The Democrats Need Another Bill Clinton - Seib, WSJ
(Seib was an excellent political analyst of the WSJ. Now retired but occasionally makes contributions).
On Nov. 4, 1980, Democrats had a very bad night. Republican Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who was bogged down by inflation and foreign crises. Reagan—someone Democratic leaders once thought would be seen by voters as too extreme and even dangerous—didn’t merely win. He won decisively, carrying 44 states. Just as damaging for Democrats, the rout extended to Congress, where Republicans flipped an astonishing 12 Senate seats to take control for the first time in a quarter-century, while also gaining ground in the House.
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What do Democrats do now?
They might want to start by considering what their party did after that 1980 rebuke. It began a long and deep rethink of how it had lost its grip on a key element of its constituency—voters who were called Reagan Democrats then and who today are known simply as working-class Americans. Then as now, Democrats found they had ceased communicating effectively with that broad swath of Americans on economic issues and, just as importantly, on cultural questions. That long rethink eventually led Democrats to reposition themselves more firmly in the country’s ideological center. It ultimately produced the candidacy and two-term presidency of Bill Clinton, a politician with a gift for listening and talking to working-class Americans. The parallels between then and now aren’t perfect, and the economic prescription Clinton brought to his party would likely fall flat with today’s electorate. Still, a similar call for a re-evaluation is arising already among Democrats.
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It’s impossible to analyze the Democrats’ struggles today, and the potential paths forward, without understanding how the party has changed shape in recent years. A party once closely identified with trade unionists and rural Americans has come to be dominated more and more by college-educated urbanites. That demographic evolution has exacerbated the loss of contact with working-class voters, who experience an economy quite different from the one felt by the elites.
During the Covid pandemic, for example, the college-educated by and large could keep working comfortably from home, while many who earned a living with their hands had no such luxury. During the recovery from Covid, the paths separated further. To a large degree, those with financial advantages were protected from the effects of the post-pandemic inflation and may even have benefited from it. The stock market in which their 401(k) accounts were invested rose dramatically. Meantime, inflation was traumatizing those who lived paycheck to paycheck.
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Clinton became the champion of economic policies that thrilled moderates but that liberals derided as Reagan lite: free trade, a balanced budget and economic globalization. In today’s populist environment, few in either party would follow this path, but in the 1990s it helped to produce a long economic expansion and actual federal budget surpluses (briefly).
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