Can the Democrats Win?

By Jacob S. Hacker

For decades, center-left parties in the West have been moving right on economic issues. They have also become less oriented to the working class, growing their support among the affluent and highly educated—what economist Thomas Piketty has dubbed the “Brahmin Left.”

Until recently, the U.S. Democratic Party has been no exception—leading to accusations, from both left and right, that it engages in culture wars at the expense of economics. In this issue, political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson say that trend is over: the Democrats have decisively broken with the politics of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

What explains the Democrats’ “U-turn” on economics, despite their growing reliance on affluent suburban voters? Can it work—as both an economic project and a way of building power? And what does this transformation mean for the future of the party—and a nation facing down democratic crisis

Hacker and Pierson lead a forum with responses from Jared Abbott, Larry Bartels, Bryce Covert, Ted Fertik & Tim Sahay, Heather Gautney, Lily Geismer, Representative Ro Khanna, and Dorian Warren & Thomas Ogorzalek.

Elsewhere in the issue, Barnett R. Rubin examines the relationship between Zionism and colonialism—and what it means (and doesn’t mean) for a political solution in Israel and Palestine. We talk with Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah and feature two poems he wrote after October 7. Plus essays on Walter Rodney’s radical legacy, geopolitics amid war in Gaza, and more.

Full list of contributors: Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson lead a forum with Jared Abbott, Larry M. Bartels, Bryce Covert, Ted Fertik & Tim Sahay, Heather Gautney, Lily Geismer, Ro Khanna, and Dorian Warren & Thomas Ogorzalek—plus work by Noaman G. Ali & Shozab Raza, Abena Ampofoa Asare, Rachel Ida Buff, Helena Cobban, Fady Joudah, and Barnett R. Rubin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boston Review
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781642595345

Jacob S. Hacker

Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. A Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, he is the author of The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, The Divided Welfare State, and, with Paul Pierson, of American Amnesia: The Forgotten Roots of Our Prosperity; Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class; Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. He has appeared recently on The NewsHour, MSNBC, All Things Considered, and Marketplace. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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A DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION has taken place in the U.S. Democratic Party. For several decades it was moving rightward on economic issues, following the same trend as many center-left parties in wealthy democracies. But over the past few years it has made a sharp U-turn, boldly embracing broad and costly economic programs, industrial policy, and active regulation. Indeed, in 2021 Democrats pursued the most ambitious and redistributive economic agenda their party has attempted in more than half a century. Contrary to frequent denunciations of Democratic wokeness (whether from the right or the left), economic issues—not cultural ones—have become the core of the party’s agenda.

This shift is surprising because of another striking development: Democrats have simultaneously sought out and won over an increasing share of affluent suburban voters—the very voters who might be expected to oppose bold redistribution and constrain the party’s economic ambitions. Now, more than ever, the Democrats’ racially diverse electoral coalition is a mix of the affluent and economically struggling.

What explains these changes, and what do they mean for the future of the party and the nation? Given the alarming rise of authoritarianism on the political right, the stakes are high—for democracy, not just Democrats. In the aftermath of January 6, the ability of the United States to resist the threat of democratic backsliding seems to rest almost entirely on the electoral success of the Democratic Party. As the 2024 elections approach, few questions are more fundamental than whether Democrats can build and hold together a broad multiracial and cross-class coalition.

The Density Divide and the Brahmin Left

THE PLACE to begin is the changing geography of American politics. The partisan divide is now a density divide. Over the past few election cycles, Republicans have registered particularly big gains among white voters in lower-density regions of the country battered by the shift to a postindustrial knowledge economy. The consequences of the GOP’s retreat from dense metro areas are now well understood. It has powered the party’s embrace of Christian nationalism and right-wing populism as well as its growing attack on American democracy, leading to a base that is older, whiter, more heavily Evangelical, and less highly educated.

Less well understood is the other half of the story—the transformation of the Democratic Party. Democrats are now firmly established as the political voice of multiracial, cross-class, metro America. Democrats have always done well in urban cores; what has changed over the past several decades is the party’s performance in the suburbs, which have grown more Democratic even as they have grown more affluent. Some of these gains have occurred because the suburbs have diversified racially and economically. Yet the most striking change in recent cycles is growing Democratic margins in the richest suburban communities—the biggest beneficiaries of U.S. economic growth over the last two decades. Most of these areas remain disproportionately white, and many leaned Republican not long ago.

Because of these shifts, Democrats are now much less clearly the party of the have nots. In 2021–22, they represented twenty-four of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest median household income—a striking change from the past. (Documentation for most of the statistics in this piece can be found in a recent academic article we wrote with Amelia Malpas and Sam Zacher.) At the presidential level, Democrats now win counties that produce the lion’s share of the nation’s economic output; some 71 percent of GDP came from the 1 in 6 counties that backed Biden in 2020. Indeed Biden won every one of the twenty-four most economically productive metro areas, and forty-three of the top fifty.

The result is a pronounced U-shaped coalition. On one side are voters driving the party’s recent suburban gains: highly educated and mostly white workers thriving in the knowledge economy. On the other side are less affluent denizens of metro America, disproportionately workers of color and their families, who have limited access to high-wage knowledge sectors. These voters struggle with rising metro costs—especially housing costs—even as they are effectively excluded from the wealthiest, highest-opportunity suburbs.

In remaking their coalition to bring in affluent college-educated voters, Democrats are hardly alone. Left-of-center parties in most other rich democracies have evolved along broadly similar lines as the knowledge economy has built up steam—gaining highly educated professionals while losing white working-class voters, who increasingly embrace the populist right. In economist Thomas Piketty’s evocative depiction, parties that were once oriented toward the working class—the British Labor Party, the French Socialists, the German Social Democrats, as well as the U.S. Democratic Party—now represent the Brahmin left. In their efforts to court the affluent and educated, Piketty maintains, these left parties have retreated from their historical commitment to redistribution.

This argument echoes the claims of many American observers, including prominent journalists and analysts such as David Leonhardt, Thomas Frank, Thomas Edsall, John Judis, and Ruy Teixeira. In their recent book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), for example, Judis and Teixeira lament that the party has steadily lost the allegiance of ‘everyday Americans’ and that the main problem is its cultural insularity and arrogance. Democrats, these critics insist, have embraced the social liberalism of their affluent, college-educated white voters at the expense of the working class. Many political scientists would concur that as the class heterogeneity of a party’s coalition increases, it is rational for the party to pivot away from economic issues. At a minimum, a party attempting to appeal to affluent professionals should be expected to mute calls for redistribution and higher taxation.

This logic is reinforced by the fact that in the U.S. electoral system, the density divide carries a density tax. As political scientist Jonathan Rodden documents in Why Cities Lose (2019), our first-past-the-post, single-member electoral districts badly disadvantage the geographically concentrated Democrats. In this system, votes for geographically dispersed Republicans are more efficiently distributed.

The problem is especially acute in the Senate, with its extreme skew in favor of low-population states. Senate Republicans have not represented a majority of voters since 1996, but they have held a majority of Senate seats for about half that period. This has proved crucial to Republican efforts to confirm conservative Supreme Court justices, as have the biases of the Electoral College (which hurts Democrats in part because of the density tax). There is no clearer marker of the GOP’s built-in advantages than the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, while Republicans have chosen six of the nine members of the Supreme Court.

The density tax also carries over to the House and to state legislatures, where the Democrats’ spatial concentration also leads to many wasted votes—and since state legislatures play a powerful role in drawing state and federal districts, the density tax is compounded by gerrymandering. At the extreme, as in Wisconsin, a minority of votes can be turned into not just a legislative majority but a veto-proof supermajority.

The density tax thus increases pressure for economic moderation. Competing on a tilted playing field, Democrats badly need upscale suburban votes in less densely populated metro peripheries. More broadly, they have to reach well past the center of the electorate to obtain legislative majorities. Combined with the party’s move up the income distribution, this harsh reality has been widely seen as closing the door on ambitious economic reforms.

And indeed, it did—for a time. From the mid-1980s to the end of Barack Obama’s administration, the Democratic Party largely fit this pattern. Political historians have documented how, as Democrats moved into the suburbs, the party moderated on class issues while highlighting social issues like abortion rights that appealed to affluent professionals. Lily Geismer and Matthew Lassiter, for example, describe a deliberate, long-term strategy by the Democratic Party to favor the financial interests and social values of affluent white suburban families and high-tech corporations over the priorities of unions and the economic needs of middle-income and poor residents of all races.

The party’s shift was also driven by the sharp change in the balance of economic power that had been underway since the mid-1970s. Economic inequality began its long upward climb, unions weakened dramatically, and the business community undertook an unprecedented political mobilization. The Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985 by Al From, sought to pull the party rightward on economics, weakening its attachment to organized labor and strengthening ties to the business community.

The rightward pivot stuck. Aside from Bill Clinton’s failed effort to overhaul America’s highly dysfunctional system of health financing, the self-declared New Democrat tacked rightward, emphasizing deficit reduction and accepting a punitive welfare reform plan. Most consequential of all, he fully embraced the agenda of fiscal restraint, free trade with little compensatory redistribution, and financial deregulation that was fatefully sweeping both Wall Street and Washington. Rubinomics became the trademark of Clinton’s economic team, led by financier Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

Summers’s place on Obama’s economic team signaled the considerable continuity in Democratic policymaking from the Clinton years. Obama’s first two years in office featured significant reforms—notably, a major health care bill (which still fell well short of the universal models found abroad). But they were marred by an anemic recovery package advocated by Summers that left the economy weak for years. After 2010, the president mostly played defense against a resurgent congressional GOP and cultivated an Obama coalition of minority voters and affluent professionals, further building up the party’s U-shaped base. Meanwhile, his focus on reaching a bipartisan deficit-reduction agreement broadcast the resilience of the Brahmin left.

Bigger, Bolder, Broader

FAST-FORWARD TO the Biden administration, however, and the party’s economic approach looks very different. The Blue Divide within their U-shaped electoral base might have pushed against a big redistributive agenda, but Democrats embraced one. Whether the metric is levels of spending or reliance on active government, President Biden and his congressional allies have been far bolder on these issues than other recent Democratic administrations. No less striking, these efforts have dominated not just legislative and executive policymaking but also the party’s rhetoric. In recent national platforms, as well as the social media appeals of both the party’s leadership and rank-and-file congressional Democrats, economic issues have had pride of place.

The surprise isn’t just that Democrats tacked left on economics even as they have successfully courted affluent suburbanites. It’s also that they have done so with the slimmest of margins in Congress. The density tax has mattered here. In 2021 Democratic senators—plus the two independents who caucus with them, Bernie Sanders and Angus King—represented over 56 percent of the nation’s voters but held exactly 50 percent of the seats. With an equally divided and highly polarized Senate, Democrats who hoped to push through new legislation on climate, infrastructure, social policy, health care, and many other economic priorities could lose none of their caucus members in the upper chamber, and only a handful in the House.

The pivotal vote in the Senate belonged to Joe Manchin, whose home state Donald Trump carried in 2020 by a margin of 39 points. Along with Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin would ultimately block the bulk of the Democrats’ economic agenda. Yet this outcome has overshadowed the striking fact that the overwhelming majority of the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate broke sharply with the economic orientations of Clinton-era Democrats. It is this majority—not Manchin and Sinema—who reveal the shape of the emerging Democratic coalition and its policy aspirations.

Much of the 2021 agenda was packaged in the Biden administration’s announcement that spring of two initiatives grouped under the rubric of Build Back Better (BBB): the American Jobs Plan, focusing on infrastructure, and the American Families Plan, focusing on education, health, and family policies. BBB might well have stood for Bigger, Bolder, Broader. Even a fairly detailed summary of these two initiatives—which hardly exhaust Democrats’ agenda in 2021–22—would omit provisions that would have been considered landmark policy changes if enacted on their own in the recent past.

The American Jobs Plan called for $2 trillion in new spending over eight years—approximately 1 percent of GDP per year. The plan included over half a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending on roads, bridges, ports, rail systems, and mass transit, as well as spending for human infrastructure—home- and community-based health