Post by robeiae on Jan 31, 2017 7:43:15 GMT -5
Interesting--if poorly titled--piece: Could Someone Like John Edwards Have Saved the Democrats?
A taste:
I think it's an interesting thought experiment; eight years of a technocrat now seems--in hindsight, to be sure--to be a clear set-up for a bit of populism (which helps to explain Sanders' appeal for many, as well).
A taste:
If Democrats really wanted to follow Judis and Teixeira’s script, they probably should have nominated someone like John Edwards in 2008. Obviously, Edwards himself would have been a disastrous choice for the presidential nod. Late-breaking revelations about an extramarital affair (while his wife was terminally ill), a child from that affair and subsequent indictments for violating campaign finance law would (and should) stop any presidential campaign in its tracks.
But Edwards (sans the moral failures) seems like the sort of politician who could weld together Judis and Teixeira’s majority. Edwards was an economic progressive. His memorable “Two Americas” speeches focused on economic inequality between the wealthiest set of Americans and the rest of the country, and his campaign often emphasized increasing access to health care, improving education and hammering predatory lenders. He was liberal on abortion and LGBT issues (in the context of his time), but he was for the death penalty and at least tried to appear deferential to gun owners. Maybe most importantly, Edwards was able to take liberal policy positions without projecting cultural cosmopolitanism. If you roll all of that together, you get something like what Judis and Teixeira described – a fiscal and social liberal who could still make a credible appeal to white working-class voters.
A candidate like Edwards would probably not do as well with racial minorities as an Obama-era Democrat, but he or she would have other advantages. For example, a North Carolina county-by-county regression model shows that in 2016 Hillary Clinton outperformed Edwards’s 1998 showing in highly educated and racially diverse areas, but Edwards’s vote share went up as the rate of college education among whites went down. Clinton narrowly lost the state, but if Edwards’s 1998 county-wide vote shares were applied to the 2016 electorate, he would have barely won.
But Edwards (sans the moral failures) seems like the sort of politician who could weld together Judis and Teixeira’s majority. Edwards was an economic progressive. His memorable “Two Americas” speeches focused on economic inequality between the wealthiest set of Americans and the rest of the country, and his campaign often emphasized increasing access to health care, improving education and hammering predatory lenders. He was liberal on abortion and LGBT issues (in the context of his time), but he was for the death penalty and at least tried to appear deferential to gun owners. Maybe most importantly, Edwards was able to take liberal policy positions without projecting cultural cosmopolitanism. If you roll all of that together, you get something like what Judis and Teixeira described – a fiscal and social liberal who could still make a credible appeal to white working-class voters.
A candidate like Edwards would probably not do as well with racial minorities as an Obama-era Democrat, but he or she would have other advantages. For example, a North Carolina county-by-county regression model shows that in 2016 Hillary Clinton outperformed Edwards’s 1998 showing in highly educated and racially diverse areas, but Edwards’s vote share went up as the rate of college education among whites went down. Clinton narrowly lost the state, but if Edwards’s 1998 county-wide vote shares were applied to the 2016 electorate, he would have barely won.
