The News: Dem Bones

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

The NYT isn’t subtle much of the time in its attempts to build a framing narrative that will encourage the electoral outcomes that the editors and their political reporters prefer.

Try this one on for size in this morning’s coverage of the Michigan Senate primary, appearing before the race was called for Abdul El-Sayed, from the reporter Lisa Lerer. Lerer writes “The continued tightness of the race in Michigan underscores a divide that’s frequently emerged in Democratic primaries this cycle. The split between a loud, online liberal movement, which championed Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate primary, and many of the voters who are the backbone of the party in battleground states is particularly striking”.

This particular race was a very close one, and it does suggest a significant divergence of preference among people voting in the Democratic primary in Michigan. There have been other close primaries this year, and a few that were less close than expected, which could plausibly be said to show a similar divergence in preference. So a political reporter ought to be thinking about what it means, and working both with a range of data as well as collecting various opinions and analyses in pursuit of that thinking.

But where does this “backbone vs. loud online movement” characterization come from? Have these primaries stimulated a massive wave of new party registrations on behalf of the Democrats such that one could argue that an old “backbone” is being challenged by a new “loud movement”? No, actually: Democrats nationwide have actually lost registrations since 2022. Is there other evidence that the “loud movement” are not normally Democratic voters? No.

So why are the other voters the backbone and the loud movement some other imputed part of the skeleton? The Louds can’t be all that online given that they’re actually winning elections with actual voters who actually went to polling places or actually mailed votes. I mean, the voters who voted for El-Sayed had nothing to do with the unexpectedly positive midterms for the Democrats in 2022, right? They didn’t provide any of the votes that pushed Biden into the Presidency in 2020, right? Surely their preference for Bernie Sanders in 2016 was of no electoral importance at all in that year’s political outcomes? And naturally they were immaterial to Obama’s two victories. One begins to wonder if there’s been a misidentification of “backbone” here.

Think on how this story-telling worked on the other side of things. Track the mainstream discourse in political journalism from the rise of the Tea Party into the subsumption of the Republican Party into Trumpism. The Tea Party went from being a faction described as outside of the GOP’s base to being reluctantly conceded as representing a historically important faction within the GOP that was newly mobilized by Republican-favoring electoral redistricting carried out between 2000 and 2012 to being the “Trump base” to being “the Republican Party base”. Track what happened to the “establishment GOP” at the same time, who went from being the presumptive core of the GOP in most journalistic accounts to struggling to harness the Tea Party side as they always had before to being elbowed aside and turned into the never-Trump Lincoln Project while the GOP revealed itself to have always been dominated by the constituencies that now devoted themselves to Trump.

Read through journalistic accounts and a certain kind of political science, that story-telling arc looks less like a series of empirical concessions and more like a failed attempt to influence outcomes, to cast the “establishment GOP” as a “backbone” when it was never anything of the kind. What eludes the mainstream press and the cloud of pundits and consultants that revolve tightly around the press even now is not just that they got it empirically wrong, but that their attempt to narrate the outcome towards a desired direction was so obvious and clumsy that it had the opposite effect.

It is no surprise that the ineptly handled “postmortem” on 2024 that the Democratic Party leadership only reluctantly published under pressure turns out to have had a missing chapter. The leadership denies that they omitted it on purpose, but however it came to be, the chapter’s analysis is fairly on point. The Democratic Party’s old guard is deeply entangled with its consultants, lobbyists and favored interests and has few touchpoints with its actual electorate in their actual lived circumstances, whether they are people that Lerer is thinking of as a “backbone” or the loud movements that happen to live and work in actual states and voting districts.

The old guard has an ideology that it largely shares with the Lincoln Project-type Republicans who have largely been pushed out of their former party. I scold enough about this topic for any reader to know the quick-sketch words I tend to use: managerial, technocratic, institutional, procedural, incremental. Follow the process, stay inside the red lines of established norms, tinker at the edges of big problems, defer to a hierarchy based on seniority and expertise, and keep both hands firmly on the wheel at all times. Long-time readers also know that despite my scornful tone and exasperated criticism, I understand the historic appeal of this ideology. It is the predominant ideology of the social class to which I belong, even in some cases the people whose issue-based affinities are “progressive” or “leftist”.

The American electorate has for a long time shown the signs of having fractured into thirds (or possibly even more fragments). One third are the Trump base: a coalition between locally well-off people who feel alienated and excluded from what they judge to be the predominant sociocultural matrix, white nationalists in the grip of ressentiment over growing racial inclusivity, self-identified evangelicals who are seeking some degree of theocratic authority over civil society and political institutions, and men both young and old who blame educated women for their feelings of economic and social marginalization. The second third are the managerial, the educated technocrats. The final third that we might call grassroots progressives are people committed to the inclusivity of the “Second Reconstruction” that followed from the civil rights movement, who want major reforms aimed at checking the power of oligarchs and hedge funds over economic and political life along with a lessening of wealth inequality overall, who want a more active relationship to political leadership, and who want a sense of dynamism and imagination in government.

The fractions overlap more than the present divided discourse might imply. Trumpists and grassroots progressives both want a more direct and agentive relationship to political power, and they both want to see an establishment class detached from its position of privilege (though they conceptualize that establishment in radically different ways). The managerial faction is perfectly content with inclusivity as long as that does not affect their retention of authority over institutions, but they’re generally ok with losing inclusivity too. The progressives and the managerialists both see themselves as mirrored by and addressed within existing popular culture and as potentially allied within most “culture wars”, though with many caveats.

In actually winning elections, the Democratic Party usually needs two of these fractions (and their numerous subfractions), whereas the Republican Party at present only needs the tight-knit alliance of its core base and in national elections or purple states, it needs some strays to drift over.

The Democratic Party’s old guard—and its friendly storytellers, like Lerer—do not actually want to imagine their ideology as socially based in the vested interests of its core demographic loyalists. They should! It would help them to understand what the problem is with their consultants, which is that those consultants also come from that socioeconomic core and reinforce the party’s attachment to it. It would help them to understand why they’re struggling to win elections, which is that they don’t know how to talk to or satisfy the aspirations of voters that they depend upon. They marginalize or demonize those voters as a “loud movement” even while those voters win elections, and speak of a “backbone” that is not actually concretized or identifiable and is not in any sense mapped into the social reality of the educated managerial class that is being named in that moment.

The people who voted for El-Sayed are very clear about why the party leadership doesn’t want them and isn’t listening to them. They’re clear about the gap between what they want and what the establishment leadership wants, clear that at least some of the problem they have with America at present is represented by the managerial class as well as the Trumpists in Washington, though those are not the same kind of problem. But on the other side of things, the Democratic establishment doesn’t really understand what it’s facing, or doesn’t let itself understand what it would rather not know.

You can see that mismatch of understanding not just in the election results but in moments like Gavin Newsom suddenly asking other states to cancel lawsuits against the Paramount-WB merger. Newsom is ambitious, he’s gearing up to run for President in 2028. He’s got consultants, data, polls. So surely he knows that he’s got to pull in a coalition in the primaries and sustain it in a general election. Who exactly is he trying to please by expediting the merger and getting the billionaire Ellisons out of a financial trap of their own making?

Newsom says: so filming can start again in Los Angeles, to keep the industry alive in California. But all that means, for most of the Democratic Party’s actual constituency, is that either Newsom is a complete idiot or that he is favoring interests that are closer to the small but powerful socioeconomic base to which he actually belongs over the interests of his restive and alienated possible voters. I don’t rule out the complete idiot theory, since that’s part of the mythologies that sustain the managerial world. Drowning in words like “incentives” and “abundance” and “public-private partnership”, it is just possible to believe in magical outcomes like “David Ellison will start filming a lot more in Los Angeles” despite the fact that no previous media megamergers have those kinds of results.

Doing-what-managers-are-expected-to-do seems more likely as an explanation, which includes facilitating the movement of financialized wealth into a small tier of political and civic institutions that float above the public sphere rather than reside within it. Otherwise known as kissing ass. If that is an actual electoral backbone as well as the posterior part of the anatomy, it suffers from an increasingly severe chronic diminishment of scale and an according inability to bear the weight being placed upon it. The spice is flowing elsewhere, and so is the electorate that the Democratic establishment needs, no matter how much they think they want some other poorly imagined constituency that is presently well beyond their grasp.