Democrats Can Embrace Reality, or They Can Lose Again
The left can’t not be the more progressive of the two parties, but it needs leaders who have significant differentiation from that core ideology.
The type of leaders Democrats need.
Photographer: Julio Cortez-Pool/Getty Images
After a tumultuous and dramatic election, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the most boring and important facts about American politics, like how more voters identify as conservative than liberal. This is a fundamental structural problem for Democrats, who need to win over large majorities of self-identified moderates without alienating their base. A new post-election survey from center-left think tank Third Way that looks at voters in presidential battleground states reveals that voters picked Donald Trump over Kamala Harris for the extremely boring reason that they saw him as closer to their ideological views and not that they saw her as some wild-eyed radical.
Harris’s score of 2.5 on a 0-10 ideological spectrum places her squarely in the middle of the left-of-center coalition. That’s consistent with her history as a Democrat who ran to the left in 2019 when that was the general trend in the party but then returned closer to the center as vice president. Trump, at 7.8, was seen as somewhat further off center. Nonetheless, voters placed themselves considerably closer to Trump because they see themselves as on the whole right-of-center.