The Democratic Coalition Isn’t Really a Coalition
And why that’s actually a big problem.
Calling the Democratic Party a “coalition” is a venerable cliché of Democratic political life. But in recent years, it has basically become an empty one. The party’s working-class support has so markedly declined that Democrats largely have stopped describing the party as a “big tent coalition.” However, the notion that the party is nonetheless a coalition remains common.
As the 2024 election approaches, it’s time to stop and face the reality. The Democratic Party doesn’t act like a coalition, it doesn’t think like a coalition, and it sure as heck doesn’t try to assemble a majority like a coalition.
To see why, consider how an actual Democratic coalition would work:
During the primaries, the process would be largely like what occurs today. Candidates for Congress and the presidency would compete while major political issue groups would offer support to the candidates who support their particular perspectives and agendas.
As the likely winners and their margins of victory become clear, however, all the major candidates and issue groups would begin intense and serious negotiations over the party platform. These negotiations would be taken very seriously by all the participants because it would be understood that the platform will become the “consensus program” or “governing agenda” Democrats will campaign on in the fall and candidates will promise to support if they are elected. At the presidential level these negotiations will also be the basis for an understanding about the way government positions in the new administrations will be allocated (a distribution generally based on the relative vote share the different primary candidates have received). The major issue groups would continue to uphold their “long term agenda” but would also sincerely agree to support a Democratic administration that bases itself on the coalition platform.
At the convention where the Democratic agenda is unveiled, all the major candidates for president and congress would stand on the stage together linking their arms and holding the agenda in their hands in a dramatic visual assertion of unity around their program.
The agenda and the image of Democratic unity would then be used as the basis for the billions of dollars inevitably invested in the fall advertising campaigns and would be explained to the press as the agenda that the Democrats will govern on if elected. This approach will provide a far clearer understanding of the actual Democratic position than the usual “every man for himself” strategy in which each individual Democratic candidate attempts to define his own unique platform and agenda against inevitable Republican attacks.
The vast majority of Democratic candidates will support the platform and those that don’t will clearly state their points of departure from its agenda.
A coalition divided against itself cannot stand
Just describing this process indicates how profoundly far the modern Democratic Party is from being an actual “coalition.” Today, most Democratic candidates try to define their own specific personal platforms and agendas. As a result, the term “Democrat” is reduced to a generic label with vague historical connotations and not the name for a firm political coalition to which they belong.
In many cases today the main effort of many major political issue groups is actually to defeat other Democrats who do not endorse their long-term agenda and perspective rather than on recruiting new voters to a broad Democratic coalition.
As Tom Edsall noted in a New York Times column:
I asked Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution [the political action committee of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)], if the organization had flipped any House seats from red to blue. He replied by email: “This was not the goal of Our Revolution. Our Revolution’s goal in the 2022 elections was to push the Democratic Caucus in a progressive direction…” Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, emailed in response to a similar inquiry of mine that his group does not focus on shifting seats from red to blue: “We haven’t really run races in those areas. We’ve been focused on blue seats where the incumbent is corporate-backed and out of touch with their district.”
In developing a common program, moreover, presidential candidates do not systematically include input from all the major voting blocs in the Democratic Party. In 2020, for instance, Joe Biden engaged in extensive negotiations with the groups who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries—but not with other major groups in the Democratic coalition.
As a CNN report noted at the time:
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign on Wednesday released a draft of policy recommendations crafted by allies of the former vice president and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The 110-page document is the product of weeks of negotiations between six- and eight-person “Unity Task Forces” appointed by Biden and Sanders, the former vice president’s longest-lasting rival in the Democratic presidential primary. The task forces drafted a joint approach to climate change, criminal justice, the economy, education, health care and immigration.
No negotiations of comparable scope were conducted with any other elements of the Democratic coalition.
This approach was reflected in the 2020 party platform in a way that represented a fundamental change from the past. To be able to assemble a majority coalition, a party must be willing to accept a range of opinions among the groups that it attempts to unite under its banner. This is, in fact, precisely what distinguishes a party seeking to create a broad political coalition from a political party that requires all its supporters to back a clear and specific program and ideology.
The Democratic Party traditionally recognized and accepted the need to accommodate a substantial range of views within its coalition. This was most clear on the issue of abortion, where many Democratic candidates—particularly Catholic Democrats—maintained their personal moral and religious objections to abortion but also accepted that they did not have the right to demand that all other Democrats accept their personal views.
In recent years, however, this approach has become increasingly replaced by the concept of “litmus tests” established by political issue groups. These groups outline explicit ideological positions that Democratic candidates must endorse in order to receive a group’s support. Today a wide range of issue organizations, think tanks, and other components of the Democratic political infrastructure—the interlocking network that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis define as the "shadow party" in their recent book Where Have all the Democrats Gone?—demand that candidates endorse specific positions on social issues ranging from the environment and immigration to crime, racial equity and anti-racism, transgender issues, and others.
As a result of this change, a sharply restricted range of views were included in the 2020 Democratic platform.
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