Why Do Progressives Keep Losing?

Ronen Tivony / Echoes WIre

To start, let’s ask a few simpler questions:

• Why did Donald Trump win the 2016 Presidential Election?
• Why did Joe Biden win the 2020 Democratic Primary?

Trump’s win in 2016 and Biden’s win in the 2020 primary seem unrelated at first, but they’re more similar than you might realize. Trump and Biden have one thing in common: nobody you know wanted them to be President. All of your friends probably hate Trump, and while some of your friends may have voted for Biden in the primary, they only did so after their first choice dropped out.

Twice in a row, a Presidential contest has yielded an unconscionable outcome for the progressive activist class. But Biden and Trump’s wins are related events with related causes. The reason that progressives can’t seem to beat either moderate Democrats or Republicans is that the progressive worldview — open and enthusiastic about change — is a minority opinion of which the vast majority of Americans are deeply skeptical.

I’m not going to suggest that progressives abandon or sacrifice the policy objectives they (and I) hold. But if progressives do not learn to communicate their policy objectives in the language and values that most voters have, they’ll never win any national elections. If the point of politics is to win elections and improve the lives of vulnerable people, nothing matters if you keep losing. Right now, the progressive movement is losing.

To understand why candidates progressive activists hate keep winning, let’s first turn our focus elsewhere:

• Why does how you feel about this painting predict your political views really accurately?

This painting is called “Coffee Thyme”

The answer comes from social science & psychographics

Psychographics: “the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.”

Psychographic research has identified that openness to new experiences can help predict behavior in everything from our dating choices to our work habits. For now, we’ll focus on the profound impact that psychological openness has on political behavior in America.

Knowing how open voters are to new experiences is the skeleton key to American politics in 2020.

To (over) simplify, openness measures your:

• Comfort with things that are foreign or different from what you are comfortable with
• Willingness to overturn existing structures and norms
• Desire to explore new hobbies or interests

People with high-openness:

• Like foreign cuisines
• Are more comfortable with diversity
• Are less religious
• Pursue higher education disproportionately
• Think that Coffee Thyme is art

People with low-openness

• Avoid new or unknown cuisines
• Are turned off by symbols of diversity and cultural pluralism or change
• Are more religious
• Are less interested in higher education
• Think that Coffee Thyme is not art

A person’s openness is about that person’s view of change. It is not a proxy for moral virtue. People who are low-openness can be moral or immoral, just as people with high-openness can be. People with low-openness are probably different from you but do not deserve your condescension.

Just as your level of openness predicts your attitude towards art, culture, education, and food, openness also predicts your political views very accurately.

(There are a few important exceptions to this rule — we’ll get to those later).

• Openness predicts political ideology very closely:
• Liberals & Progressives → High Openness
• Moderates → Medium Openness
• Conservatives → Low Openness
• Openness has always predicted political ideology well, but relatively recently (last few decades) it has begun to predict vote-choice very well too. In the past, there used to be many Conservative Democrats and Liberal Republicans — that’s much less common now.
• The 2016 election was much more polarized around openness than 2012 or 2008.
• The increasing polarization around openness is why college-educated and urban & suburban voters have become much more Democratic. It’s also why non-college educated and rural voters have become much more Republican.

Understanding how openness impacts vote-choice is key to understanding politics today.

If this does not make intuitive sense, think: How many Romney→Clinton voters do you know? What are their cultural tastes? Do they like abstract art and foreign foods? Do you know many Trump voters who love abstract art and foreign food?

The High-Low Openness divide in politics is a huge problem for Democrats

A useful heuristic:

• ~20% of Americans are high openness
• ~40% are medium openness
• ~40% are low openness

Republicans can win elections by appealing just to voters skeptical of new and foreign ideas. Democrats need to win a coalition that includes high, medium, and low openness voters.

If you are reading this, you may be confused. Almost everyone who will read this is (like me) very open to new experiences. If you graduated from college and live in a big city, you’re probably high openness. As a result, almost everyone I know is high openness — the same is probably true for you!

So you are probably wondering: “How can only 20% of Americans think like me? Everybody I know thinks like me.”

If you are a high openness person living in a big city, you’re living in a funhouse mirror. The cultural, social, and political norms you and your friends hold seem popular and self-evident, but the vast majority of people are skeptical or hostile to those values.

Now, think about who runs progressive political campaigns. Do you think they represent a broad cross-section of society? Or do you think only the highest-openness people become activists?

Obviously, the latter. There is, of course, a tremendous amount of diversity within the progressive movement — people of all races, backgrounds, and experiences — but there’s probably not as much psychographic diversity.

The progressive movement is dominated by people who are very open to new experiences, have a strong preference for diversity, and believe that revolutionary change is good. I personally think these ideas are good, but this perspective is a problem when the keys to electoral majorities are in the hands of voters much less amenable to these values.

Despite making up a majority of voters, people skeptical of structural change remain under-represented in the progressive movement. As a result, the movement has a blind spot when it comes to messaging to these voters.

Why did Donald Trump win the 2016 Election?

Donald Trump upended the traditional GOP playbook by deemphasizing spending cuts and reemphasizing conservative cultural values, especially on immigration. His slogan was “Make America Great Again” — appealing to the grievances of low-openness Whites who resented their loss of cultural dominance.

Trump’s message lost a lot of higher-openness votes in the suburbs that Romney won, but won even more low-openness votes in rural areas.

Hillary Clinton ran a campaign explicitly on promoting cultural openness. Her slogan was “Stronger Together” — a deliberate contrast with Trump, emphasizing her belief in racial equality and cultural pluralism — in other words, the high openness-playbook.

Clinton’s strategy did win suburban & college-educated votes but lost a huge number of rural votes.

Hillary Clinton still won a plurality of voters, but the electoral college gives greater weight to rural voters, handing Trump the election.

Ironically, Barack Obama, despite being African American himself, did much better than Hillary Clinton did with voters skeptical of multiculturalism.

Unlike Clinton, Obama avoided speaking explicitly about race as a candidate — instead, he focused on an economic fairness message, while de-emphasizing race.

Meanwhile, Romney’s message was much more open to multiculturalism, emphasizing small-government conservatism, without explicitly disavowing cultural pluralism.

For low-openness voters who still value a strong social safety net (this is a large, historically Democratic constituency) Obama was a compelling candidate. He deemphasized multiculturalism in his message, so low-openness voters felt less threatened by his candidacy. Since there are more low-openness voters than high-openness ones, Obama made the right tradeoff and Clinton made the wrong one.

If you are a high-openness progressive, you didn’t realize Clinton’s mistake until she lost. That’s because it is hard for a progressive to intuit how unpopular the high-openness worldview is with most voters.

Opinion polling failed to capture the error Clinton was making.

Over the last decade, fewer and fewer people have been responding to polls — which means that polls risk getting an unrepresentative sample of voters.

Increasingly, college-educated voters respond to polls much more than non-college-educated voters. Since we also know that college education correlates with openness, we realize that unless pollsters make adjustments, they’ll overstate the percentage of voters who are high-openness. This leads to a sample that’s way more liberal than the actual electorate.

In 2016, many pollsters did not realize:

• Education was going to correlate with vote choice much more than in previous years
• They were oversampling college-educated voters

The impact of this mistake was a significant 2016 polling error in states with a lot of Obama-voting white voters without a college degree: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota. Remember, since college-education correlates to openness, this means polls were missing low-openness voters.

• All of these states saw significant polling errors because pollsters were over-sampling high-openness voters and not making any attempt to reweight their responses.
• The pollsters who did make sampling adjustments got Trump’s surge right. However, they were in the minority.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election because he swapped a small number of high-openness Romney voters for a much larger pool of low-openness Obama voters. He did this by emphasizing White identity, skepticism about multiculturalism, and opposition to immigration. The political class didn’t see this coming because of their own cognitive biases towards openness and because of methodological flaws in opinion polling.

Why Did Joe Biden win the 2020 Democratic Primary?

One of the lessons for progressives after the 2016 primary is that it’s impossible to win the Democratic Primary while getting crushed with African American voters. Bernie knew this, and to his credit, spent a lot of time staffing a genuinely diverse campaign that brought racial justice issues to the forefront.

Similarly, the other campaigns in the race that were either explicitly progressive or at least quasi-progressive saw that success with voters of Color required a strong emphasis on racial justice.

In theory, this message should have drawn a sharp contrast with Biden, whose own record on race and cultural issues was much more conservative than the rest of the field. Basically all of the liberal and progressive candidates in the race supported decriminalizing border entry, which Biden opposed. Kamala Harris attacked Biden on his opposition to busing as well.

However, with the primary almost in the rear-view mirror and Biden the presumptive winner, it’s clear that his rivals’ attempts to turn to the left on issues of culture and diversity did not win enough African American voters.

To understand why the majority of African American voters powered Biden to victory while rejecting the more progressive candidates in the race, let’s go back to what we know about openness. The general rule is that high-openness people are liberals and low-openness people are conservatives.

But this rule does not apply well to African Americans. Since almost all African American voters are Democrats, there are millions of low-openness African American Democrats. This is not true of White voters — there are very few low-openness White Democrats. Low-openness Whites are just Republicans now.

Subsequently, African American Democrats are much more psychographically diverse than their White progressive peers — they’re on average much older, more skeptical of radical change, and more religious.

There is, of course, a genuine “Black Left” that is, like the Left generally, very open to new experiences and change. But as Perry Bacon Jr. writes:

What’s different for the black left — as opposed to the white left — is that its views are very deeply in tension with the broader black Democratic electorate.

Public opinion polling backs this up as well — on issues of culture, diversity, and immigration (issues classically correlated with openness) Democrats of Color, especially African American Democrats, are much more conservative than their White peers. This makes sense given what we know: Whites who are skeptical of diversity are already Trump voters, while voters of Color skeptical of cultural change still view the Democrats as their best bet.

The scale of the divide between white progressives and Democrats of Color is striking, however.

Writing for the New York Times, Eric Kaufmann points to startling examples of White Progressives holding significantly more progressive attitudes towards diversity than the average Democrat of Color.

• 56% of White Democrats want to increase immigration levels, but only 32% of African American Democrats do.
• 83% of White Democrats believe racial diversity made America better, but only 54% of African American Democrats do.
• 91% of White Democrats with a post-graduate degree believed it was racist to limit non-White immigration to “maintain the White share of the population.” 73% of all White Democrats agree. Only 58% of Democrats of Color do

The conventional wisdom of progressives was that the key to winning Black voters was to emphasize themes of racial justice and diversity. This makes sense because progressive activists of Color are likely high-openness themselves and probably believe that a message of diversity and pluralism is effective.

However, emphasizing diversity, especially immigration, is the wrong strategy for winning African American voters, many of whom are the most conservative voters in the Democratic electorate. In fact, polling suggests that emphasizing diversity was an actively counter-productive strategy that harmed the candidacies of progressive candidates.

Enter Joe Biden

From the start, progressive activists hated Joe Biden’s campaign. In the face of Donald Trump, Joe Biden didn’t have much new to offer:

• He emphasized his service in Obama’s White House, which had come under increased scrutiny from the Left
• His policy positions were to the right of the field on every major issue, especially on immigration and culture issues.
• He argued for incremental change, claiming that voters wanted “results, not a revolution”

Despite a record on racial issues that is problematic at best, Biden dominated with African American voters, especially more conservative, low-openness Southern African Americans.

Put more simply: African American voters, especially in the South, are much more Conservative than you probably think, so it should not be surprising that they voted for Biden, the continuity candidate.

I’m a White liberal, so I’m obviously not well-equipped to explain why Biden clicked with African American voters. However, Congressman Jim Clyburn gives a clue:

“I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us”

Clyburn succinctly explains the case for Biden — a case that the majority of African American voters bought in the 2020 primary. His case was not that Biden has the best racial justice platform, nor is that Biden is a policy innovator capable of creating revolutionary change.

Instead, Clyburn espoused the defining belief of a low-openness voter — in times of crisis, embrace certainty and safety, the person you know and the person who knows you. Biden had decades of trust and credibility banked with these voters, and in 2020 he cashed in.

Nothing typifies this dynamic quite like this interaction Biden had with Jacquelyn, an African American security guard at the New York Times building. While the New York Times Editorial Board seemed disdainful at best of Biden’s campaign during their meeting, Biden won Jacqueline’s adoration. She said, “I love you, I do. You’re like my favorite.”

There are a lot more Jacquelyns in the Democratic Primary electorate than there are members of the NYT Editorial Board.

Unfortunately, even though the progressive movement does care about the Jacquelyns of the world, it isn’t messaging to her.

While a crowded field of progressives competed for a slice of high-openness Democratic voters, Joe Biden easily consolidated the largest slice of low-openness Democrats — elderly African Americans. His victory in South Carolina cleared the field of moderate candidates who appealed to college-educated Whites, who joined Biden’s campaign and won him the nomination. Progressives didn’t ignore low-openness African Americans in South Carolina, they just failed to communicate a message that landed.

What can Progressives learn from their failures?

Most people are skeptical of big revolutionary change. Most people are especially skeptical of diversity. That doesn’t make them bad people, it’s just a fact. If progressives want to make the world a better place, they have to find new ways of convincing people who are afraid of big change and increased diversity to not just agree with progressive policies but to trust the progressive movement to represent them and their values.

Progressives do not need to fundamentally change their policy proposals. They just need to communicate their ideas in a way that honors more traditional values. This is difficult because most progressives instinctively oppose traditional values.

Since progressives see the world differently from most people, they can’t trust their gut when it comes to a political message. Instead of messaging what feels good to them, progressives should rigorously test their message with people who don’t share their worldview.