Why do Democrats keep coming back to "electability?"
With ongoing campus protests over the war in Gaza throughout the nation, you should probably go and read something by someone with expertise in the politics of the Middle East or in protest and social movements. I feel strongly about not getting over my skis on topics where I’m not an expert.
But there is a party politics angle that I want to get into here. A recurring frame for progressive dissent on the issue has been about electoral strategy, suggesting that Biden should shift policy directions (withdrawing support for Israel in the war), lest he risk losing reelection. With a close race ahead and a nominee who aroused the suspicions of progressives in 2020, these concerns make sense. There are several considerations. One is spatial voting logic that probably still pertains: the Biden campaign is worried that people on the relative right of the 2020 coalition (centrists, independents, disaffected Republicans) will have somewhere else to go; people on the left will have fewer options. In other words, a gamble that Trump is a greater electoral threat than RFK, Jr. or the Green Party nominee, etc. This is also closely related to the question of whether presidential elections are won on persuasion or mobilizing the base: the political science answer lately seems to be, “yes.” Which isn’t terribly illuminating in this circumstance.
The larger picture is the emphasis on electoral implications, when we are talking about a conflict in which tens of thousands have been killed or grievously harmed. And the progressive, anti-administration position has much broader implications for the direction of US foreign policy. But when we talk about divisions in the Democratic Party, it’s usually framed around electoral strategy.
Using electoral strategy as a way to talk about philosophical and policy disagreements among Democrats has a long history. Most notably, this was the driving force behind the centrist turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of the Democratic Leadership Council and its influence over the party – the avoidance of the label “liberal” and association with “special interests.” (Which meant interests of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.)
These were, of course, in today’s parlance, about “messaging,” but recent work on the centrist turn in the Democratic Party also highlights how the “new Democrats” of the period also believed what they were saying. As historian Lily Geismer has pointed out, the proponents of market-driven and technocratic solutions were convinced of their policy potential – not just an answer to an electoral need.
This moment for the Democratic Party came at a crucial time for a few reasons. The losses of northern, liberal presidential candidates in 1984 and 1988 cemented the perception from 1972 that the party was out of touch with the nation’s core values. The fact that these losses occurred alongside the civil rights realignment meant that the “special interests” narrative was also central to strategy going forward.
Electoral concerns are always pressing for parties, of course. But the electability debate serves the convenient purpose of papering over more substantive disagreements within the party, especially as formal and informal mechanisms for this have eroded over time. This was also on display in 2020, when electability was obviously a top concern for Democrats – but also provided cover for the deeper disagreements between the party establishment and a growing activist base with a bigger appetite for change. These divisions were evident over race and policing, healthcare, and how to approach climate issues. The Biden team has managed these divisions fairly well up to this point, but there was bound to be an issue that was harder to reconcile. And now, with Gaza, there is.
While the electoral framework is a familiar one, the ideological cast is different this time. Democrats talked about losses on the left flank after the 2000 and 2016 elections, of course. But the idea that the progressive faction could be pivotal – on the issue of longstanding bipartisan support for Israel, no less, is something new. It might also be indicative of the emerging dynamics between nationalized party politics and the Electoral College, where Muslim and Arab voters may play a pivotal role in Michigan.
In theory, this is exactly how democracy is supposed to work: groups organize and use their collective electoral power to pressure elected officials to make different policy decisions. But using the electability lens to shape fights within the party coalition is a slightly different thing. For the left flank of the Democratic Party to do this represents a real shift – appearing to take a page from the Republican playbook that emphasizes the mobilization of the base rather than chasing the center. Such a move would be a real departure from what the Democrats have done in recent decades. But the two parties are not constituted exactly alike and it’s less obvious who the party base actually is in a party made up of various groups – many of them minoritized and marginalized. That’s just one of the questions that the electability question hides, and that Democrats will eventually have to face.