If the Blue Wave collapses before it hits shore, Democrats may need to ask whether #MeToo and other forms of identity politics are really the wave of the Democratic future.
Democrats have been waiting for that wave to crest for a long time, at least since the 2002 publication of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book’s modest thesis suggested that demographic trends would increase traditional Democratic constituencies while slowly shrinking the GOP’s base, as long as Democrats could find a way to hold their then-current coalition together.
By 2016, many saw that as prophecy: All they needed to do was wait for the GOP’s atavistic denizens to die off, leaving the country to those on the right side of history.
Yet salvation keeps failing to arrive. We now have the most diverse electorate in American history. If the strong version of the EDM thesis were correct, not even gerrymandering, voter suppression and untimely FBI announcements would have handed Republicans enough power to tip the electoral college in their favor. The prophecy failed. And still, a whole lot of folks seem to be waiting for history to vindicate them.
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