The one-hundred million who do not vote do not lean significantly to the left. Some simply do not care about politics. Moving the political agenda to the left, especially when it comes to social issues, is not a recipe for the Democrats to mobilize and win.
Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost the 2024 elections because they moved too far to the right when they should have moved to the left. This is the lesson some will draw from the election, including Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, her supporters, and many who represent a wing of Minneapolis politics. Yet Yiscah Bracha’s analysis of Omar’s electoral performance points to how she has underperformed compared to other DFL candidates in the state, challenging this basic premise.
Bracha’s analysis is provocative. It brings into focus an important empirical question about the future of the Democratic Party nationally, in Minnesota, and Minneapolis. Some contend that were the Democratic party to move to the left it would activate a base of non-voters who would push the Democratic Party and American politics in a progressive direction. But is that true? As Democrats contemplate their party’s future and with the pending 2025 Minneapolis elections, it is worth exploring this question.
The Democratic Party had a close but bad year in the 2024 elections. Close in that Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump by 1.5% points in the national popular vote—the narrowest margin in decades. Had Harris won 230,000 more votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin she would have scored an electoral college victory. More voters cast ballots for Democratic US Senate candidates than for Republicans and flip less than 10,000 votes in three congressional races and the Democrats have control of the House. In Minnesota a handful of votes in a few House races and the DFL would maintain their trifecta.
But the results were bad. According to exit polls, for the first time in nearly one-hundred years the Democrats are a third-party preference among voters with those casting a ballot self-identifying as Republicans (35%), Independents (34%), and then as Democrats (31%). Harris lost to Trump among voters who identified themselves with incomes of less than $100,000 and without college degrees. She lost support among persons of color. Polls suggested rightward shifts among voters nationwide, including Hennepin County. In Minnesota, out of the eighty-seven counties, Harris-Walz only won nine, down from thirteen in 2020. Even Senator Klobuchar saw erosion in her margins for reelection.
Harris only won the majority among the college-educated affluent. The Democrats have become the party of elite whites. (See my companion article with more 2024 election statistics).
But these losses are proof to some that running to the left is the solution. Nationally and in Minnesota the issue was not that Trump and Republicans received so many more votes it was that the Democrats received less. In 2024 Harris receive 6.2 million votes than Biden in 2020 in an election and where the overall 2024 turnout and percentage was lower than 2020.
But what if the Democrats were to move to the left, would that attract a cohort of new and more progressive voters? The answer is nuanced.
Political scientists have studied voting and voting behavior for more than seventy years. Books such as The American Voter, The American Voter Revisited, and The New American Voter describe who votes and why. We know that barely half of those eligible to vote do so, with the profile of the typical voter skewed in favor of those who are more affluent, older, white, and better educated. Generally, the poor, younger, persons of color and less educated do not vote. Some see a clear demographic bias in the electorate, favoring a more conservative political agenda. Run to the left, campaign on racial or other identity issues, and this will bring in new voters.
Yet there is mixed evidence that were non-voters to vote, they would do so uniformly from the left. Wolfinger and Rosenstone did one of the most important studies of the non-voter. Their conclusion was that the non-voter differed little ideologically or policy-wise compared to voters. Others such as Leighley and Nagler found some differences, especially in terms of how non-voters seemed more supportive of economic issues such as more support for the poor.
The Untold Story of the American Non-Voter is perhaps the best report ever on who opts not to vote. There were many reasons why one-hundred million individuals do not vote, including not liking the candidates, feeling their votes do not matter, or that the political system was corrupt. But when surveyed in more detail, two interesting facts emerge. One, there are many different types of non-voters, of which twenty-one percent could be classified as traditional progressives, seventeen percentage traditional conservatives, twenty percent moderates, with the rest fitting into some category of moderation. Second, their policy positions on a range of issues are not far from that of voters when it comes to social issues, but there is more evidence of differences when it again comes to some economic matters.
The one-hundred million who do not vote do not lean significantly to the left. Some simply do not care about politics. Moving the political agenda to the left, especially when it comes to social issues, is not a recipe for the Democrats to mobilize and win. These non-voters simply lack the social capital, skill sets, or interest in voting. Non-voters distribute their political preferences along the same ideological dimension as do current voters. For the sake of democracy and voice we should find ways to encourage them to vote, but they do not represent a consistent and vast progressive wing of voters.
Why is all this important? It brings us back to Yiscah Bracha’s analysis of Omar’s electoral performance and Minneapolis politics. Ever since Judis and Teixeira’s 2004 book The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that changing racial and other demographics were the key to future Democratic Party success, the mantra of “demographics is destiny” has driven politics within the party, replacing traditional issues based on economics, class, and law and order as primary issues. But as the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections demonstrated, and Bracha’s study shows, this demographics agenda is failing even in Omar’s district to give her more votes than other Democrats.
Minneapolis is not Minnesota or the United States. It may on average be more to the left than the state or the country. But the evidence does not show that the electorate here is moving to the left, at least as it is currently being defined or advocated by Omar. There is little evidence to show that shifting in that direction will mobilize new voters, alter the ideological landscape, and shift policy preferences to the left. It is entirely possible that again in 2025 a collection of Minneapolis candidates supporting identity issues will win. Yet if Bracha’s argument is correct, they will do so with a suppressed turnout, potentially setting up in Minneapolis the same results the Democrats experienced nationally and in the state in 2024.
What exactly is meant by “moving to the left” here is a little vague. While there’s some hints, like “campaign[ing] on racial or other identity issues,” this definition of “left” is a very subjective and constricted idea of what leftist politics are. Ideas on the economic left, such as higher effective tax rates for the very wealthiest, improved funding for services like schools, state-funded higher education, the desire of more people to have the right to organize with their co-workers, and universal single-payer healthcare are wildly popular with voters. You don’t have to take my word for it, go look at just about any independent (not a right-wing “think”/propaganda tank) poll. Should the Dems spend more time focusing on niche identity politics and welfare? No, probably not. Should they “move left” on economic issues that most people in the country have repeatedly said they want for decades now? Definitely.
Mike Hogan – I think that we could probably agree on a political spectrum of how much government intervention there should be that would look like this:
• Communism: Full government control of all aspects of the economy and extreme intervention in people’s lives.
• Socialism: Substantial governmental intervention in the economy, including government ownership or regulation of whole industries. Substantial involvement in people’s lives. And note that the Scandinavian countries are not socialist but fiercely capitalist. That is how they fund their extensive welfare state.
• Moderate Democrats/Moderate Conservatives: Moderate government intervention in the economy and people’s lives, with the fight mostly over degrees of intervention.
• Libertarianism: Extremely limited government intervention, with government mostly national defense, public safety, and enforcement of contracts.
• Anarchy: No government intervention in anything.
With the funding of the Roof Depot project and its “community ownership” model, the Labor Standards Board, the $130K to the MayDay Cafe to become worker-owned, and many other examples, it is easy to see how we are much closer to socialist than moderate. These things would not have been thinkable under a moderate council.
I’ll be contrarian to the other responders – no the Democratic Party lost the popular flow of the election. Going further “left” (more support for fringe issues and social benefits) is not a winnable program. The middle voter works hard, pays taxes, wants safety, and wants a realistic vision of the future. I’m not cold-hearted, however the fringe issues will force me (and others) to likely vote Republican if the approach doesn’t change. I voted for Harris, but had no enthusiasm in doing so. Bring on the enthusiastic, growth and opportunity focus.
Professor,
If the discussion we need to have is “Should the Dems run more to the left than they have done lately, or more to the center?”, then I mostly agree with your analysis.
But I think that’s the wrong question. The question should be “Should any party actively run “out ahead” of the people, or should it run just on those things it believes in, AND are already popular?”
I think many on the vanguard of the Progressive Left have forgotten that the way the politics of change works (for anyone, of any persuasion, in any era) is you work like hell, typically for what seems like a too-long time, to get a majority of the public to change its mind about something. And THEN you convince the politicians of your chosen party to run on the principles of that desired change. If you do the opposite – if you succeed in getting your favorite party to espouse your ideas for change while 80% of the public still dislikes the new idea – then you get nothing – because you lose elections. Not only “now”, but for as long as it takes to re-convince a skeptical public that you are listening to them.
Doing this correctly, for instance, is how we got to Gay Marriage. Dem politicians, with some exceptions – even ones who were privately sympathetic – turned back-flips not to endorse the idea… until… Obama and just about everyone else DID endorse the idea, because PUBLIC OPINION HAD CHANGED. Now, did Obama (and not just him) running on “Civil Unions” rather than Gay Marriage amount to “running to the center”? Maybe. Was it something less than righteous, and moral? Maybe. Did it feel less than good for a lot of us at the time? Maybe. Did it work? Yes. Flat out, YES. And in ways that failing to get elected, by getting too far out in front of the public, never would have.
The real tough question is this: In an environment of instant on-line communication, how do the leaders of any party PREVENT, what the most vocal advocates of new policies on the party’s ideological flank are saying, from being perceived as the actual position of the party? And, viewed from a complementary perspective – How can activists who DO “get it” begin to “move the Overton Window” WITHOUT making is seem to the public like their favored party has already adopted the new idea as a Platform Plank? This is important going forward, and I don’t have a ready answer. But we do it badly today, and have for about 10 years. The Left caused The Dems to appear to have gotten “out front of the public” in several instances recently – to name just two, “Defund the Police” and “Trans Rights”. Both of these were/are very much minority stances among the general public, but have been and/or are “associated” with the Dems in the minds of many non-Dem but persuadable voters.
We have to figure out how to fix this.
David, thanks for the insighful article. Given what you wrote here, and I think you are correct, I’m anxious to read your analysis of the direction the Democrats should go in the next four years. Do you plan to write on that topic?