The Identity Crisis Facing Both Republicans and Democrats

By Gerald F. Seib (WSJ)

Updated Feb. 25, 2019 11:36 a.m. ET

 

Voter shifts are causing ideological and policy whiplash

Sometimes the most momentous shifts in American life happen in plain sight, but in such slow motion that they aren’t fully appreciated until complete.

Such a shift is happening right now with the country’s two major political parties. Both Republicans and Democrats are in the midst of—and in fact, may be near the end of—significant realignments that are altering who they are and what they stand for.

This realignment was on display in the results of both the 2016 and 2018 elections. Yet, as we’re seeing in the current policy debates in Washington, the parties haven’t caught up with their own new realities. In fact, they are facing a kind of identity crisis, in which they are pushing policy prescriptions that aren’t really in tune with their changed rank-and-file membership.

The Democrats, once the party seen, at least in stereotype, as the home of lunch-pail, working-class union members in the Rust Belt, now are a party dominated by higher-educated, higher-income voters, particularly women, on the coasts, combined with progressive young voters and minorities.

And the Republicans, once the party seen in stereotype as the party of the country club and the Chamber of Commerce, now are dominated by working-class and middle-class Americans, particularly men, as well as older citizens in exurban, small-town and rural America.

This shift is well illustrated by two groups my Journal colleagues have been tracking closely in recent years: college-educated white women, and men without a college degree. In the 1990s, these two groups voted almost identically: They were just right of center, almost in the middle of the political and ideological spectrum.

Now they have veered off in dramatically different directions. Last fall, college-educated white women favored Democrats in House races by 33 percentage points, while white men without a college degree favored Republicans by 42 points. These two groups also are rough proxies for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voters in the 2016 presidential elections.

As the rank-and-file has shifted, so has the geographical center of the two parties. Among Republicans, New York liberals and California conservatives once coexisted as powerful internal blocs. Indeed, since World War II, Republicans five times picked a presidential nominee from California (Richard Nixon three times, Ronald Reagan twice), and had a serious California contender as late as 1996 in former Gov. Pete Wilson. Twice they chose New York’s Thomas Dewey.

Now California and New York rarely produce a Republican candidate who can win statewide, much less lead the party nationally. The party is weak on the two coasts, and is centered in the interior of the country.

Democrats, meanwhile, regularly nominated presidential candidates from the heartland and the South—Missouri’s Harry Truman, Texas’ Lyndon Johnson, South Dakota’s George McGovern, Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, Arkansas’ Bill Clinton, Tennessee’s Al Gore. Each of those states has since turned Republican red.

The problem for the two parties is that these changes are creating some ideological and policy whiplash. Republicans, traditionally dominated by business interests, used to be the party of free trade and open movement of workers across borders. But the new, middle-America Republican party under President Trump has become the party of tariffs and border walls.

And when the core of the party is older, working-class Americans, can Republicans really advocate cutting entitlements, as former House Speaker Paul Ryan did in the wake of a big tax cut?

And for Democrats, can the party that increasingly represents wealthier Americans really be the party that stands for a 70% top tax rate and an across-the-board wealth tax on the most well-heeled? And can the party that considers climate change an existential threat really speak to the coal miners and auto workers that used to form part of its core constituency?

A lot of this realignment is captured in the immigration issue. To vastly overgeneralize, Democrats are the party that embraces diversity. Republicans are the party that fears diversity is changing the face and the economy of America in harmful ways.

Mr. Trump, better than most, has understood the change within his own party, while also accelerating it. The new GOP is, for now at least, the party of Trump.

For their part, Democrats have some tough choices: Do they pursue a more moderate policy path that tries to meld the impulses of the old Rust Belt version of their party with the new coastal and millennial sentiments? A couple of presidential contenders—Sens. Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar—are trying to do that. Others—Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker—play more to the new, progressive, millennial version of the party.

Footnote: The odd constituency out in the realigned world may be the business community, which now finds neither party particularly in sync with its free-market view of the world.

MORE

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Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com