"Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters..."

"... who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats.... Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!... Shor’s analysis... suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. ... He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami. The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.... The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "How Deep Is the Hole Democrats Are In? Pretty deep" (Substack).

Shor = David Shor, who explained his findings here:

"Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI."

That's point #3 on a 4-point list by Ruy Teixeira, in "Trump 2.0: A Survival Guide for Democrats" (Free Press).

DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.... Racial preferences are very, very unpopular and have been for a long time.... 

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

And that fits so tightly with the Democrats' 2 favorite arguments: 1. You're dumb, and 2. You're racist. Which reminds me — the #1 item on Teixeira's 4-point list is: "Avoid name-calling."

I'm halfway through quoting all 4 items, so let me continue. #2 is "Moderate — starting with immigration." And #4 is "Embrace energy abundance."

Yeah, the Democrats cannot do these things. Not unless they get their own Trump. Someone extremely daring, charismatic, and powerful who barges in and reshapes the party around him. It could have been RFK Jr., but they used their grubby little ways to keep him off the ballot. And now who is out there?

"The Progressive Moment Is Over/Four reasons their era has come to an end."

Writes Ruy Teixeira (at Liberal Patriot).

The 4 reasons:

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it...

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it....

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it....

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it....

That made me think of this TikTok I saw today, a woman describing what she thinks is "a new breed of conservatives": 

"But a careful look at the available data strongly indicates that Harris’s coalition looks very different from Obama’s and is still struggling to match the contours of Biden’s 2020 coalition."

Writes Ruy Teixeira in "Harris has yet to replicate the Biden coalition as Election Day nears/With about six weeks until the election, Kamala Harris has yet to match Joe Biden’s coalition" (WaPo)("for now, she is underperforming her party’s historical patterns with non-White and working-class and younger voters")(free access link).

"The official website of the Biden for President campaign is a complete mystery. It’s basically a half-hearted request for money with a promise to 'Finish the Job.'"

"Finish the job?? Does this make much sense when voters think the job you’ve been doing is so bad?... Of course, 'Bidenomics,' which famously crashed and burned as a campaign theme, was no better and probably worse. But what is 'finish the job' but Bidenomics without the name or mentioning Biden at all?"

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Democrats Should Swap Out 'Bidenomics' for an Abundance Agenda
'Finish the Job' ain’t gonna cut it."

Okay, so "Bidenomics"... "Finish the job"... how about "I'm not done yet" or "Can I get a time extension"?

Teixeira suggests: an “abundance agenda.” 

"Across the battleground, Biden is losing to Trump among working-class voters by 16 points."

"That compares to Biden’s national working-class deficit of just 4 points in 2020.... In Michigan, Biden’s working-class deficit against Trump is 24 points. In 2020, that deficit was just 6 points.... In Pennsylvania, it’s Trump over Biden by 19 points among working-class voters. That’s a sharp drop from Biden’s 9 point deficit among these voters in 2020 (States of Change data). This is a state that Biden won by only a single point last election. In Wisconsin, Biden is behind Trump by 6 points among working-class voters. That doesn’t sound so great but is actually 6 points better than Biden did in 2020, when he lost these voters by 12 points. This is the only state of the six surveyed by the Times where Biden is running better among these voters today than in 2020...."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "The Working Class-Sized Hole in Democratic Support Widens/This is a big, big problem" (Liberal Patriot). He's looking at the recent NYT poll of voters in the battleground states.

Seems like the key for Biden is understanding Wisconsin. What's happening here that isn't happening in Michigan and Pennsylvania?

Teixeira ends his column with the idea presented in Blueprint, which he quotes:

"The days when Democrats could get away with thinking of Hispanics as one of 'their' minority groups are, or should be, over."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Postcard from the Hispanic Working Class/Education polarization comes to America’s Latinos"  (The Liberal Patriot).

In terms of voting intentions, Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics but by 39 points among their college-educated counterparts. Interestingly, this 38-point reverse class gap is actually larger than the class gap in this poll among whites (30 points).... And here’s something that should concentrate their mind when considering the working-class Hispanics problem and how seriously to take it. The simple fact of the matter is that there are far, far more working-class than college-educated Hispanics. According to States of Change data, Hispanic eligible voters nationwide are 78 percent working class. And working-class levels among Latinos are even higher in critical states like Arizona (82 percent) and Nevada (85 percent).

I'm giving this post my "Biden's racial nightmare" tag, though I can't remember what made me invent that tag and will need to publish this post and click on it to find out. 

UPDATE, right after posting: I now see why I created the tag. It's a pretty different topic, but I want to go back into it. It was August 13, 2020:

"I used to always hear Democrats saying, 'The election was all just Trump’s racist appeals,' but I actually went to the rallies in 2015."

"He would talk about bad trade deals. He promised to bring back Glass-Steagall, which is the bill regulating finance. He talked about health insurance. He was going to do a plan that actually would cover all Americans and wasn’t going to be like a rat’s maze. And if you compare the ads, his ads were overwhelmingly more policy-oriented than Clinton’s. She was really just attacking him as a bad guy and it didn’t work.

Said John Judis, quoted in "Where Have All the Democrats Gone? John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explain how liberals lost their way" (The Free Press)(transcript and audio)(Judis and Teixeira are political analysts). 

The "Honestly" podcast host asks: "So, you didn’t anticipate that the party that said, 'We are the party of Paul Ryan, we’re the party of tax cuts, we’re the party of Milton Friedman,' would actually start to sound more liberal on economic policy?"

"Some Latino voters say the Republican Party supports their hopes for economic advancement."

"That is the case for Luiz Oliveira, 63, an immigrant from Brazil who owns three coffee shops in the Las Vegas area. 'I came here with a dream to live the American dream, and many other immigrants have the same dream,' he said. He said he is wary of Democratic policies that seem too much like socialism. 'Socialism will kill my dream, kill my business,' he said. The Journal poll, which included a large sample of Latino voters, found that views within that group differed by education level. Latino voters with a four-year college degree substantially favored a Democratic candidate over a Republican—61% to 32%—whereas Republicans led or were at parity among those with lower levels of formal education.... 'Black working-class and Hispanic working-class people have a lot more in common with white working-class people than many people have been willing to believe,' said Ruy Teixeira, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute who writes often on the subject." 

From "GOP Gaining Support Among Black and Latino Voters, WSJ Poll Finds/Republicans appear to be in a better position with both groups heading into the midterms than they were in 2020 or 2018" (Wall Street Journal).

For more from Ruy Teixeira, here's "Hispanic Voters on the Eve of the 2022 Election/Hispanic Voters Are Normie Voters and Normie Voters Aren’t Happy." I was going to blog that a few days ago, but I got so sidetracked into the use of the term "normie"! He writes:

In short, they are normie voters. And like other normie voters, if they feel Democrats are falling short on the things normie voters care about, they are more than willing to punish the party they hold responsible.

"I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place."

Said Ruy Teixeira, quoted in "'A real chilling effect': A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI/Ruy Teixeira predicted Obama’s rise. Now he’s scorning DC’s liberal think tanks for caring more about diversity than class" (Politico).

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP [Center for American Progress], and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms.... 

"Start with the fact that Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and Democrats have viewed their vote..."

"... as an uncomplicated and burgeoning asset for them. However, starting in 2020 there were troubling signs of attrition in Asian support for Democrats.... One problem has been that Asians are worried about public safety and leery of a Democratic party that has become associated with 'defund the police' and a soft approach to containing crime. Another has been that Asians, like Hispanics, are a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy.... They are far more interested in how they and their families can get ahead in actually-existing American society. Finally... Asian voters... see [education] as the key tool for upward mobility.... But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools.... This of course was a huge issue in San Francisco, where the School Board pushed this approach up to and including replacing the rigorous entrance test for the famed Lowell School with a lottery. That move, combined with the School Board’s bizarre obsession with an 'anti-racist' school renaming project even as schools remained closed and students suffered, angered Asian parents and others so much that they took the lead in successfully recalling three of the ringleaders of this approach, a clear precursor to the current recall."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Time for the Democrats’ Chesa Boudin Moment! If Not Now, When? If Not Him, Who?" (Substack).

"Do they really believe that the Black voters who formed the base of the Democratic Party think like Ibram X. Kendi, or the leaders of BLM? Are they crazy?"

"I mean, how can they not understand there’s enormous sort of diversity among the worldviews of people within the Black community? They vary by class, they vary by age, they vary in all kinds of ways. And the idea that they are sort of all on board with this crusade against the superficial aspects of so-called systemic racism, that that’s really what they care about, is fanciful, really." 

Said Ruy Teixeira, quoted in "Confessions of a Liberal Heretic/Ruy Teixeira was co-author of one of the most influential political books of the 21st century. Now, he says, Democrats are getting its lessons all wrong" (NYT). 

Teixeira's influential book was "The Emerging Democratic Majority," predicting, in 2002, that the process of demographic change would pile up votes on the side of the Democratic Party.

Interviewed about that idea now, he says that even back then he (and his co-author) "very specifically said — and this is widely ignored — that for this majority to attain and exercise political power, you have to retain a significant fraction of the white working class." And he admits that they didn't recognize how much the "professional-class hegemony in the Democratic Party... would tilt the Democrats so far to the left on sociocultural issues" and lead to positions on immigration and crime and systemic racism that are alienating to many white working class voters.

"The year since I wrote the original essay on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left has not resulted in a sea change in the left’s attitudes embodied in these five sins."

"Instead, they seem just as or more entrenched than they were. This augurs a future where working class voters continue to drift away from the Left, while highly educated elites increasingly define the left’s profile. The economist Thomas Piketty has referred to this development as the rise of the 'Brahmin Left.' For the Brahmin Left, the five deadly sins are virtues, since this is what the enlightened among them believe. But for the working class, as well as less ideological upscale voters, these ideas make the left less attractive. There is still an opening for a left that promotes universal values, a better model of capitalism, practical problem-solving on climate change, and an economy that delivers abundance for all. But the hour may be getting late...."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "The Five Deadly Sins of the Left/Time to Repent!" (Substack).

The sins are identity politics, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growthophobia, and technophobia — described in some detail at the link.

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with 'people of color' and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues..."

"... that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer.... Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.... The findings about relatively positive Hispanic attitudes toward police have been confirmed by poll after poll, as concern about crime in their communities has spiked. An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works....  Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns."

From "The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem It's Not As Bad As You Think—It’s Worse" by Ruy Teixeira (SubStack).