In a coalition as broad and diverse as the Democratic Party, I have come to find that intra-party coalitions depend even less on perceived ideology than they do in comparisons between the two parties. Just look at the current sources of strength for Edwards, Clinton and Obama among varying Democratic demographics. Edwards finds strength, for example, both among progressive blog readers and among conservative white Christians. Clinton shows virtually no difference in her support among liberals and moderates, but a large gap in her support among men and women. Obama's varying performance among difference Democratic age groups is larger than his varying performance among different Democratic ideological groups. Further, the gap in Obama's performance among seculars and non-seculars puts all other previously mentioned difference to shame… Also, as Unqualified Offerings recently discussed, Hillary Clinton actually does better among Democrats who think the war in Iraq is lost than those who think it can still be won…. The cultural perceptions behind these intra-party alliances seem at least as important, if not more important, than the ideological determinations. This is especially the case when one considers that cultural perceptions play a major role in determining ideological self-identification.
When I was considering the difficulty the netroots have sometimes found in forming intra-party coalitions, I wonder how much of that difficulty is rooted in the cultural identity of the blogosphere. Our readership is disproportionately drawn from some demographics that are often considered predominately Republican: male, white, high-income, non-union members. While we certainly have high concentrations of some very pro-Democratic demographics as well--secular, Jewish, GLBT, urban, post-graduate degrees--for the most part, even those cultural identifiers cause us to stick out from the Democratic coalition as a whole… Look at Pew's crosstabs on 2008 again. Every single demographic from which we draw a disproportionate number of our readers is less pro-Clinton than every other demographic, and only one of those demographics is ideological. It certainly makes you wonder what the real driving force in this campaign, and even the Democratic Party, really is.
This is not to say that ideological self-identification is not a factor in determining votes in Democratic primaries. Instead, it is simply to suggest that cultural self-identification in the form of age, gender, religion, or ethnicity might cumulatively, or even individually, play a larger role.
This brings us once again to a way in which the MA-05 special election might be a proxy for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. As Matt has discussed, the frontrunner for the seat is moderate Niki Tsongas, while the progressive netroots favorite appears to be Jamie Eldridge. This leads to an important question, one that is very relevant in to the Democratic campaign: what will be the most important determining factor in how people vote in the district, ideological self-identification, or cultural self-identification? If it is the latter, then Tsongas will have an edge on Eldridge, while Eldridge will receive a boost if it is the former (there are other candidates in the MA-05 campaign, but for the purposes of this post I am only looking at Tsongas and Eldridge). This question can also be applied to the Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Richardson campaign for the Democratic nomination, where the candidate perceived to be running the most progressive campaign in terms of policy, John Edwards, also happens to be the only white male in the top two tiers of the campaign. Further, Edwards has begun to struggle in polls over the past two months and, even before he began to struggle, as I noted above his base of support tended to come from the whites, men, older voters and Christians, not from the religious and ethnic minorities that make up the majority of the Democratic coalition. In the American prospect, in an article entitled What Edwards Doesn't Get About Poverty, this situation recently led Garance Franke-Ruta to assert the following:
Today, minorities and women have far greater access to electoral office and, while still underrepresented, one of each is running for president alongside Edwards. Meanwhile, the outsider civil rights movement has given way to a generation that looks to elected minority officials for leadership on questions of social justice and a less combustible form of identity-based representation. As the nobility and controversy of the civil rights era gave way to the controversy without nobility of the identity politics era, politicians learned to shy away from genuine challenges to the social order while simultaneously seeking to claim the moral mantle of historical daring. Today's goal, as Edwards' tour shows, is to be noble without being in the least controversial.(…)
But offered a choice between the promise of new programs and political candidates who might enhance their social standing and political power, many poor people are choosing the promise of social change. They understand intuitively that social equality and increased political power for the disenfranchised leads inexorably to greater economic equality and opportunities for all. Edwards' promise of anti-poverty government action, in this calculus, holds less appeal than the transformative potential of electing the first African-American or first woman president in the nation's history.
The title of Franke-Ruta's article is questionable, since I am not sure what Edwards is supposed to "get" about poverty-that he should somehow become an African-American in order for his message to resonate? Further, the ideological situation here is not cut and dry, since Edwards turn to the left is a phenomenon of the last four years, and since Bill Richardson has arguably the most progressive position on Iraq. However, there does appear to be enough evidence to conclude that cultural self-identification does indeed play a larger role in determining the way voters choose candidates in Democratic primaries than ideological self-identification. That is not good news, either for John Edwards, or for Jamie Edlrdige. It even seems quite possible that Niki Tsongas could end up serving in Congress on the strength of not only women voters, but even of progressive, left-wing women voters.
I should mention an important caveat. In Philadelphia, one of the most segregated cities in America, and where race has for a long time been the primary determining factor in voter behavior in both local Democratic primaries and local general elections, Michael Nutter recently won the Democratic primary for mayor with a plurality of support from all cultural demographic groups. He was, I believe, the first candidate to win both the white and the black vote in a hotly contested Democratic mayoral primary ever, and I have no doubt that he was the first African-American candidate to win the majority of the white vote in a hotly contested Democratic primary. He did this despite significant pushback from much of the African-American Democratic establishment in the city, including several overt claims that Nutter wasn't black enough. The machine remains unrepentant about this as well, since there is even a joke going around among local ward leaders that the Philadelphia Inquirer, aka middle class white media establishment, just waits to see who the 27th ward (aka, the middle class white progressive ward that overthrew the machine in our neighborhood, which also happens to be my ward) endorses before making their picks. Basically, there were a lot of attempts to play the race card on Michael Nutter from all sides, and it simply did not work. Partially, that could be because Michael Nutter is African-American, but mainly I think it was because the highly unpopular sitting mayor, John Street, is also African-American. Given the theories already laid out here, the most likely scenario is that African-Americans were not drawn to the "blacker" candidate, U.S. Congressmen Chaka Fattah, probably because there was already a perception that they had achieved major electoral inroads in the city.
This could indicate that ideological factors become more important in determining voter behavior among groups who feel they have already achieved electoral equality in any given electoral district. In majority-minority Philadelphia, electoral equality in higher office had been achieved for some time among African-Americans, who make up the majority of the Democratic Party. However, that sense of electoral equality has clearly never been achieved when it comes to the, so far, exclusively white male American Presidency. As such, it seems highly unlikely that John Edwards will ever be able to fully compensate for his deficit among women and minorities through a direct, ideological appeal to progressives. Finally, turning to MA-05, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, one wonders if perhaps Niki Tsongas's possible gender advantage will be muted. I doubt that it will, since Nancy Pelosi is probably still be viewed as an anomalous figure among most women whose voting behavior is primarily determined by their desire to see greater female representation in higher office. In Philadelphia, for example, even after African-American Wilson Goode spent eight years as mayor in the 1980's, the 1999 election of John Street was just as polarized along racial lines as any election in Philadelphia history.
If there is a lesson in all of this for progressives, it might be that, at least for now, the most successful electoral coalitions in Democratic primaries for federal races will feature candidates who can combine both ideological and cultural voters. As early as February 2004, during my time in Chicago, I remember watching Barack Obama's campaign in the Illinois Senate primary as a test of this theory, which at the time I was referring to the "Jackson-Dean" theory of primary politics. Jesse Jackson and Howard Dean both made stirring runs for the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2004 respectively, but they both still lost. However, I figured that if there was a way to combine the two coalitions, then progressives could actually win. After Obama's decisive victory, this reason alone has made him someone I would consider endorsing.
Now, don't read this as an endorsement of Obama, because I am not endorsing Obama here, but I did want to throw this idea out there and see what other people thought of it…
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