The Democrats: Leadership Discredited, Party Off Kilter

How does a political party with overwhelming advantages, including increasing support from the growing bloc of highly educated and affluent voters, almost monopoly support from the press and broadcast media, and with burgeoning financial and high-tech sectors of the economy, manage to lose just about everything across the board?

The Biden administration has been repudiated by voters over the inflation that resulted from its heedless spending and open border policy on immigration, and it has been discredited by recent disclosures of former President Joe Biden's incapacity and by Democrats in and outside the White House who concealed and lied about his condition.

Most of what used to be called the mainstream media has also been discredited, long since distrusted by perhaps half of Americans, and now shown to have been incompetent or partisanshiply complicit. The Democratic Party's hopes that President Donald Trump's job approval rating would zoom down toward zero have been temporarily frustrated, as it has risen slightly in May and is higher than at any point in his first term.

To illustrate the pickle Democrats are in, it's helpful to provide a little historical perspective, at least as far back as a dozen years, on the very different political climate following the 2012 election. That saw the third consecutive reelection of an incumbent president, something not seen since 1820.

The respected Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg argued that Democrats' increased support from college graduates, plus huge margins from Blacks, Hispanics and young people, would form a "coalition of the ascendant" dominant for years to come.

Greenberg was right about trends up to that point. However, he failed to account for the Newtonian law that says for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. His coalition spurred a coalition of the nonascendant. White non-college-educated people living outside million-dollar-plus metropolitan areas spurned Democrats and elected Trump over Hillary Clinton. A similar coalition in Britain produced the unexpected victory for Brexit five months before.

By 2024, after one term each from Trump and Biden, that movement continued, including among non-college-educated Hispanics, Asians and Blacks. Figures compiled by the Democratic firm Catalist and spotlighted by Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini showed Republicans gaining 36 points among Latinos aged 18 to 29, 33 points among Black men, and 30 points among non-college-educated Asians between 2012 and 2024.

In the process, the Democratic Party has become increasingly dominated by white college-educated people, who reliably turn out to vote, contribute lots of money and have poor judgment about what matters will appeal to majorities of the entire electorate. As the financial adviser Dave Ramsey put it, "The hardest people to convince to use common sense are the smart people."

High-education voters, repelled by Trump's crudeness, provided the enthusiasm behind the Russia collusion hoax and the various lawfare prosecutions and attempts to remove Trump from office somehow. They provided the impetus behind the flawed "science" to extend school closings and other undue COVID-19 restrictions.

After George Floyd's death in May 2020, they gave support or silent acquiescence to radical calls for defunding the police, to reparations for descendants of slaves, and to continued racial quotas and preferences -- all positions opposed by large majorities of voters. Biden, having secured the nomination after winning the majority-Black South Carolina primary, felt obliged to name a Black woman for vice president, although the party nominated a Black presidential candidate twice in the previous three contests.

In a process described by Greg Schultz, manager of Biden's 2020 primary campaign, the voters and officeholders of what he called "the (mostly) safe middle" of the party have embraced or accepted policies advocated by "the (much smaller) far left," but that actively repel "the majority-makes" whose votes Democratic candidates need to win.

That didn't happen when "the (mostly) safe middle" was typified by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg's non-college-educated housewife from Dayton married to a machinist. However, it has happened now that the voter looks like the college-educated professional woman married to a lawyer in the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia.

You can see how this works out on controversial transgender matters. College-educated Democrats, noting the public majorities favoring same-sex marriage, have enthusiastically backed stands supported by transgender advocates and expressed scorn for the few elected Democrats opposing them. They have failed to reflect that it took 22 years from Andrew Sullivan's 1989 New Republic article advocating same-sex marriage to the first Gallup poll showing a national majority in favor.

Those two decades included partisan and civil arguments from Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch that marriage would consensitize gays and need not affect others, just as standard wedding etiquette allows you to decline an invitation without giving a reason or a gift.

In contrast, transgender activists impinge on others. They insist that inevitably more muscular biological men must compete in female sports, and they pummel the rare Democrat, such as Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), when they question that. As transgender demands have become better known, they have lost support, as Pew Research reported.

Most voters are motivated by concrete concerns -- direct economic interests and ethnic or racial concerns. College-educated voters tend to have more theoretical concerns. Sometimes they may alert others to injustice and persuade them to address it, such as supporters of equal rights for Blacks. The danger is that their high regard for their own views leads them to take impolitic stands, such as former Vice President Kamala Harris' support of government-paid transgender surgeries for prisoners and illegal immigrants.

Every political party must strike some balance between the demands of its core constituencies and the beliefs of voters. That's hard for a party dominated by college-educated activists with theoretical rather than practical concerns. The Democratic Party today, with its discredited leadership and its college-educated core, seems badly off kilter.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.