Democrats are still center-left. They’ll stay there if they want to win.

Galston looks at ideology among self-identified Democrats over a six-year period — 2013 to 2018 — and compares it with self-identified Democrats about 20 years ago, at the start of the century. The big movement to the left occurred primarily among white Democrats: In recent years, 54 percent of white Democrats identify as liberals — that’s up from 34 percent of white Democrats from 2001 to 2006. For blacks and Hispanics, however, the story is very different. A large share of black Democrats and Hispanic Democrats (40 percent and 36 percent, respectively) identify as moderates. And while self-identified conservatives make up the smallest part of Democratic voters, 24 percent of black Democrats and 23 percent of Hispanic Democrats identify as conservatives, compared with only 12 percent of white Democrats. These findings are especially significant given that black voters are a large and powerful segment of the Democratic vote — especially in primaries, which have lower turnout than general elections.

A second word of caution about the party’s supposed leftward tilt comes from a study of candidates in the 2018 primaries that I co-authored with Alex Podkul. We saw an outpouring of enthusiasm on the left that resulted in a substantial upsurge in candidates running in Democratic primaries as progressives. But they tended not to win. Establishment Democrats won 35 percent of their primaries, while progressives won 26.6 percent of their primaries.