To return from the political wilderness, the party must reconnect with working-class voters on both style and substance. Clinton’s success in the 1990s shows how.

Bill Clinton campaigns in 1992, center. Clockwise from bottom left: Vice President Kamala Harris; protesters in October 2020; Trump supporters celebrate his victory on Tuesday night; Ronald Reagan in 1980. CHANTAL JAHCHAN

On Nov. 4, 1980, Democrats had a very bad night. Republican Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who was bogged down by inflation and foreign crises. Reagan—someone Democratic leaders once thought would be seen by voters as too extreme and even dangerous—didn’t merely win. He won decisively, carrying 44 states.

Just as damaging for Democrats, the rout extended to Congress, where Republicans flipped an astonishing 12 Senate seats to take control for the first time in a quarter-century, while also gaining ground in the House.

Flash forward 44 years, and the Democrats have just suffered another stinging defeat, one with similar causes and with consequences potentially as far-reaching. Kamala Harris was defeated by Donald Trump, failing to carry any of the key swing states she was counting on. Democrats lost ground in some 90% of the counties across the country compared with the presidential vote four years ago, while also giving up control of the Senate and possibly failing in their hopes of taking over the House.

President-elect Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy on election night in 1980, when Reagan won 44 states. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

What do Democrats do now?

They might want to start by considering what their party did after that 1980 rebuke. It began a long and deep rethink of how it had lost its grip on a key element of its constituency—voters who were called Reagan Democrats then and who today are known simply as working-class Americans. Then as now, Democrats found they had ceased communicating effectively with that broad swath of Americans on economic issues and, just as importantly, on cultural questions.

That long rethink eventually led Democrats to reposition themselves more firmly in the country’s ideological center. It ultimately produced the candidacy and two-term presidency of Bill Clinton, a politician with a gift for listening and talking to working-class Americans.

The parallels between then and now aren’t perfect, and the economic prescription Clinton brought to his party would likely fall flat with today’s electorate. Still, a similar call for a re-evaluation is arising already among Democrats. “The first thing you’ve got to do is what I called reality therapy,” says Al From, a Democratic Party operative who launched the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist think tank that became the wellspring of the Clinton philosophy. “Reality therapy is you’ve got to be honest about what has happened and why you are losing.”

James Carville, who was Clinton’s political guru, believes that Democrats need to erase the perception they have been pulled too far left on cultural issues, crime and immigration. “What killed the Democrats…was a sense of disorder,” he said this week on “Politics War Room,” a podcast he hosts with journalist Al Hunt. “And part of the sense of disorder was the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era…the image stuck in people’s minds that people wanted to defund the police, that they wanted to empty the prisons.”

Bill Clinton, left, shakes hands with steelworkers while campaigning in West Virginia, July 1992. Clinton had a gift for listening and talking to working-class Americans. PHOTO: STEPHAN SAVOIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It’s impossible to analyze the Democrats’ struggles today, and the potential paths forward, without understanding how the party has changed shape in recent years. A party once closely identified with trade unionists and rural Americans has come to be dominated more and more by college-educated urbanites. That demographic evolution has exacerbated the loss of contact with working-class voters, who experience an economy quite different from the one felt by the elites.

During the Covid pandemic, for example, the college-educated by and large could keep working comfortably from home, while many who earned a living with their hands had no such luxury. During the recovery from Covid, the paths separated further. To a large degree, those with financial advantages were protected from the effects of the post-pandemic inflation and may even have benefited from it. The stock market in which their 401(k) accounts were invested rose dramatically. Meantime, inflation was traumatizing those who lived paycheck to paycheck.

Similarly, technology has been a boon for many college-educated Americans, opening up opportunities and making their work more efficient. For many blue-collar Americans, technology has simply been a job killer.

The growing economic gap between top and bottom has opened up a hole in the middle of the Democratic Party. “We have a strange coalition: suburban and higher-educated people and poor minorities,” says Jim Kessler, executive vice president of Third Way, a think tank of centrist Democrats. “These are not people who talk to each other much.”

The effect was seen in this year’s vote. The Associated Press’s VoteCast, a survey of over 120,000 registered voters, found that Harris won a majority of voters with incomes below $25,000 and above $100,000, while Trump won every income bracket in between.

There were other indicators of a fading attachment to the working class. Trump won 64% of whites without a college degree, including 68% of men in that category. Among households with a union member, Trump essentially tied with Harris, the nominee of a Democratic Party that once proudly wore a union label.  

Supporters of Donald Trump at campaign rally in Reading, Pa., on Monday. PHOTO: ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Harris fared significantly worse at the polls than President Joe Biden did four years ago. Biden, who had long stood roughly in the ideological middle of his party, won the Democratic nomination in 2020 over more liberal challengers, including Harris.

“But the Biden presidency moved to the left pretty quickly,” says Kessler. “They got a lot of things accomplished, and a lot of centrist things accomplished too. But ultimately I think they were listening to interest groups, not voters. They forgot about the border until it was too late. They funded the police but didn’t really talk about some of the progressive excesses that were happening in the cities. They didn’t aggressively address inflation, at least in terms of talking about it.”

To pull the country out of the Covid slump, Biden pushed for an economic stimulus package so large it added to inflation. He also aggressively supported forgiveness of federal college loans, a position with great appeal to college-educated Democrats but one that rankles many in the working class. “Basically they’re asking people who don’t go to college to pay for forgiving the loans of the people who do,” says From.

The changing demographics of the Democratic Party has also affected its approach to cultural issues. Issues that are important to better-educated urbanites—police brutality, racial equality, gay and transgender rights—have risen in prominence and priority. Those issues simply don’t have the same resonance for many parts of the old Democratic coalition—including some Black and Latino voters, as this year’s vote showed.

Immigration is a similarly divisive issue. Highly educated voters tend to view immigrants as an asset to the country, while many in the working class view them more as a threat to the economy and to public order.

Vice President Harris sought to pivot toward the center on some of these charged issues. discarding her previous opposition to fracking and support for decriminalizing border crossings. But that didn’t stop the Trump campaign from using cultural issues against her. Research by AdImpact, a firm that tracks ad campaigns and spending, found that the Trump campaign spent $11 million running and rerunning a single ad charging that Harris supported using taxpayer money to pay for sex-change operations for prisoners.

When the Democrats were faced with a similar disconnect from working-class voters in the 1980s, they went through a long and sometimes painful reconsideration of their path. The party’s liberals wanted to turn further leftward, defending government activism in defiance of Reagan’s conservative revolution.

Amazon warehouse employees in Eastvale, Calif., wear masks and practice social distancing, May 2020. The pandemic and the recovery hit working-class Americans harder than white-collar workers. PHOTO: TERRY PIERSON/ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER/ZUMA PRESS

But others, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, thought the path to revival should be paved in the political center. Bill Clinton later wrote that the DLC’s creation was “a turning point in the Democratic Party.” Clinton became the champion of economic policies that thrilled moderates but that liberals derided as Reagan lite: free trade, a balanced budget and economic globalization. In today’s populist environment, few in either party would follow this path, but in the 1990s it helped to produce a long economic expansion and actual federal budget surpluses (briefly).

At the same time, Clinton countered the idea that the Democratic Party had veered too far left on social issues. To rebut the idea that Democrats were weak on law and order, he pushed through a bill called “Cops on the Beat” that put 10,000 additional police officers on America’s streets. To show that Democrats didn’t want an ever-expanding welfare state, he embraced a welfare-reform bill that tied benefits more closely to work. He backed immigration reform legislation that cracked down on illegal border crossings.

“On every one of those things…he knew how to talk to people and understand their emotions and provide solutions,” says Rahm Emanuel, an aide in the Clinton White House who went on to serve as mayor of Chicago and is now America’s ambassador to Japan.

Clinton also made calculated moves to directly challenge his party’s left on cultural issues. During the 1992 campaign, while speaking to a predominantly Black audience at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, he criticized a Black hip-hop artist for comments hostile toward whites, in what came to be known as his “Sister Souljah moment.”

But it wasn’t only his policy positions that enabled Clinton to connect with voters across the racial and educational spectrum. His folksy manner, Southern drawl and fondness for McDonald’s runs gave him visceral appeal to what was known then as the “Bubba vote”—the white, blue-collar men among whom Trump does so well today. Having grown up among working-class Blacks in Arkansas, he had a strong personal connection with Black voters. In 1998, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison referred to Clinton, half-jokingly, as “the first Black president.”

In a June 1992 speech to an audience including Jesse Jackson (right), Clinton criticized Black hip-hop artist Sister Souljah, signaling his challenge to the left on cultural issues. PHOTO: GREG GIBSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It would be hard for a Democratic leader to replicate the Clinton formula today. The country is more polarized now, and moves toward the center certainly would be resisted by the party’s progressive wing, which is more assertive and potent than it was in the 1990s. Still, after the gut punch of this election, simply maintaining the status quo doesn’t seem to be an option for the Democrats. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake calls for the emergence of a kind of “liberal populism,” and her plea for her party is simple: “Have an economic plan and message that works for blue-collar people.”

Carville suggests reviving a party tradition by holding a midterm mini-convention in two years. “Give people something to do,” he says. “Give people something to organize around. Because right now, the entire party—and when I say the entire party, I mean not just the leadership but the rank and file—is dazed, confused.

Excerpts .: Wall Street Journal, Nov. 8, 2024

Gerald F. Seib was the Wall street Journal’s executive Washington editor and Capital Journal columnist and now serves as a visiting fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics.

Illustration photos: clockwise from top left: John Minchillo/Associated Press; Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Andrew Kelly/Reuters; Associated Press; Al Drago/Bloomberg News