The left leaning candidate almost always loses the Democratic nomination. Why?
Among their major electoral problems, progressives and left leaning electoralists can’t count. In other words, they don’t know what a majority of the Democratic Party consists in and how to get there. Nor is this merely a problem of electoral organizing. It’s also one of the key problems Jane McAlevey sees in many unions in her book No Shortcuts, among other works.
In order to get to some ways to solve all this, I’d like to take a look at the Democratic Party and its presidential nomination. Who does win? And how do they do it? What kind of coalition of voters do they build?
Who Wins the Democratic Presidential Nomination?
Let’s take a look at the last three winners of the Democratic nomination – Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. We could go back earlier than that, but the Democratic Party has changed too much since 2004. John Kerry and Al Gore fit reasonably well into the categories below. But Bill Clinton built in 1992 a very different sort of politics no longer viable today.
So, what about Obama, Clinton, and Biden? First, they won black Democrats in large numbers. That’s a big deal. Why? Contrary to the opinion of many (mostly white) political analysts, black Democrats are a very diverse group. They span the entire ideological spectrum of the party, and even tend to concentrate a bit at the moderate end. And so, they serve as a proxy for the party as a whole. The candidate who wins black Democrats can put together a broad coalition.
But beyond that, Obama primary voters stands out as much different from Clinton and Biden voters. He won white progressives in droves in 2008. Neither Clinton nor Biden did that. They won white moderates.
And Who Loses It?
Let’s move on to some of the losing candidates. In 2008, we have Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. In 2016, we have Bernie Sanders. And in 2020, we have Sanders again, plus candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, and so on.
Why did they lose? For one, all of them (with the partial exceptions of Sanders and Bloomberg in 2020) failed miserably at winning black Democrats in any large number. Two, many of them appealed only to very narrow electoral coalitions. Buttigieg’s coalition, for instance, was almost entirely limited to relatively wealthy white liberals. Warren’s coalition was almost entirely limited to highly educated white progressives. The Sanders 2016 candidacy moved a bit beyond Warren’s, but really only in terms of income. He won a much narrower group in 2016 than he did in 2020. Klobuchar and Bloomberg only won moderates – with Bloomberg doing a better job than Klobuchar of building a broader, multi-income coalition of moderates.
The 2008 race was a bit more complex, but Clinton and Edwards often denied each other the same groups of mostly white, mostly liberal votes they were competing for.
Two Winning Coalitions and Three Losing Coalitions
I’ll introduce five Democratic electoral coalitions here. The first two are winners – and based on Obama, Clinton, and Biden’s run with them. The next three are losing coalitions – based on the losing candidates.
1: Black Democrats + White Progressives (Obama 2008)
2: Black Democrats + White Moderates (Clinton 2016, Biden 2020)
3: White Progressives Alone (Sanders 2016, Warren 2020)
4: Progressives of All Races and Incomes (Sanders 2020)
5: Moderates of All Races and Incomes (Bloomberg 2020)
Two Winners
So, let’s talk about these coalitions. (1) and (2) aren’t guaranteed winners. After all, in 2008, Obama and Clinton both tried to build a “winning” coalition and faced off against each other. Obama won that race because he defeated Clinton among black Democrats and more effectively mobilized voters in caucus states.
Three Losers
The less said about (3), the better. It’s a guaranteed losing coalition. Despite what people too plugged in to Twitter might think, white progressives make up maybe 20-25% of the party. Sanders was able to do a bit better than that in 2016 in a two-candidate race with an unpopular front runner. But he was never a serious threat to win the nomination. And Warren got nowhere within a mile of the nomination in 2020.
(4) is a unique and compelling coalition for the left. And, really, the Sanders 2020 campaign is the first and only campaign to put it together in a coherent way*. Sanders didn’t win, but he came much closer than he did in 2016. Groups like Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement really want (4) to be the way to win. But even (4) only amounts to maybe 30-35% of the party. Note that Sanders placed in that ballpark range in lots of states.
Regarding (5), I almost didn’t list it at all. This kind of coalition won in the more distant past (e.g., Bill Clinton 1992), but I have serious doubts about it now. Bloomberg tried something like it, but even he isn’t a perfect fit. The numbers might still be there, at least for another cycle or two, but it would be incredibly difficult to build up a local base of vocal support with this coalition. Presidential candidates need to at least nod to the more liberal base in order to win.
The Prospects for Leftist Electoralism
For the left, I think Sanders’s 2020 loss puts a few things into focus. First, the left doesn’t have a majority. Either in the U.S. as a whole or even in the Democratic Party. While this seems obvious to many, some progressives seem to think they already have a majority out there waiting to be ‘unlocked.’ Nope. They have to build it.
Second, progressives and leftists might not agree all that much with each other on how to do this. Groups like Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement – progressive groups that aren’t really ‘leftist’ – promote (4) like there’s no tomorrow. And they want to get there without doing the kind of base building work they need to do. Many leftists, on the other hand, want something a lot different from (4). Rather than organize around progressive ideology, they want to organize a ‘multi-racial working class.’ In other words, many leftists want to organize around class, not merely ideology.
It’s still a bit of a mystery what that would look like. But it would presumably come to a broad coalition of working-class people who come to be leftists. We’ve never really seen that kind of coalition in U.S. politics. It’s not represented anywhere in (1) – (5).
But there could be time to build it. Contrary to my own predictions in 2020, I think it’s quite likely Biden will run for the presidency again in 2024. And, even if he doesn’t, Coalition 1 looks like the most promising route for the Democratic nomination in the short-term future. There’s no shortage of candidates (e.g., Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams) who want to put it together. I don’t see anyone right now who could ride (4) to the nomination in 2024 or probably even 2028.
Brief Note
*Some might argue for Jesse Jackson 1988 as an example of (4) above, but I’d argue that Jackson’s 1988 campaign was more an example of (1).
