Chapter OneThe Rise and Fall of the Emerging Democratic Majority
In 2002, we wrote a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Democrats would have established a majority. It would not be an overwhelming and long-lasting majority like that which Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats had enjoyed, with only a few breaks, from 1932 to 1980, but it would amount, on average, to an advantage over several decades. We pointed to new groups within the Democratic coalition, including college-educated professionals and single women, and to the growing numbers of minority voters.
These voters were concentrated in postindustrial metro centers that we termed “ideopolises.” These metro centers such as Boston, New York, the Raleigh/Durham Research Triangle, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, Omaha, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area predominately produced ideas rather than material goods. To win elections, Democrats would still need a significant share of working-class votes, and the votes of people who lived in small towns and midsize cities that had relied on manufacturing or mining, but they would not need the solid majorities that had sustained the New Deal party. We expected that Democrats would hold on to enough of these voters, many of whom had voted Democratic for decades, to win national elections and retain an overall edge in congressional elections.
In the wake of the Democrats winning the White House and Congress in 2008, our prediction appeared to have been confirmed. We were hailed as seers. It even seemed to us possible that the new president, Barack Obama, in responding effectively to the financial crash and the Great Recession, could create a Roosevelt-like majority that would consign the Reagan–Bush Republicans to the same sorry fate as the Coolidge–Hoover Republicans. But the Democrats’ dominance lasted only two years.
In 2010, Republicans won back the House and netted 6 governorships and would have won back the Senate if not for several wacky Tea Party candidates who proved unelectable. In the remaining elections during the second decade, the parties alternated control of the White House and Congress, and Republicans built an edge in statehouses. In 2022, the Republicans narrowly won back control of the House but Democrats retained narrow control of the Senate. American politics was stuck in a teeter-totter between the parties. The majority we predicted had not emerged. What had happened? Where did we and where did the Democrats go wrong?
Where We Went Wrong
We did get the new groups right. In The Emerging Democratic Majority, we argued that professionals, women, and minorities were displacing the old New Deal blue-collar working class as the key ingredients in a new Democratic majority. Professionals were, broadly speaking, college-educated workers whose success at work was measured by the quality of the product or service they produced. They were not private-sector managers who were judged by whether they mobilized workers to bring in the highest return, nor were they salespeople who were judged on their bottom line. They included nurses and teachers, software programmers and engineers and scientists. Once typified by the dentist or doctor who ran his own business and was a loyal Republican, professionals began voting Democratic in the late sixties and by the 1988 election were supporting Democrat Michael Dukakis over Republican George H. W. Bush. In polling, professionals appear in the ranks of voters with a postgraduate education, although their actual ranks include many people with only four-year degrees.
Their increase in numbers reflected the dramatic change in American capitalism that took place after World War II. In the 1950s, professionals made up only about 7 percent of the workforce in the United States. But as the country has moved away from a blue-collar industrial economy to a postindustrial one that produces more ideas and services, they have grown dramatically to 24 percent of the labor force, more than triple their level in the 1950s. They were drawn to the Democrats by the party’s support for blacks’ and women’s rights, consumer and environmental protection, and its identification not so much with the average American but with the public interest, most clearly articulated beginning in the 1960s by consumer and good government advocate Ralph Nader. Some professionals like nurses, teachers, and social workers also joined unions and, like other union members, tended to support Democrats rather than Republicans.
The second group was women and particularly single and working women. They, too, were growing in number. Around half of adult women are now unmarried and their labor force participation in the twenty-first century has been pushing 60 percent, up from under 40 percent in 1960. As a group, women had tilted Republican as late as 1976, but in reaction to the Republican identification with the religious right and opposition to the welfare state, many women began voting Democratic in 1980. A substantial gender gap arose that is now a regular feature of our elections. In 2020, women supported Biden over Trump by 13 points, while men supported Trump by 6 points, producing a 19-point gender gap.
The third group was minorities. Blacks had begun voting Democratic during the New Deal and, after the Republican repudiation in 1964 of the civil rights reforms, became uniformly Democratic. Democrats had historically been the party of immigrant groups and Republicans the party of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Hispanics, except for Miami’s Cubans, had earlier been Democratic, and after the 1965 reform of immigration law, their numbers expanded rapidly. Most Asians had been voting Republican. In the 1990s, however, they started to come around. In California, they were driven by a perception that Republicans were hostile to immigrants.
Our calculation was that as the numbers of college-educated voters, working women, and minorities grew, and as postindustrial metro centers grew, if Democrats were able to hold on to about 40 percent of the white working class, with close to an even split in heavily white working-class Rust Belt states, Democrats would more likely than not win the presidency and Congress and a majority of statehouses. We viewed the working class to be generally workers without a college degree who earned a wage rather than an annual salary and worked in jobs where they had little, if no, authority over the goods or services they produced.
We expected that this new majority would emerge by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and when Obama won in 2008, it seemed to confirm our prediction. Obama, benefiting from Republican candidate John McCain’s failure to convince the public that he could handle the Great Recession, won not only the vote of the new Democratic groups from the sixties, but also white working-class voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Besides carrying all the states Democrat John Kerry won in 2004, Obama carried the southwestern states of Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico and the southern states of Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia (the first time Democrats had carried that state since 1964). He also swept the industrial Midwest, adding Iowa, Ohio, and even Indiana to Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Democrats gained 21 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate on top of their wins in the 2006 midterms.
Obama took better advantage than any of his predecessors of the emerging Democratic groups and of their rising share of the electorate. According to Catalist, among rising groups, Obama received 79 percent support among nonwhite voters, carrying black voters by 88 points, Hispanic voters by 32 points, and Asian voters by 22 points. He also carried women by 16 points, single women by 35 points, and voters under thirty by 30 points. We hadn’t included younger voters in our calculation, but these voters, who as late as the 1980s had favored Republicans, appeared to be still another entry in the new majority, as the millennial generation came of voting age. Among the burgeoning ranks of white college-educated voters, Obama made a historic breakthrough and carried them by a point and white college-educated women by 9 points. And he dominated the postgraduate vote as a whole by 18 points, reflecting the Democrats’ growing strength among professionals.
Obama’s victory bore out our prediction that, based on the growth of postindustrial metropolitan areas, the Democrats would even begin to do well in southern states they had been losing since 1980. In North Carolina, which had not gone Democratic since Jimmy Carter’s run in 1976, Obama won by dominating the state’s thriving metro areas. In Mecklenburg County, the fast-growing heart of the Charlotte metro area, Obama bested McCain by 24 points, an amazing 44 points better than Michael Dukakis did when he lost the county in 1988.
Obama cleaned up in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which includes Raleigh and Durham, and three major universities. Obama won Wake County, where the Raleigh metro area is located, by 14 points, a 29-point swing since 1988, when Dukakis lost the county by 15 points. Obama won the Durham metro area by an overwhelming 40 points, a 30-point improvement over Dukakis’s modest 10-point advantage in 1988.
Obama combined this strong performance with a dramatic reversal of the prior Democratic decline among white working-class voters. In 2004, according to the exit polls, Kerry lost these voters by 23 points. Obama cut the Democratic white working-class deficit to a comparatively modest 13 points nationally, and he carried the white working-class vote in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Obama carried Macomb County, the home of Chrysler autoworkers, by 9 points, which Kerry had lost in 2004. In a 1986 study, consultant Stanley Greenberg had immortalized Macomb as the home of the Reagan Democrats.
But Obama’s coalition proved to be as fleeting as Reagan’s. In the 2010 election, his majority disintegrated. Midterm elections are normally bad for the incumbent party, but the drubbing the Democrats received went far beyond the expected. They lost 63 seats in the House, as the House flipped from 256 to 179 Democratic control to 242 to 193 Republican control. In doing so, Democrats lost the House popular vote by 7 points. The Republicans gained House seats all over the country but were especially successful in the upper Midwest where Obama and the Democrats had seemed to make a breakthrough. House delegations in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all states that Obama won—flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. The key was the defection of white working-class voters. According to Catalist, Democratic congressional support among white working-class voters in Wisconsin went from 6 points Democratic in 2008 to 20 points Republican in 2010, a dramatic reversal of 26 points.
Democrats also lost 6 Senate seats and 6 governorships, and the main losses were in the industrial Midwest. They lost Senate seats in Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and governorships in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They also lost a net of 680 state legislative seats. Democrats had controlled 61 state legislatures and Republicans 36; now Republicans controlled 60 and Democrats only 36, an almost complete reversal.
While Democrats’ support fell across virtually all voting groups, the most consequential shift was among white working-class voters. They abandoned the Democrats in droves. The Democratic deficit among these voters ballooned to 23 points in 2010. And these voters were at the time close to half of all voters—and considerably more than half in the upper Midwest where a good deal of the carnage took place. We had gotten the new voting groups right. Even in 2010, the Democrats continued to have an edge among college-educated professionals, single women, and minorities, but we were dead wrong about the Democrats’ ability to hold on to the working-class whites. By losing the white working class so decisively, the Democrats lost their majority.
Losing the Heartland
Copyright © 2023 by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira