Dem
47
GOP
53
Thomas Edsall's always interesting column this week addresses the issue of why Democrats often take stands that cost them many votes and sometimes even the election. For example, Kamala Harris' position on the trans issue clearly weakened her and may have even cost her the election. Donald Trump's campaign manager, Susie Wiles, thought this issue was so potent that she ran $65 million in ads about it. She is very experienced and would never have done that without a lot of polling data backing her up.
The 2024 election was not a teaching moment for Democrats. In Jan. 2025, the House took up a bill to ban trans women from being on women's sports teams and all but two Democrats voted against the bill, despite a huge majority of voters being for it. They could easily have defended a vote for the bill by saying they were protecting women from unfair competition from bigger, faster, and stronger men. Protecting women is why sports teams are gendered in the first place.
Why do Democrats do something that hurts them so much in elections? One of the reasons is that small donors tend to prefer extreme candidates with extreme positions. They don't like the mushy middle. The donors tend to reflexively support every minority group, no matter how small and how unpopular with the voters.
Another factor is the extreme gerrymandering of House districts. The Cook Political Report rates 399 of the 435 districts as not competitive. That means the only threat a sitting Democratic representative has is a primary opponent, generally someone more extreme than the incumbent, as it is tough for a moderate to generate a lot of excitement against an incumbent in a D+10 district. Consequently many Democrats are worried about their left flank in a primary, not a Republican in a general election. But when all Democrats do the same thing, it becomes part of the party's brand, including in the few competitive races that there are. And there it hurts.
The Senate is a gerrymander of the whole country, but it is not as extreme as the House. Still, a Democrat in California, or Illinois, or New York need not worry about losing a general election, only losing a primary to someone more extreme than himself or herself. Senate candidates then behave accordingly.
There is plenty of data to support this view. For example, this paper shows that in competitive races, being a moderate helps, but in all other races it hurts. Partisans in both parties prefer more extreme positions.
State legislative races are even worse than House races. In 2022, 41% of seats weren't even contested. That is, only the incumbent (and possibly some primary challenger) filed to run. The nonincumbent party didn't even bother to field a candidate. What's the point of being a moderate if you will be the only candidate on the November ballot?
Another factor at work here is the demographic changes taking place in the Democratic Party. The typical Democrat used to be a blue-collar white man with a working class job, like a construction worker or a bus driver. These people were very sensitive to economic issues, like minimum wage laws and fights to unionize companies. Now the Party is packed with affluent, college-educated liberals who don't care as much about wages or unions. They have the luxury of focusing on previously irrelevant issues like who plays on which sports team, who uses which bathroom, and which prisons trans criminals are sent to. In FDR's time, it would have been unthinkable for Democrats to focus on stuff like that. Bread-and-butter issues mattered the most. Not as much anymore.
A new centrist Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, has called for Democrats to support protecting trans people in employment, housing, health care, and access to credit (issues that are popular with voters), but to downplay the contentious stuff. They know that even liberal women may support a trans woman's right to get a job, but still don't want her in the locker room at their gym. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. The problem is that if all the Democrats in noncompetitive races are saying the same thing, that becomes the Party's toxic brand with voters and then they are stuck with it in competitive races. To win elections, that needs to change.
While Edsall's column this week is focused on trans issues, there are plenty of other issues where the Democrats are not on the same page as the voters. These include affirmative action, basing college admission in part on race, giving Black small business owners priority for loans and grants over white ones, teaching LGBTQ themes in elementary schools, and welcoming asylum seekers. In 2020 in California, there was a ballot initiative to reverse a constitutional ban on race-conscious college admissions and thus allow race to be a legal factor in admissions decisions. Every major Democrat in the state supported the initiative, including the governor, both senators, the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. The only people against it were the voters. It got 43% of the vote and lost. If popular incumbent Democrats can't convince voters in a very blue state, what chance do nonincumbents have riding this kind of issue to victory in swing districts and states where voters see the Democrats as "weak and woke"? If Democrats are with Henry Clay and would rather be right than be president, fine, but then they have no basis for complaining when somebody else gets to be wrong and president. (V)