Why Do Ds And Rs React Differently to Election Losses?

It’s because of white supremacy.

At his newsletter, Tusk, political scientist Seth Masket has an interesting piece about the different approaches of the two parties. Democrats, he points out, tend to try to moderate in response to political losses. Republicans in contrast double down.

Following the 2016 presidential election, the losing Democrats questioned many things about their party, its decisions, and its nomination processes. They determined they had made a mistake in the nomination of Hillary Clinton and sought to nominate someone perceived as more conventional and more electable in the next election cycle, even though this undermined some core party beliefs about identity and equality. This decision proved successful and the party won in the next cycle.

Following the 2020 presidential election, the losing Republicans largely refused to question core assumptions about their party and its nomination processes. Most decided that their party had been correct in its nomination of Donald Trump, despite his loss, and many in the party insisted, falsely, that he had actually won the election. They largely sought to nominate the same person for the next election cycle, not demanding any moderation or apology from him, and indeed doubled down on his messaging from the previous election. This decision proved successful and the party won in the next cycle.

Masket here is arguing that both approaches seem to work; Democrats often win when they moderate; Republicans often win when they double down. The problem, he says, is that the two perspectives together are “toxic.”

You can have two parties worried about electability and the democratic system can still operate. You can have two intransigent parties and the democratic system can still operate, more or less. But one intransigent party and one party focused on electability means the country will continue to drift in one direction, away from public opinion, away from representative democracy.

Masket’s certainly right that our politics have gone to a bad place. But I think the problem precedes the different party attitudes. Or to put it another way, I think I can explain why the two parties have different attitudes in two words: white supremacy.

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The system is toxic because it’s racist

The differing attitudes of Republicans and Democrats haven’t developed in a vacuum. Rather, they’ve both been shaped by a system which is white supremacist, first in the nuts and bolts of democratic systems, and second in its ideological underpinning.

The first is an empirical fact and is simply uncontrovertible. Because Democrats tend to be concentrated in cities, they are easier to gerrymander, giving Republicans a mild advantage in the House. The electoral college currently gives the GOP a substantial advantage in presidential elections. The Senate bias towards large empty rural mostly white states gives Republicans a huge advantage in that chamber, which in turn gives the GOP disproportionate power over the judiciary.

On top of that, since the Democrats are the party of poorer and more marginalized people, it’s easier to pass voting restrictions which target them. For example, Democratic voters are more likely to be young and more likely to be people of color—two groups which disproportionately lack valid photo ID.

All of these factors combine to mean that Democrats generally need to overperform in order to stay even. To win the Senate and the presidency, Democrats have to capture states which lean further right than the country as a whole, like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.

Democrats, in short, have to appeal to conservative voters if they want to win. That leads them to run to the center. When they lose, they conclude they have not been centristy enough, and that they need to do more to appeal to right leaning white voters—and because of the systematic tilt, they’re often not wrong.

In contrast, Republicans are used to running radical candidates and winning anyway. Or at least, they’re used to running radical candidates and then keeping things close enough to win a reasonable amount of the time.

The playing field is uneven, and the two parties have therefore learned different lessons. The disadvantaged Democrats have learned that they need to compromise if they’re going to win. The Republicans have learned that they don’t. A white supremacist system has created outcomes in which the white identity party has substantial advantages. Both parties know this and respond accordingly.

The imagined ideal voter leans right

In addition to these practical issues, though, I think there’s also an ideological bias. In a white supremacist society, white people are seen as less marked and more natural; they are the neutral embodiment of American civic virtue and American democracy. When leading (disproportionately white) pundits and politicians think about the core voter, the iconic voter, that voter tends to be white. (And often rural as well.)

Democrats constantly ring their hands about their inability to win “white working class” voters. That’s in part a reflection of the fact that white rural voters really do hold a disproportionate amount of power in our system, especially in the senate. But it’s also a function of white supremacy itself, which makes it seem natural or right that white people should be in control.

The ideology interacts with the facts on the ground in ugly ways. After losses, for example, Democrats could double down on voting rights demands; they could point to Washington DC and say, “For fuck’s sake, none of those people can vote! They are disenfranchised; that is bad and we are not going to stand for it any more.”

But they don’t do that, in part because, again, many Democrats, like Republicans, feel deep down that to be legitimate, they should win white voters. They know voting rights are important; they want to protect the rights of their voters. But that commitment often feels abstract. The thing that really feels right, the goal that actuates many of the party leaders, is the dream of becoming again the party of white voters—and of somehow, someway, saving those white voters from their own racism. If we only talked about lowering insulin prices in the right way, Democrats think, if we only proved we are really responsible about budgeting, white voters—working class white voters, rural white voters, even billionaire white voters—would embrace us, and we would be a real legitimate party. Hallelujah.

Republicans do not have this sort of identity crisis because they are in fact the white identity party, and the “ideal” voters mostly vote for their platform of increasingly open bigotry, fascist violence and (not coincidentally) mass disenfranchisement of non-white voters.

There are some caveats here. For example, Trump has alienated voters with more education, which has led the GOP to sacrifice a good chunk of its off year election advantage. But the combination of a system that benefits the white supremacy party and an ideological default which legitimizes the white supremacy party has created a powerful gulf in the way that the two parties see elections.

The toxic split in party attitudes is, then, a result, not a cause, of our toxic white supremacist politics. If Democrats want to change course, they need to go against their own instinctual desire to cower and equivocate, and they need to instead focus on institutional changes which can correct the rightward leaning tilt of our politics. That could create a virtuous circle in which the white identity party no longer seems impervious and (worse) natural.

If Trump’s presidency is as bad a failure as it seems likely to be, there may be room for this kind of sweeping reset of our Democracies systems and presuppositions. Alternately, if Trump’s presidency is as bad a failure as it seems likely to be, we may just no longer have a democracy. At that point, Democrats and everyone else will have a different, and worse, set of problems.