In two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I detailed studies sponsored by Jacobin magazine on working-class politics and the left. Among other things, the studies concluded that voters prefer a ‘progressive populist’ (and later, ‘left populism’) message to a ‘woke progressive’ message. Readers can review the links above.
In my discussion of those studies, I pointed out that while the electorate – especially working-class voters – prefer left populism, they’re not yet on board with many left policy ideas. We have an electorate open to us. But we haven’t yet reached it. And so our task should involve building a majority. Not simply assuming our majority is already out there.
Third Jacobin Study
Jacobin followed up with a third study.” This study investigates Democratic Party candidates in the last couple of elections. It asks whether they actually use left populist messaging.
What do they find? For the most part, Democrats don’t use it. They find few Democrats actually use this messaging. But the ones who do use it tend to do a bit better than ‘woke’ and/or ‘moderate’ Democrats (though a fairly small difference). Left populism does especially well with working-class and/or non-white voters.
I don’t have many nits to pick here. So long as we make sure that ‘left populism’ amounts to policies aimed at full employment, up to and including a federal jobs guarantee, I think the conclusions are well supported. But it’s a limited conclusion.
The problems from my discussion of the second study, of course, remain. The sort of ‘jobs’ language Jacobin places under the category of ‘left populism’ can be fairly easily appropriated by moderate or mainstream liberal Democrats, including Joe Biden. They paint ‘left populism’ with a large brush.
And so, they don’t, in my view, get around the conclusion that we still need to build a left majority. It’s not already there.
