Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy

Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand

Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.

If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades. 

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.

Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections. 

In building their new multi-racial coalition Democrats reasonably turned to something called identity politics. Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class.

I say “reasonably” because as the new Democratic Party became a multi-racial coalition hyper-focused on gaining civil rights for marginalized groups, the ensuing decades produced technology ever more capable of allowing Democrats to speak very specifically (micro-target) to various component parts of their coalition. They were representing new constituencies and in 2008, such a strategy seemed to work.

Fast Forward to 2022

In 2022 I had a meeting with unnamed DCCC officials to discuss their strategy going into the midterms. As I thought they might, the DCCC folks had developed a complex strategy full of microtargeting identity politics.

When I told them that was the exact opposite of what we need to do, they looked like I asked them to eat a piece of poo.

Why? Because by suggesting the party’s strategy should be structured around one universal branding theme deployed across various constituencies in the Democratic Party’s base I was suggesting, in their eyes, that we “throw marginalized groups under the bus” by not wanting to run identity politics ads.

That is why I focused part of my 2024 book trying to explain that what matters for marginalized groups is policy, and that policy only comes from power. The way to represent marginalized groups is by wielding the power to represent them in majorities, not by identity politics in campaigns. 

Donald Trump just accomplished the same thing by focusing most of his ads on scary trans people and the data don’t lie, millions of ads repeating the sex changes for prisoners broke through.

We did not centralize our messaging, as I showed you in last week’s update.

Ok, all of that background was to set up this graph. 👇

This one graph tells us exactly why Democrats lost.

First and foremost, it tells us that the Democratic Party has a brand and that brand is “they stand up for marginalized groups.”

Now, that’s a great brand to have if you’re like me, an ideological liberal who cares deeply about the rights of the powerless!!

The issue is just about a quarter of the electorate is liberal and psychologically predisposed to care about marginalized groups.

The rest of the electorate doesn’t get the warm fuzzies we get from marginalized groups, because most humans are hardwired to prefer in groups over out groups and Republican strategists have exploited this expertly.

Now, let's focus on the time window on the graph. As you can see, the Democrats used to have a massive advantage with the working class which began to erode around the same time of the Reagan Revolution and round two of Nixon’s Southern strategy.

Please keep in mind, the erosion also corresponds with the diversification of America both in terms of ethnicity and gender and reflects in part the backlash to civil rights!

But there is another important lesson. The same three decades where people stopped seeing Democrats as the party of the working class are the exact same three decades Republicans launched economic war on them.

Can a party of union-busters financed by industry and bankers “represent the working class?”

Apparently so, as long as they distract them enough from the economic warfare they are conducting against them by leveraging new technology to construct grievance politics as a backlash to our identity politics strategy.

And it doesn’t just work on White people, folks! Today’s working class are NOT the working class of the 1940s or even the 1960s. 

If we are lucky enough to get another election in this country, the messaging must focus on telling America the story of what happened to all their money, their rural communities, their paychecks, and their health under Republican Party governance.

Keep in mind the pocketbook deliverables Democrats brought to working class and middle class Americans over the same time period

A short sample:

Bankruptcy reform

Minimum Wage increases in Blue states

Card card APR reform

Student loan reform

Medicare Part D

The Affordable Care Act

Not to mention keeping millions of people from becoming homeless in the pandemic with the foreclosure and eviction freezes, something Republicans would have cut early in 2021.

Of course, as I explain ad nauseum to you my constant readers, voters have no idea these things happened, let alone why it happened and who tried to stop it from happening: the Republican Party. And they will never know if we don’t tell the story:

When it comes to economic policy for working Americans, Democrats deliver and Republicans just don’t. 

We must make the GOP’s brand the party at war with working America.

That is the story America needs us to tell them if we get the chance.