Paul Begala, best known for being an adviser to Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, recently made some waves when he told late-night show host Bill Maher, “The Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge.” He joked that Democrats have two secret labs, “One in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class.” He added, “It’s working wonderfully.”
Sadly, I agree. I represented the 3rd District of Illinois for 16 years in the House of Representatives until I was defeated in a 2020 Democratic primary election, which reflected the party’s shift. Though I am a former college professor, my base of support came from factory workers, unions, and other working-class and middle-class voters in my Chicagoland district. My opponent was supported by the new progressives: the highly educated, wealthy suburban voters focused on problems I’ve heard voiced in faculty lounges, not in union halls. If these voices seize control and push out the commonsense men and women who built the Democratic Party, it could be electorally disastrous.
To illustrate jokingly how some of his party’s policy proposals alienate middle-class voters, Begala said that when he recently spent time with members of the machinists union in Chicago, not one of them told him, “I really hope you take my tax dollars to pay off the debt of someone who went to Stanford.” I’ve likely spoken to some of these same union members along with countless others like them. Though the Democratic Party was long known as the party of “working families,” many directly complain that the party often seems no longer to care about their jobs, families, and communities. They still talk about Clinton’s bad trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, as well as the granting of permanent normal trade relations to communist China. Unfortunately, former President Barack Obama continued down this same road with the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 countries mostly in southeast Asia, though it was blocked by members of Congress. They saw this as evidence that the party was choosing the investor class over workers.
These voters do not just feel alienated on particular economic concerns but also on a variety of cultural concerns, saying the party appears to have been taken over by the more radical voices in the faculty lounge. We saw this in the race for governor of Virginia last year.
But the area where the shift in the Democratic Party is best documented is abortion. While the party has always supported Roe v. Wade, it was once much more tolerant of other views. This was reflected in the 1976 Democratic Party platform, which said, “We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion.” This allowed room for Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who opposed abortion and favored federal restrictions, as well as for the 45% of Democrats in the House who represented Catholics and southern evangelicals and who voted to support the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal abortion funding when it was first passed in 1976. Many of these Catholic Democrats were union members.
Though the party began taking a stronger stand on abortion in the 1990s, it was tempered by the use of Clinton’s slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” The 1996 platform also explicitly declared that “the Democratic Party is a party of inclusion” and “we respect the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue, and we welcome all our members to participate at every level of our party.” In 2000, the party even took credit for a drop in the abortion rate.
But the Democratic Party changed in the 2000s. In 2004, the “inclusion” language was eliminated from the platform, and in 2008, the assertion that abortion should be “rare” was dropped. In 2009, 64 House Democrats voted to add Hyde Amendment restrictions to Obamacare, but after the final bill passed without this provision and many of these Democrats lost in 2010, the party seemed to lose interest in including anyone who was not on board with the most extreme abortion position.
In 2016, the Democratic platform called for the elimination of the Hyde Amendment despite it being
supported
by 62% of the public, including 44% of Democrats. In 2020, pro-abortion rights groups made the elimination of the Hyde Amendment a litmus test for presidential candidates, and all Democrats in contention complied — even Joe Biden, who in doing so abandoned a position he had held for almost 45 years.
At the convention, the group Democrats for Life attempted to amend the platform to add the “party of inclusion” language and to eliminate support for late-term abortion after 20 weeks, which it noted was opposed by majorities in 389 out of 435 congressional districts. But these requests for a little space in a “big tent” for the large number of Democrats who do not support an extreme pro-abortion stance were rejected.
As polls show more working-class and middle-class voters turning against the Democratic Party, alarm bells are sounding. The decrease in Hispanic support is especially troubling given that this bloc’s increasing vote strength had been expected to provide the party with an “emerging majority.” Until recently, Democrats were buttressed by the Republican Party’s lack of interest in supporting workers. But it appears this could be changing.
So what should Democrats do? The first step party leaders should take is to start listening to commonsense voters like those in the union halls, and then they must demonstrate that their policy priorities are not being drowned out by the most radical voices in faculty lounges. That is, they should take Begala’s advice and stop embracing ideas that “piss off the working class.”
Daniel Lipinski served as the Democratic House representative for Illinois’s 3rd district from 2005 to 2021.
