Still Emerging?

On the face of it, the 2004 election results got a little egg on the faces of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Bush improved his margins among women and hispanics and consolidated his majority in the South, exceeding his 2000 performance by 3%. So is the Emerging Democratic Majority dead on arrival?

In the American Prospect, Judis and Teixeira try to explain why their overarching thesis still holds true. They argue that Bush's victory is no grand departure, but just one more hoary re-assembling of the Reagan coalition, which is showing real signs of weakness. Bush's gains among Latinos were restricted to a few states, while his gains among women seem driven entirely by the War on Terror.

The Democrats continued to show strength among singles, the young and minorities; and also developed important new institutional resources. And the Democrats did suprisingly well given Kerry's real limitations as a candidate (his inability to present a clear economic or foreign policy position and his patrician demeanor). So given a decline in the salience of foreign policy and continued Democratic re-organization, we might see a new political majority after all.

Furthermore, Judis and Teixeira diss the idea that the exurbs are delivering the Republicans an insurmountable advantage. Exurbs are still a very small part of the population, and the combined share of exurb and rural voters has remained stagnant at around 25%. So no worries there.

For those of you who had read The Emerging Democratic Majority, this should all be very re-assuring. The basic thesis of the work is that demographic changes (larger numbers of seculars and minorities and the rise of the left-leaning "ideapolis"), social developments (increasing secularization) and economic re-structuring (the proletarianization of professionals) will gradually give the Democrats a political advantage.

What has always bothered me about this analysis is that it assumes past is prologue. There is no reason to necessarily believe that Latinos will remain a bedrock of Democratic voting or that we will keep now-young voters as they mature. I don't believe Judis and Teixeira really think that we just need to sit back and wait for things to go our way, but it certainly encourages that tendency.

Ultimately what Judis and Teixeira give us is a map of political opportunities. They tell us where we should look as we try to construct a majority coalition: Latinos, professionals, and the white working class. We know that we need to get those voters, but we still don't know HOW to get them. If you accept their analysis (which is in the main pretty good), what he have is an agenda, not a strategy.

Furthermore, there are contrary tendencies in the electorate which might disprove the Teixiera-Judis hypothesis: the further displacement of economic with cultural populism by the white working class and Latinos, the shrinking of old (liberal) urban centers and unions, and a continued perception of foreign policy crisis, as well as old-fashioned vote fraud, might make the Democratic majority far further away than we might like.

We still have a lot of work to do.