By Chris Satullo
Ruy Teixeira is smarter about modern American politics than me. And you. And just about everyone else who walks on two feet and has opposable thumbs.
Teixeira is a political scientist and denizen of left-of-center think tanks who has written six books. His most famous one, The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), is also the one most often – and most damagingly – misquoted and misunderstood.
Teixeira and his co-author, John Judis, looked at Census and birth rate trends. They concluded that inevitable increases in the Black, Latino, and Asian American percentages of the American electorate would present the Democratic party with an opportunity to build a stable majority – if it did the right things to consolidate support among those groups, and its working-class base.
Unfortunately, that italicized caveat slipped right by a bevy of progressive activists and the rich people who fund them. They took away from the book a sense that the demographic trends the authors cited were an iron-clad political destiny.
They further concluded that this imagined “persons of color” majority exempted them henceforward from worrying how the mass of middle-class American whites perceives the world. In the new, wonderful, woke world they imagine, Democratic strategists no longer need to seek out, consider, or cater to the views of white people they deem insufficiently enlightened.
What has ensued is a cascade of missed opportunities and lost – or closer-than-they-needed-to-be elections (think of phrases like “cling to their guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables,” “abolish ICE” and “defund the police”).
So, now, as the crucial ’22 midterms approach, Teixeira has been launching frantic messages from his blog, the Liberal Patriot, about all the ways Democrats keep shooting themselves in the foot, signaling to centrist voters that they’ve abandoned common sense.
In a key May 2021 post, Teixeira praised the Biden/Pelosi/Schumer approach on pandemic recovery and economic issues as “centrist in the sense that it corresponds to the center of gravity of American public opinion.”
Then he added a sobering but:
This cannot be said of a wide variety of cultural issues that have come to the fore in Democratic party circles and have vigorous advocates within those circles and more broadly in Democratic-adjacent nonprofits, media, and academic institutions. These cannot be said to be centrist in any sense of the term and are typically embraced by only a small percentage of voters overall and are not generally majoritarian even within the Democratic party itself.
Despite that, he said, the tribunes of the progressive left continually deride people who fail to subscribe to their full roster of shibboleths as retrograde, racist, sexist, transphobic and so on. That’s a prescription for losing elections – and close votes on big, progressive ideas in Congress.
In that 2021 blog post, Teixeira proposed a set of nuanced, center-conscious rewrites of progressive views on hot-button issues that he said could gain strong, stable majority support from Americans of all stripes.
And now a pollster has put Teixeira’s handiwork to the test, by running his proposed statements by voters in Wisconsin. The results are a slam-dunk for Teixeira.
I’m indebted to Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark, a Cheesehead through and through, for sharing the results of this poll. I’m just going to quote one of his recent blog posts laying out the numbers:
ON EQUALITY:
“Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.”
66% of Wisconsin Democrats and 73% of state Republican voters agreed with this principle.
ON PATRIOTISM: “America is not perfect, but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.”
71% of Democrats and 93% of Republicans agreed.
ON RACISM: “Discrimination and racism are bad, but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.”
62% of Democrats agreed, as did 91% of Republicans.
“No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.”
55% of Democrats agreed, as did 87% of Republicans.
ON IMMIGRATION:
“America benefits from the presence of immigrants, and no immigrant — even if illegal — should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.”
74% (!) of Democrats and 89% of Republicans agreed.
ON POLICE
“Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong, and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. More and better policing is needed for public safety, and that cannot be provided by ‘defunding the police.’”
69% (!) of Democrats and 91% of Republicans agreed.
ON GENDER IDENTITY
“There are underlying differences between men and women, but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.”
91% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats agreed.
“There are basically two genders, but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.”
Both Democrats (65%) and Republicans (76%), agreed with this statement.
ON EDUCATION:
“Racial achievement gaps are bad, and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.”
64% of Democrats and 91% of Republicans agree.
ON FREE SPEECH:
“Language policing has gone too far. By and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution, or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.”
61% of Democrats agreed as did 91% of Republicans.
Sykes adds that a similar poll conducted in Massachusetts – home, I’d remind you, of those infamous Martha’s Vineyard “lefties” so despised by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – also had results encouraging to Teixeira’s thesis, though less dramatically so than the Wisconsin poll.
You may disagree with parts of Teixeira’s formulations. The question is – if you want to win elections and create majorities big enough to do big things – should you ritually stress where you disagree with the majoritarian views in these polls, or where you do find common ground?
—
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia