Washington reads titles, and it reads indexes, but it doesn’t always finish the book. That was the experience of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who published “The Emerging Democratic Majority” shortly before the 2002 midterms. As Republicans held the House and flipped the Senate, their concept got mocked; six years later, their insight that growing urban/suburban “ideopolises” were powering a new electoral coalition was obviously true. On Tuesday, Judis and Teixeira will publish a quasi-sequel to their book: “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” It builds on their analysis of how Democrats lost ground with a crucial part of their coalition — white working-class voters, without whom the “ideopolises” were just blue islands surrounded by red seas. Americana: What mistakes have Democrats made since then that imperiled the “emerging Democratic majority?” Ruy Teixeira: We did have an argument in the book about the influence of demographic change — how the dynamic metropolitan areas of the country were changing, the role of professionals. What people really latched onto was the rise of the non-white population, and the decline of the white population. But in our analysis, we very specifically pointed out that while Democrats may not carry the white working class in the future, it’s essential for them to maintain a strong minority share of it. If that goes south on them, the political arithmetic just doesn’t work. That part was kind of shunted aside. In 2008, the way people tended to interpret that election was a new Democratic majority from the rising American electorate. They forgot about the fact that Obama did relatively well among white working-class voters, including in the Midwest. Democrats get wiped out in 2010, but Obama bounces back in 2012, partially because he manages to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. That’s not the story that’s told after 2012. It’s the bowdlerized version of our thesis, that it’s all about demographics. Americana: What opportunities did Obama have, but not take, to change this trajectory? John Judis: Let’s say one thing that he did do right, which was the auto bailout. In 2012, that really wins him the election; he gets Michigan and he gets Ohio on that basis. But his strategists got this weird idea that independents are worried about deficits. They supported the sequester, they really didn’t fight the Republicans on that stuff, and as a result, the Great Recession dragged on. Democrats in the 1990s bought into a soft version of neoliberal economics. Obama, despite what he promised in his campaign, really was a continuation of that approach, not a break from it. Americana: Right, and you tell a recurring story of Democrats getting elected — starting with Carter — and ditching what worked because of K Street lobbying. Why does that keep happening? John Judis: Let’s go back to 1984. In that election, Mondale really thinks that if he gets the AFL-CIO endorsement, he’ll have workers; if he has a female running mate, he’ll have women; if he has the civil rights groups, he’ll get minority voters. And it doesn’t work out. The AFL-CIO keeps hemorrhaging members in the 1980s, because of Reagan, so it’s really weak. By the early 90s there’s a kind of alliance in Washington between Wall Street and the CEOs, and a lot of the groups that come out of the 60s — feminists, civil rights, environmental groups. That prevails in the politics that Obama follows. Hillary Clinton runs on that in 2016 and loses. Biden starts to get away from that, and that’s been his strength. Americana: Right, and a lot of what you talked about, Biden is doing – leveling the playing field for workers, infrastructure, labor, not pursuing new trade deals. But I don’t see a lot of credit for it. In polling, people believe Donald Trump thinks more about their needs than Biden. Why hasn’t that changed? John Judis: Inflation is poisonous. Absolutely poisonous. And I think that that’s eroded a lot of Biden’s support. The policies themselves are too technical. A lot of them are good — the CHIPS Act is great. But companies are fighting it. They want to be able to basically internationalize their products and rely on Chinese manufacturing. They don’t want to bring manufacturing home. Ruy Teixeira: If you look at the underlying economic data on wages and income, basically, not much good has happened under Biden. If you compare the pre-pandemic Trump years with the Biden administration, people think the Trump economy was better, because for a lot of them, it was. This is not to say that Trump was a great economic policy guy, and Biden isn’t, but these are the realities. You’ll hear people say: “What’s wrong with these people? Why aren’t they grateful for all the wonderful things that the Biden administration has done? They’re probably just misinformed or listening too much to Fox News!” I think that’s pretty tone deaf. Americana: You retell the story of Ralph Northam here, and how what you call the “shadow party” of interest groups called for him to resign over his yearbook photo, along with the entire Democratic field. Then polling comes out that shows most Black voters are fine with Northam. What was the lesson? Ruy Teixeira: That really exemplifies that the groups that purport to speak for these vast sectors of the population, like Back voters, or Hispanic voters, or women, frequently do not. Those voters are much more moderate, much less concerned with a lot of the issues that animate these groups. The market is speaking — minority, working-class voters are leaving. That’s bringing home to the Democrats that bringing the groups that claim to represent these people, and sort of mushing them together into a coalition, is actually not effective. Americana: In 2002, you wrote that some Republican attitudes about gay people were alienating: “Americans see conservative attempts to punish and stigmatize gays as bigotry and intolerance.” I hear that argument made to contradict your chapter on “gender identity” in this book, that maybe this isn’t popular now, but let’s check back in 10 years. Is that wrong? John Judis: I come out of the 60s and early 70s. Gay liberation, to some extent, was anti-family at that point. But when Andrew Sullivan comes along with his gay marriage idea, that really transforms everything, and it becomes a viable movement. With trans stuff, we’re against discrimination, but there’s an extent to which this thing is going just completely overboard, the way that movements do. Biological men being in women’s sports, demanding the whole transformation of language, insisting that a trans woman is really a woman, it’s radical in the bad sense, in the way that a lot of movements were. I don’t think in 10 or 15 years that a lot of what is seen now as the extremes to that movement will become acceptable. Ruy Teixeira: The whole idea makes fundamental claims about science that are extremely debatable and wrong. Basically, there are two biological sexes. It is, in fact, salient what biological sex you are. Nobody has the right to puberty blockers. That’s not a civil rights issue. That’s a policy question about what is good for children with gender dysphoria. No, I don’t think that in 10 or 15 years, everybody’s going to be on board and say, yeah, trans women are women, or say let’s pass out puberty blockers like candy. Americana: Since you started writing the new book, have Democrats done anything to move in the right direction? On economic policy, we talked about that. I don’t think I’ve heard a Democrat say “defund the police” in three years. John Judis: In 2020, I don’t think there were 10 politicians running for federal office who said “defund the police.” Ruy Teixeira: The point we’re making is that there’s this shadow party that becomes identified with what Democrats stand for. In the State of the Union, Joe Biden said: Fund the police, fund the police. That was the inoculation against the charges that Republicans were making. The problem is that policies that are being pursued by Democratic leaders in a lot of parts of the country, are, in fact, implicated in rising crime and disorder. Bail reform — very important issue, but it’s not redounded to the benefit of the Democrats. They’re associated with disorder in the streets, the harm reduction strategy, people shooting up in the middle of places that are run by Democrats. We’re talking about the need for a Sister Souljah moment for the Democrats on some of these issues. Joe Biden has been extremely loath to do this. Democrats are so afraid of the blowback they’ll get on social media, and from the progressive left in the party. | 
