What's Tony Thinking

Are the Dem’s Listening?

After being elected as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee in February Ken Martin said, “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In other words, we need to get voters to listen to us. Really? Or could it be that it is the Democrats who need to be doing some listening?

At this point, the party finds itself with its lowest approval rating since 1968, at 27%. Sure, our blue district Congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal, can round up a crowd in Seattle to cheer her calls to The Resistance.

But a better use of time might be a hard look at how people actually voted in 2024. A careful analysis of the vote is on offer at Ezra Klein’s recent podcast with pollster David Shor, titled “Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won.”

Among other things, Shor’s analysis shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, a higher voter turnout does not favor Democrats. Had there been a higher turnout, Trump would have won by a significantly higher percentage, nearly 5%. Another enduring Democratic Party assumption has been that they have a lock on people of color and on the young. Neither is true. Ideology is proving more important than racial or ethnic identity, which suggests that saying those who voted Republican, or any one who questions Democratic Party orthodoxy, is presumptively “racist” may not be the best move.

Beyond a come-to-Jesus moment in relation to voter data, there are a host of liberal/ progressives who are offering important new ideas for what Democrat’s need to be about going forward. Instead of “say it again louder” as Martin seems to suggest, or stand pat (“I wouldn’t change anything”) as Kamala Harris chose to do, a new message and agenda are required.

Let me recommend a couple of things I’ve been reading and listening to of late from people who think the Democrats and fellow liberal/ progressives have had some key things wrong.

One of the very best is David Leonhardt’s recent article in the New York Times Magazine on how the Social Democrats of Denmark have faced up to immigration, and what this means for a party that cares about working people. It might seem curious to make my number one recommendation for rethinking the Democratic agenda an article about Denmark and immigration, but Leonhardt opens eyes on similar challenges in the U.S. (There is an audio option if you prefer to listen to Leonhardt’s article.)

Beyond immigration, a second issue is affordable housing and its impact on social mobility. Social mobility was once a key characteristic of the U.S. and a driver of prosperity. But now, according to Yoni Applebaum in an article at The Atlantic “How Progressives Froze The American Dream,”  social mobility has ground to a near halt. He expands on the theme in his book, Stuck: How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. 

In line with the title of his article, Applebaum notes the irony: “Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.”

No one is offering more prods for fresh thinking for a Democratic and liberal agenda than Ezra Klein. Along with his co-author, Derek Thompson, Klein is just out with, Abundance: What Progress Takes. Like Applebaum, they focus a good deal on how zoning laws and environmental review requirements have become tools preventing building much of anything (e.g. hi-speed rail), and in particular building affordable housing. Moreover, as liberals who believe in government, they ask, why can’t government get stuff built? Lots of money was appropriated for public works during the Biden administration, but almost nothing actually got built. What happened?

Thompson and Klein argue that while conservatives attack government, liberals have been defending a government that doesn’t work. They advocate an “Abundance Agenda” at the heart of progressive politics. You can get a podcast with them from The Free Press where Bari Weiss asks, “Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?”

One sub-plot here is that wealthier, often politically liberal people have fostered systems that, while serving their interests, have been blind to other not so well-off Americans, namely, the non-college educated working class and much of the middle class that now finds itself stuck or priced out of cities where they grew up or where they might like to live and work.

The Democratic Party has come to represent a wealthy elite, one that is focused on issues of racial, ethnic, sexual and gender identity. It’s not that these aren’t important. But they aren’t the only important thing. And for many Americans they are the issues that are nowhere near the front burner.

Many voters have different issues, different priorities: jobs, affordable housing, social disorder, uncontrolled immigration and a government that works. Do the Dem’s have a marketing problem, a problem of getting people to listen to them? It’s deeper than that. They are one’s who need to be doing the listening.