The world’s oldest political party set an all-time record Tuesday night by fielding 12 presidential candidates on one stage in Westerville, Ohio. A suburb of Columbus, the fastest-growing major metropolitan area in the Midwest, Franklin County has voted Republican in all but one presidential election for a half-century (1944-92) but has voted Democratic in six elections since.
It’s a fitting home for a party that has become increasingly dependent on and dominated by white, college-educated voters, even as it has lost support in central factory towns and working-class constituencies.
As I argue in my recent book, How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), the Democratic Party, since its founding in 1832, has been a coalition of outside groups, people who are considered atypical Americans but who, if they stick together, can constitute a majority in the country.
But keeping these diverse groups together can be challenging because they often disagree on crucial issues. A poignant example: candidate Beto O’Rourke’s insistence on denying tax breaks to churches that don’t support same-sex marriage.
This could close many historically black churches, Orthodox synagogues and Muslim mosques. So we have a clear disagreement between two overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies: secular college graduates and traditionally religious black churchgoers.
National Democrats, eager to include even the factions, have devised rules that allow candidates to receive as little as 2 percent support at the debate stage—which encourages those with little support to attack the frontrunner. In the first three debates, Joe Biden was the target. In Westerville, it was Elizabeth Warren.
Warren’s support comes disproportionately from white college graduates, and her “I have a plan for this” proposals, while theoretically aimed at people of modest means, appeal mostly to the upper echelons of society. But her specificity disappears when it comes to the price tag of her version of Bernie Sanders’ original “Medicare for All.”
Pete Buttigieg, who plays well with educated Iowans, challenged her stubborn, Trump-like refusal to acknowledge, as Sanders does, that middle-class taxes “will go up.” “There’s no plan that explains how Senator Warren’s Medicare for All plan created a multitrillion-dollar hole,” the South Bend mayor said in his attack. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Amy Klobuchar, who hasn’t clicked in the polls, interjected. “I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the bill.”
The closest Warren came to an answer was when she said, “(C)osts will go up for the wealthy and big corporations, and costs will go down for hard-working middle-class families.” She takes obvious pleasure in proposing a 3 percent wealth tax on the super-rich, as well as federal and labor oversight of large corporations. That’s “wokenomics,” said liberal commentator Van Jones.
But this “urge to punish” — what Michael Goodwin of the New York Post calls it — may seem unattractive and alienate liberal voters in the wealthiest suburbs, where Sanders’s support waned four years ago.
Before the debate, Warren seemed well-positioned to absorb the votes that Sanders had before his heart attack on Oct. 1. But while Warren was on the defensive, Sanders was vocal and energetic, and he is expected to receive endorsements from up-to-date Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar over the weekend. Warren looks set to continue to face powerful opposition from the socialist left.
Other Democrats argued over other issues that typically pitted one Democratic constituency against another. Cory Booker supported taxpayer-funded abortions, while Tulsi Gabbard, echoing Bill Clinton in the 1990s, said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Buttigieg, while rejecting Medicare for All, praised a ban on assault weapons and called for a Supreme Court fill-out, something Biden has vocally opposed.
For two generations, Democrats have been skeptical of many military interventions and have generally supported free speech. During this debate, Biden and Buttigieg condemned President Donald Trump’s troop withdrawal from Syria over Gabbard’s powerful opposition. For reasons that are unclear, Kamala Harris repeated her call for Twitter to shut down Trump’s account — something many Republicans wish it had done a while ago, but that suggests a disturbing pleasure in stifling speech. Joe Biden was questioned, cautiously, about his son Hunter Biden’s $600,000 job at a Ukrainian gas company — a topic that Democrats and NBC anchors seem desperate to avoid.
Last week, I wrote that the Democratic favorite in the faute de mieux was Elizabeth Warren. We’re still waiting to see who, if anyone, is the mieux.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a longtime contributor to The Almanac of American Politics.
