it_is_the_light
Gold Member
Offline
Christ Light
Posts: 40948
The Pyramid of LIGHT
Gender:
|
There’s also little evidence that most voters pick a candidate based on policies and that a moderate candidate who wrote campaign talking points to appeal to a broad swath of voters would do significantly better than a more visionary and progressive one. Instead of trying to win back a waning electoral and demographic force, Democrats would be better served to consider what will get voters to the polls. Hillary Clinton’s loss can only be explained by a long list of factors, but surely one of them was apathy: The certainty that she had the election in the bag probably depressed voter turnout.
Contrast that to the 2018 midterms, which had a record-setting turnout — and a record number of women elected. Disgust with the Trump administration surely pushed voters to the polls. But so did a slew of exciting candidates who don’t look like the old models of “electable.” They looked a lot more like the people actually electing them.
Women made record numbers of political contributions in 2018 and, at least anecdotally, dominated campaigns behind the scenes. Mr. Trump’s white working-class base still voted Republican, although in lower numbers than when he triumphed. Women of color, and particularly black women, continued their trend of staunchly supporting Democrats, and turnout among racial minorities hit a high at 28 percent of voters, and 38 percent of voters under 30. A majority of white women with college degrees voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but it was this group that gave Democratic candidates a new advantage in 2018, increasing its support for Democrats over Republicans by 13 percentage points from two years earlier.
In several key states, including Ohio and Florida, white women with college degrees flipped: A majority voted Republican in 2016 and Democratic in 2018. White men, regardless of education, did not. It’s white women, not working-class white men, who are the most promising swing voters for Democrats in 2020, and who could wind up as loyal lifelong Democrats.
Strong turnout among voters of color, a Democratic shift among white voters, and significant flips by college-educated white women all reaped dividends for the women who ran in 2018. Female candidates in the midterms outperformed male ones by a significant margin, on both the left and the right (and the gap was larger with Democratic candidates than Republican ones). In other words, if the 2018 election is any indication, women are more electable than men are — especially, but not only, with Democrats.
History is a limited guide when it comes to who can win. After all, an African-American law professor with limited national political experience and a foreign-sounding name was not exactly the picture of electability; neither was a thrice-married former reality TV star turned accused sexual assailant and verified compulsive tweeter. But both tapped into something alive and hungry in the American electorate.
Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, no force has been greater, bolder, louder and hungrier than women. Beginning with the Women’s March, segueing through the #MeToo movement, and hitting full force with the 2018 midterm women’s wave, women have been the most vibrant and effective political constituency in Trump’s America. Within that group, it is women of color who are the backbone of the Democratic Party.
It is baffling, then, to know all of this and conclude that the most electable candidate is Joe Biden, an older white man tightly associated with sexual harassment and racism, even if he is polling ahead more than a year before the election.
A white male Democrat has not won the White House in more than 20 years; a white male Democrat has not won a majority of American voters since at least the 1970s (and Hillary Clinton, it bears repeating, won a larger share of the electorate than Donald Trump).
Despite all of this — who votes for Democrats, who works for Democrats, who has actually won the White House as a Democrat in the past two decades — many people have surveyed the field and concluded that Joe Biden is the most electable of the bunch. That conclusion does tell us a lot about what we still assume the rightful custodians of power look like. But it doesn’t tell us much about who can actually win in 2020.
|