Democratic Party insiders experienced the election as something more like a defeat than a victory. The narrowness of his win against Trump — and the unexpected losses absorbed by Democrats running for Congress — brought into the open complaints that had been only whispered before. A postelection autopsy by a trio of Democratic-aligned groups found that congressional candidates suffered damage with voters who believed their party supported socialism or defunding the police.
Yet while most of the official Democratic Party — meaning its elected officials and paid staffers — now agrees that it erred by allowing its brand to be associated with unpopular left-wing ideas, many progressives remain loath to concede the point, noting that the Democrats got their old white moderate and still only managed to eke out a win against a historically unpopular incumbent. Their most common pushback, now as then, is to treat the argument that Democrats need to cater to political moderates as an endorsement of white power. Will Stancil, a progressive researcher and popular left-wing social-media personality, has dismissed calls for heeding public opinion as “a tool for moderate white dudes to argue in defense of the old consensus that moderate white dudes have the most pragmatic politics.” Taifa Smith Butler, president of the progressive think tank Demos, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein that Democrats should focus on “marginalized communities,” rather than “continuing to try to appease white moderates.” The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. argued, “The idea of White appeasement is certainly not new, even if it is often not acknowledged directly or referred to with a pejorative such as ‘appeasement’ — the term ‘electability’ is often invoked instead, obscuring that the swing voters at issue are almost all White.”
The grim irony is that, in attempting to court non-white voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.
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