Yet
whatever misgivings Americans have about governmental effectiveness,
they aren’t dampening the desire to have government do more things. This
month a CBS/New York
Times poll found that 57 percent want “the government [to] do more to
reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.” Last year a Pew poll
found that 54 percent believe that raising taxes on the wealthy for
government programs would help the poor while only
35 percent bought that “lowering taxes on wealthy people and
corporations in order to encourage more investment and economic growth.”
The
electorate’s internal tug-of-war between distrusting government and
wanting more government comes to a head in this muddled Pew finding from
February: 49 percent believe
“government aid to the poor does more good than harm” and 44 percent
believe the opposite. The left retains the edge, but it is slight.
Still,
there is little evidence as of yet that moderates are punishing
Democrats for moving left. Following the market crash, moderates broke
big for Obama. He won them
by 21 points against McCain and 15 points against Romney. The
conservative poll drops, the solid numbers we see for government action
and the lead Hillary Clinton holds in 2016 trial heats all suggest that
moderates are not running away from their implicit
alliance with the Left, even if other poll numbers remind us that the
alliance is tenuous and not unbreakable.
At
minimum, six years of Obama hasn’t soured America on the idea that
active government can help solve tough problems. But why have voters,
after electing Obama twice,
reversed course in the midterms by giving Republicans more power in
Congress and in the statehouses?
It’s
best to not read too much into the midterm results. They were typical
for a two-term president. As Larry Sabato explained in Politico
Magazine, “Every eight-year
presidency has emptied the benches for the triumphant party.”
This
is even true for our “transformational” presidents. FDR suffered two
horrible midterms, the most painful in 1938 when his attempt to purge
Democrats of conservatives
backfired, leaving him with an anti-New Deal majority that thwarted
additional reforms for the rest of his presidency. Ronald Reagan lost
Republican control of the Senate in 1986, dooming his chance to drive
the Supreme Court farther to the right. (The following
year, the Court added who would become a gay rights hero, Anthony
Kennedy, after the Democratic majority torpedoed Reagan’s first choice,
the consummate conservative Robert Bork.)
Obama
lost the Senate in his second term too. But within that loss were
worrying signs for conservatives that the political center has ticked
left—that for Republicans
to win in swing states, they have to don some liberal trappings.
Most
of the Republican Senate pickups in 2014 were in states that went for
Romney in 2012. Only two were in Obama states: Iowa and Colorado. Joni
Ernst famously won the
Hawkeye State primary by promising to apply hog castration techniques
to the federal budget. But it is important to remember she moderated her
rhetoric on Social Security and abortion for the general election. She
also had the luck of having for her opponent
the worst Senate candidate of the year in Bruce Braley, who couldn’t
live down slamming Iowa’s other Senator as a “farmer from Iowa who never
went to law school.”
Colorado’s
Cory Gardner offers a clearer window into the Republican future. Having
secured the nomination without the hassle of a primary, Gardner offered
Rocky Mountain
voters a moderate face from start to finish, posing in front of wind
turbines, supporting the legalization of undocumented immigrants and
assuring women he supported easy access to birth control—which made
Democratic attacks on his abortion record harder to
land.
Republicans
came up empty in other blue state races they hoped would be
competitive. Scott Brown’s hard right turn on immigration failed to
dislodge Sen. Jeanne Shaheen
in New Hampshire. Terri Lynn Land’s reliance on thin conservative
talking points didn’t get her any traction in Michigan. Republicans may
shrug off these losses as the product of inherently flawed candidates.
But that only strengthens the argument that the
center of gravity has shifted: Republicans need exceptional candidates,
candidates who can adapt to the terrain, in order to compete outside of
Red America.
For
decades, liberals were embarrassed to be liberals. Back in 2004, when a
surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry dismissed
“the label game” on ABC’s
This Week, Sen. Lindsey Graham shot back, “The label game is a result
of how you behave. Call me a conservative … I am. I'm proud of it. I
vote that way … Is there anybody in the Senate who will admit to being
Liberal?”
He spoke a core truth: If you’re not proud of your own beliefs, why would anybody else want to join your team?
Since
then, Barack Obama gave liberals more spring in their step. He stops
short of fully embracing the label, but he forthrightly defends
everything associated with liberalism.
In turn, most Americans consider him a liberal, and still rewarded him
with two-terms.
While
candidates like Michael Dukakis got tongue-tied when confronted with
the L-word, candidate Obama took it in stride. “We know all those old
tricks,” he during a February
2008 rally, assuring Democrats he was ready for the attack. “Oh, well
you know, he's liberal. He's liberal. Let me tell you something. There's
nothing liberal about wanting to reduce the influence of money in
politics … There's nothing liberal about wanting
to make sure that everybody has healthcare.”
While
Bill Clinton dealt with the shadow of Reagan by declaring “the era of
big government is over,” at key moments of Obama’s presidency he has
sought to make the case
for a robust, problem-solving government. At his 2012 Democratic
convention speech he said, “…we have been told by our opponents that
bigger tax cuts and fewer regulations are the only way; that since
government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing
… You know what? That’s not who we are.” For this year’s State of the
Union address, weeks after another midterm loss, he continued to tout
his regulatory approach: “We believed that sensible regulations could
prevent another crisis, shield families from
ruin, and encourage fair competition … we were told … that we would
crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest
economic growth in over a decade…”
With
the relentlessly confident Obama setting the tone, the left has
one-upped Lindsey Graham’s 2004 challenge. There’s now a senator who
admits to being a socialist.
He’s been welcomed by the Democratic Party into the presidential
primary. And it isn’t hurting the party’s standing with the public one
bit. Bernie Sanders may define himself as a socialist, and hold some
positions that wouldn’t fly in a general election campaign—like
single-payer healthcare. But by and large, his populist platform is
seen as enriching the Democratic debate. The Republicans are still the
ones worried that their primary process will yet again be hijacked by
unserious and extreme candidates who will complicate
the party’s attempt to rebrand itself and compete for the middle.
The
new polls are far from the last word on America’s ideological journey,
as conflicting signals abound. Americans are quicker to embrace the
L-word when it comes to
social issues than economic issues. Economic conservatism still
struggles to impress voters who remember the collapse that capped the
George W. Bush presidency, while Americans still seem to be watching the
economy’s slow mend and weighing a final verdict
on Obama’s remedies. What the polls do crystallize is the sense that
American liberals have a newfound confidence. And confidence can be
infectious.
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