Democrats once counted on the votes of blue-collar workers, but two rival teams of consultants saw change coming. Their fight over the party’s future still echoes today.
From FDR through LBJ, the Democratic Party’s playbook was simple: champion working people, labor unions, and economic populism while Republicans owned the country club set. Those battle lines have not just blurred — they’ve been completely redrawn. Today, Democrats typically dominate America’s wealthiest zip codes while Republicans claim the mantle of the working class.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, historian Timothy Shenk — author of Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics — takes us behind the scenes of this historic realignment.
Arguing that the Democratic Party’s transformation was neither accidental nor inevitable, he traces the seismic shift to a hard-fought rivalry between two teams of party consultants and strategists: Stan Greenberg and James Carville on one side, and Doug Schoen and Mark Penn on the other,
Shenk shows how Bill Clinton’s presidency became ground zero for this realignment, how Barack Obama’s winning coalition was fundamentally misunderstood, and why the traditional explanations for the exodus of working-class voters from the Democratic tent don’t tell the full story.
As the ground shifts beneath both parties’ feet, Shenk’s insights could not be more timely or revealing about the future of American democracy.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. From the New Deal through the Great Society, the formula seemed simple, democrats were the party of working people, labor unions, and economic populism. Republicans represented business interests and the country club set. The lines were clear, the divisions obvious, and the political playbook was well-worn and reliable.
Today, that playbook has been shredded. We live in a world where Democrats often capture the highest-earning zip codes, while Republicans claim the mantle of the working class. A world where cultural divisions trump economic interests, where sophisticated data analytics replace gut instinct, and where political consultants have become the high priests of modern campaigns.
How did we get here? What forces transform, not just American politics, but particularly center-left parties around the globe? What does it mean for the future of democracy? Our guest today brings us a fascinating window into the transformation through the bitter rivalry of two Democratic strategists who helped shape it.
My guest, Timothy Shenk, is an assistant professor of history at the George Washington University and a senior editor at Dissent magazine, and he’s the author of the new book Left Adrift, in which he shows us how the world we live in today was created not just in the spotlight of elections, but in the back rooms where the real architecture of modern politics was designed. It is my pleasure to welcome Timothy Shenk here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Tim, thanks so much for joining us.
Timothy Shenk: Thank you. It was my pleasure to listen to that introduction. Good stuff. I want to read that book.
Jeff: There you go. Well, thanks so much for being here today. At the core of this book, in this discussion of the realignment of our politics, are these two political consultants, Democratic consultant, Democratic strategist. Why did you pick them and who are they?
Timothy: So the names are Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. Now, those might not exactly be household names, but their partners are. For Stan Greenberg, it’s James Carville. For Doug Schoen, it’s Mark Penn. Carville, famously, “it’s the economy, stupid,” mastermind of the ’92 Clinton campaign, where he first met and worked alongside Greenberg, who was Clinton’s chief pollster.
Schoen and Mark Penn, they were longtime partners who started to drift apart during the 1996 election when both were brought on to help orchestrate Bill Clinton’s campaign. And eventually Penn took off as the favorite adviser to Clinton and to a rotating cast of center-left candidates from around the world, but he took off with a strategy that really owed its intellectual beginnings to Schoen.
This gets to why these two characters? A few reasons, but one important one is that, even though Greenberg and Schoen, it’ll be going way too far to say they were the brains of their respective operations, but they were the PhDs. They started off writing doctorates on politics, where they worked through theories of how elections worked that were shaped by their own experience watching that New Deal coalition break apart in real time as they were coming of age. Both Schoen and Greenberg, they’re baby boomers who are born in the peak of the post-war boom and see those last days of the New Deal or order and the emergence of something very different.
Through their careers I was able to trace first these early diagnoses of why this class-based politics was falling apart, how center-left candidates could deal with it, and ultimately what the consequences were. This was a story that I thought I knew before going into it, but then very quickly I realized did not all match the picture I had in my head when I started researching.
Jeff: It does seem that Clinton himself, Bill Clinton himself, and the Clinton presidency really lies at the core of this because it really was a presidency that moved the needle most dramatically from that New Deal coalition to a kind of neoliberalism which became the stock and trade of the Democratic Party.
Timothy: It is a turning point in the story for the reasons that you were saying, but what’s fascinating is if you look at how Democrats have done with working class voters electorally over the last 40 years, you wouldn’t necessarily pick Clinton as the turning point. Because, yes, he does gain ground with affluence of urbanites in 1992 and 1996, but he also does better with blue collar working-class voters than any Democrat of the last 40 years.
So even though they’re for policy reasons, good reasons to put Clinton up there in the neoliberal hall of fame, if you just look at his electoral coalition, it looks a lot more like an old-fashioned Democratic class polarized coalition. One reason why I ended up writing about Greenberg and Schoen in particular is that I don’t think that electoral coalition was an accident. That, instead of taking working-class voters for granted, as I had more or less assumed that Democrats had done since the 1970s, or rather writing off working-class voters so that they could go all in for college-educated suburbanites.
What I saw for Greenberg and Schoen was that these were high-level Democratic strategists who took the question of the working-class vote seriously, very, very seriously. And the reason that the Clinton electoral coalition looked the way it did, lots of factors, but one of them is that, at the same time that policy types might be pushing Democrats in a neoliberal direction, the strategists were pulling in another way.
Jeff: How much of it, though, is really a reflection of the genius of Bill Clinton as a politician that he was able to make that appeal to working-class voters? At the same time, from a policy perspective, you had Bob Rubin, you had NAFTA, you had concern about the deficit, the bond markets, et cetera.
Timothy: So genius, charisma, all the unique gifts of Bill Clinton, they are real, but they don’t mean much unless you have a strategy that can tie the pieces together and that you have at least something to point to. Bill Clinton’s, especially his popularity in the second term of his administration, I think, more than anything else, is attributable to the fact that real wages were high, inflation was low, the economy was delivering for lots of people.
But if you look at the strategy that he ran on, in 1996 in particular, he’s not out there saying, NAFTA is the triumphant accomplishment of my first term, and I will give you more of neoliberalism in a second. He’s consciously playing to this broad center of the electorate that he thinks can be wooed through this combination of tacking to the center on cultural issues so that he promises to be tough on the border.
He signs welfare reform, you can run down a list, while he’s also saying that he will defend traditional Democratic programs into popular entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. So in retrospect, we can see the neoliberal line. But even in 1996, and actually especially in ’92, when he runs some much more aggressively populist campaign than you would think, given the way the administration is remembered today, it’s a different story.
Jeff: Even within running that populist campaign, there was always an undercurrent, or it seems that there was always an undercurrent of something that went beyond that, of aspirational aspects to it. It wasn’t just giving money away. It was really about– and welfare reform is an example of that. It was about work, it was about possibility. It was really about aspiration as much as it was giving stuff away.
Timothy: This gets to a fascinating reason why you can’t pin it all on the Bob Rubin neoliberal types, or at least you can’t tell the story of the Clinton administration just as that. Because you know who opposed welfare reform in 1996? Bob Rubin. And you know who was really frustrated with the reasons why Rubin would oppose Welfare reform? It was Stan Greenberg who– by the way, one reason why he’s best in character in addition to having this academic background, Greenberg, the 1960s, he’s a grad student at Harvard. He’s working for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign.
At the same time, he tries to have a foot in academia and in practical politics. But he’s also, while he’s in grad school, like a lot of grad students before then and since, are immersing himself in this Marxist canon. He’s reading these radical left thinkers and does come to a consistent view of politics that he takes as he transitions from a Marx-ish grad student to pollster and consultant to center-left candidates around the world.
Where Greenberg sincerely believes that the path forward for the center-left is coming up with a way to restore those New Deal economically divided coalitions with a bottom-up electoral majority that can bring together the poor, the working class, the lower sections of the middle class to power a political movement that will have the muscle, the electoral muscle to give working people a fight in a system that’s tilted against them. When Greenberg looks at welfare reform, he sees a question that is absolutely toxic with a lot of working-class voters, especially white working-class voters, who are convinced that society has become a alliance of the top and the bottom against the middle.
They see Democrats becoming this union of the affluent, college-educated professionals and the poor. And if you’re a working-class voter who feels ignored in the middle, the story you’re telling themselves is, “Listen, the rich people, they don’t carry their fair share because they have fancy accountants who they pay to make sure that they never have to shell out anything in taxes. Ad the poor, they just get handouts from the government, and us productive folks in the middle, we’re the only ones who are keeping the entire system going.”
I’m not endorsing this perspective. I’m saying that’s a real one that a lot of people had. And from Greenberg’s perspective, there are some questions, like taxes on the rich, where you can create a real conversation among poor, working-class, middle-class voters. But there are other issues like welfare reform that cut that coalition apart. And he’s frustrated with Rubin, who’s this ex-Goldman Sachs executive. Ruben, to Greenberg’s mind, embodies that affluent noblesse oblige, well-intentioned, one progressivism of the 1% that just can’t understand why these white working-class voters can’t be a little bit more generous like he is.
And Greenberg ultimately thinks that a coalition united by shared material self-interest, that can get something done for workers, but that there are all these ways it can split apart. And welfare is a classic instance.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about what Schoen’s position was in this, and lead to why the Rubin point of view essentially wins out in the end.
Timothy: All right. So if Greenberg believes that the future of Democratic party in the United States and center-left parties around the world lies in trying to rebuild these working class coalitions, essentially by running on a economically populous and culturally moderate platform, Schoen thinks that there is no chance to bring back the politics of FDR in Ronald Reagan’s America. That class politics doesn’t work even for blue collar voters anymore.
And that what Democrats need to do is compete for the center ground in an electorate that has fundamentally tilted to the right. You can think of Schoen’s politics as a natural extrapolation of someone who sees the 1972 Nixon wipe out of McGovern. He sees that firsthand, and is always convinced that some version of that wipe out could be around the corner if the Democrats move too far left.
And so where Clinton’s ’92 campaign leans on economic populism, that’s a lot harder to find in the Schoen and Penn orchestrated 1996 campaign. But importantly, for them, it’s not a question again of a caricature, neoliberal writing off the working class altogether, because Schoen and Penn, they realize there aren’t enough college-educated professionals to win an election. They’re trying to hold down losses with the working class while getting any ground that they can with college professionals.
So instead of the Greenberg vision of a realignment, Schoen and Penn are just saying, “We have to battle this de-alignment forever. There’s not going to be a moment when we can say we’re done, but we can try and hold off these larger forces.” And what happens in the Clinton administration in the second term is that, for a variety of reasons, any of the big structural reforms that Clinton ran on in ’92, universal healthcare being the most obvious of them, those don’t go anywhere.
But the more neoliberal parts of the package, like free trade, that survives. And the epitaph for the Clinton years is, the conservative stuff mostly makes it through. The progressive stuff, that falls by the wayside. And what seems like a painful sacrifice to a lot of Clinton Democrats in the first term comes to seem like an inevitable and shruggable mistake. Or is sort of like, “Okay, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but the economy’s booming. Clinton’s popular, what more do you want?” And it would turn out that a lot of working-class voters in particular would want a lot more from Democrats over the years.
Jeff: And talk about how this would play out into 2008 and the Obama Coalition.
Timothy: One reason why I end up writing this book is that, in 2009, Stan Greenberg writes a memoir, and he talks about this disturbing pattern that he noticed with his clients around the world. Bill Clinton was one, Tony Blair was another, Nelson Mandela, really fascinating collection of characters, all of whom appear in the book. And Greenberg said he noticed this pattern where he could convince his candidates to run on economic populism when the campaign was on the line.
But as soon as the polls were closed, the candidates stopped talking to Greenberg so much, and start talking to the people who run the economy. And the people who run the economy are saying, “Yes, yes, yes. All that popular stuff worked on the campaign trail, time to grow up, time to think about deregulation, tax cuts, the standard neoliberal litany.” And Obama doesn’t quite fit into that pattern. But what Greenberg saw was a tendency for these candidates to run as economic populist, govern as progressive neoliberals, rack up victories in the culture war where they could, explain away the economic defeats, and then get angry when working-class voters didn’t turn out for them.
Now, broad strokes, I think there’s a lot to that explanation of what happened for the Obama years too. And that was what was striking to me, that Greenberg ready in 2009 captured this crucial dynamic for Obama who was able to do better with working-class voters, including white working-class voters than is often remembered, but who handed off a party to Hillary Clinton that was ready to make this turn finally for going all in on professionals and saying farewell to the deplorables.
Jeff: And talk about how that turn happened. Because you also have to look at it in the context of Obama’s 2012 victory against Romney and the impact that that had.
Timothy: Especially the way it was misremembered. Obama in 2012, if you listen to David Axelrod, his chief strategist, Axelrod will say time and again, “The reason we won that campaign is because we portrayed Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who was circling the middle class with a hungry Clinton in his eye.” It was a very old-fashioned economic populist forward campaign. Wasn’t the only issue Obama ran on, but that was the frame. And Axelrod said, “We did that because we knew that the economy was terrible. We were running into these stiff headwinds. So class politics was our best bet,” and it delivered for them.
And this is a story that exit polls didn’t reflect at the time. Only as data came in did it become clear that the key voters for Obama in 2012 really were white blue collar working-class voters in the Northeast and the Midwest who supported him in much better numbers than were reflected in exit polls at the time. But what you got coming out of the election in 2012 instead was a story about the Obama Coalition as the coalition of the ascendant, which was supposed to be college-educated professionals, disproportionately white young people, Black and Hispanic voters in particular.
And this misreading of 2012 as a story about, the final emergence of a progressive electorate that was going to usher in a democratic realignment and control of Washington to the left for a generation. That profound misreading of 2012 ended up becoming the basis for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and a lot of what’s happened since.
Jeff: And this was patent at the core of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Timothy: What’s fascinating is that Penn, who is definitely more than Greenberg, and even more than Schoen, someone who fits that template of urging Democrats to focus on the college-educated suburban idea, when he becomes this celebrity consultant guru figure, he does associate himself with that strategy in public. But in 2008, when he’s running Hillary Clinton’s strategy in the Democratic primary, he doesn’t say, “Count on the white collar set.” He says, “Barack Obama has those guys locked up.”
“If we’re going to win,” he tells Clinton, “It will be by taking that blue collar old traditional democratic base, it’s turning those voters out, and especially running up the score with women.” So it’s women of all types and blue collar men that he says is the basis of a winning democratic majority. Now, it doesn’t get the job done in 2008, it comes really, really close though. Clinton actually gets more votes in Democratic primary in 2008 than Obama does. But when elections were on the line, even Penn wasn’t the neoliberal caricature that I had assumed he would be going into the book.
Jeff: Much of this focuses around the areas of economics. Talk a little bit about how this nexus between class divide and the cultural divide, which was growing also plays a significant role in this.
Timothy: This is a key background to why are we having these debates in the first place, why are coalitions taking shape. And there’s a strong literature, really well-developed literature and political science that says that, as countries become more wealthy, as incomes rise for voters, it becomes a lot harder to polarize them along in economic lines. It’s often described as post materialist politics, where you’ve got a little money in your bank account now, so you can turn to issues other than pocketbook concerns.
That doesn’t mean that those go away, but it does mean that, especially if you’re an affluent, educated voter, you could be a lot more concerned with more abstract ideological questions than who’s going to help make my daily life easier. And one consequence of that is you see the emergence of, not huge as a proportion of the country, maybe about 10% of people on the left and the right who can treat politics almost as a kind of hobby. They love Fox News, they love MSNBC. I am one of those who generate political addicts probably, sorry, a lot of people listening to this, but politics for them doesn’t look the way it does for the rest of the country.
And unfortunately, from the perspective who cares about what those 90% of the country wants, those people who are political addicts, they’re the ones who watch the cable shows, they get attention. They fund the candidates, they pay for the foundations, especially the very, very wealthy at the top. And so the entire system has a tendency to wrap itself around those concerns, which are more often cultural than the old-fashioned material issues that were once the basis of the two party system.
Jeff: You touched on something earlier that I want to come back to, which was the global nature of this. So you had Greenberg, as you said, working for Blair. You had other elections around the world, Trudeau and a number of others that were all happening within the same time as these realignment were taking place.
Timothy: Absolutely. And this points to something that I think is really important for American audiences to keep in mind is that, if this is a global trend, then what’s happened to Democrats in the United States can’t be explained by any particularities of American history. For instance, it’s common in lefty in liberal circles to say that, after 1964, Democrats more or less had to give up on the working class, especially in the South because they became the Party of Civil Rights. And there was just no way that party could have the same New deal coalition behind it.
And almost that Democrats sacrificed their working-class coalition on the alter of civil rights, and that this might have been electorally questionable, but ultimately, have been vindicated morally by history. But the fact is that the history of slavery and its aftermath in the United States, which I think is essential to understanding how our country works, well, if you see center-left parties in other countries around the world transforming that didn’t have this particular historical background, then it says that, even if the debate about the Civil Rights Act is a key factor in this history, it can’t be the underlying cause because this is happening in too many different places. So you need to reach to that broader explanation, the one that points you toward the wider embrace of that post materialist politics, the one that’s narrowly focused on the particularities of US history.
Jeff: To bring it more to the present, it really also shows what Biden tried to do, the coalition that he put together to win in 2020.
Timothy: And it says, too, that one thing that the Biden winning coalition in 2020, which was much more professional, much more college educated than democratic coalitions had been in the past, it looked a lot more like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 coalition than it did even Barack Obama’s in 2008. But an advantage of looking globally is that you can see at the same time that this is a powerful trend around much of the world, that there are lots of ways to fight it.
And there’s a lot of variation from election to election and from country to country that, to me, is a sign that there’s hope for resisting this trend, if you’re someone like me who thinks it’s something that should be resisted in the first place.
Jeff: Talk about the importance, I want to come back to the fundamental of your book, the importance of political consultants of people that are strategists within political campaigns and the role that they play.
Timothy: So coming into this book, my opinion really could not have been lower, and this was especially reflected by 2016. It’s shaped by my experience in 2016, where before that election I’ve read books like Sasha Issenberg’s, like excellent account of the 2012 Obama Campaign, Victory Lab. I had assumed that I listened to Jon Favreau, and I don’t think it was even Pod Save America yet, but the proto-Pod Save podcast, they were all so confident that Hillary was going to win you.
I read reports from Republican strategists who were equally certain that Trump was going to lose. And the results turning out like they did, to me, it said that the consultants, the strategists, they just had no idea what they were talking about. Now, I still think that there’s a good reason to be a skeptical about a lot of what the consultant class does. But after spending time researching this book, digging into Greenberg and Schoen and thinking seriously, as least as seriously as I can, about this question, this group, I’ve come to have a lot more respect for what they can do when they’re doing their job well.
I don’t think that Trump 2016 came out of nowhere. It certainly was a shock to people who just thought that the big data analysis of 2016 said there was no way that Trump could win. For a certain section of the consultant class, they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about, or at the very least were over their skis. But when you look at politics with the framework that someone like Greenberg or Schoen had, one reason why I felt compelled to write this book is that, actually, it was a lot more explainable, and that includes 2024.
I think that a lot of the stories that left historians, journalists, academics, all type have come up with to explain how politics work, I think they fell apart last Tuesday. But if you have the underlying view of democracy that Greenberg and Schoen for all their differences have, if you have that underlying view, then I think the story starts to make a lot more sense.
Jeff: You also have to balance, and you see it with so many of these consultants, balancing gut instinct and the experience of being around politics for so long with the degree of analytics we see going on today.
Timothy: And more than anything else too, it’s not just gut instinct, although that matters, but that’s difficult. You cannot count on it. James Carville, who I’ve grown to be pretty fond of, had a piece in the New York Times shortly before the election saying the three reasons why I’m certain that Kamala is going to win. Whoops. And I think that there are also clear limits to what data analytics can tell you from who’s going to win the election, questionable there, I think there are a lot of Democrats who were surprised by how last week went, to why voters vote the way they do.
I, partly because of taking seriously the criticisms of someone like Sam Greenberg, who is not a fan of some of the more quantitative centric kinds of political science, I’ve become a lot more skeptical of the type of political science that says, we can explain this election by putting voters on our racism scale. We have our scientifically determined calculus that says, you are a 7.8 out of 10 on my racism chart.
And I’ve become a lot more appreciative, weirdly enough, of focus groups, which are easy to dismiss, but I think are essential for getting a kind of more nuanced, qualitative, complicated understanding of how voters are thinking. As Greenberg pointed out, if you were to go to a lot of Obama voters in 2008, they might score pretty high on that racism scale, but they were willing to support Barack Obama because they thought he would stood a chance at least of delivering changes that would make a difference in their daily life.
And that combination of taking polls seriously, not as Olympian, scientifically accurate, 1,000% timeless determinations of what the electorate really is thinking, but as rough guides to where voters are, putting in the work to try and understand, both with the big picture quantitative research and the more nuanced qualitative research, how voters are thinking at the world, that I think is actually a really important part of democracy. And when consultants do that job well, they’re doing something that’s really important for all of us.
Jeff: Do you think that focus groups, which I totally agree with you are underrated in terms of their value, and if you listen to it, look at all the focus groups that were done this cycle, the stuff that Sarah Longwell did, you come away with a lot more information than you do from Nate Silver.
Timothy: Or at least it’s a compliment to what you’re learning from Nate Silver. I think we can have a balanced peanut butter and jelly best of both world situation here, where you use the polls to get a sense of the big picture. And for instance, what is the overall mood of the electorate and which groups are feeling particularly satisfied, dissatisfied? What’s going on on this more nuanced level? They point you in direction. And then the focus groups, they’re not as scientific.
Don’t treat them like that, but do treat them as opportunities to hear how ordinary people are understanding the world, and then it can help make sense of something that, for instance, why Trump support with Black and especially Hispanic voters might surge in 2024. We don’t have entirely reliable data on this yet, it’s going to be two months until the best numbers come in, but for now, it seems like there was real change there.
And if you were just telling the story about the Trump era is a triumph of white racism that’s fueling this revolt among white America, I think you would be flummoxed by what happened last week. But if you took the time to listen to what actual Black and Hispanic voters are saying about how they understand the world, the story starts to make a lot more sense to you.
Jeff: And finally, Tim, what does all this tell you about where we stand today?
Timothy: I think that a weird silver lining for Democrats is that the scale of the defeat takes away some of the two easy excuses that they use to right away dismiss Trump and Trumpism and right-wing populism together until now. In 2016, I was [unintelligible 00:27:14] perspective at the time from, you could blame 2016 Trump’s victory, Clinton’s loss. You’d say, oh, Clinton had a terrible campaign. She didn’t even go to Wisconsin. It was James Comey. Trump didn’t win the popular vote, it was the electoral college. This is a fluke. The progressive majority is still around the corner.
2020, it’s like, oh, this wasn’t as close. This was closer than it would like, but still Trump lost. Finally, this is behind us. Losing again, and especially losing the popular vote and especially, especially losing the popular vote and the way that they see that Democrats seem to have done it by losing key working class members of the Obama Coalition, it says that this right-wing populous thing can’t be dismissed as an aberration. It’s not a passing fad that will just wear itself out with time.
Now, nothing lasts forever. But my read is that Trump and Trumpism, it shows that it is a broader and deeper political movement than a lot of folks on my side had been willing to give a credit for. Which means that we can learn from Trump about how they pulled this off. And I think there are two lessons in particular for Democrats to keep in mind. One, it’s the importance of movements, especially presenting yourself as part of a movement that’s taking on an establishment that isn’t delivering for most of the country.
70% of voters around that say the country’s on the wrong track today. Then that number, that’s a percent of Americans who say that the country’s on the wrong track, that’s been a majority position more or less consistently for 20 years now. That’s a sign of deep underlying satisfaction across party lines with the way the status quo is working. I think Democrats have done a huge disservice to themselves by making themselves at least implicitly the party of the establishment.
So understanding the importance of this insurgent outsider movement, mobilization, that energy that Trump’s been able to capture for itself, Democrats, I think have to take that question a lot more seriously. But they also have to be aware that the Trump movement succeeded and winning over a lot of these working-class voters, not because Trump was just saying whatever came into his head, but because what he was saying resonated with these voters, voters who often have more populist economic positions and more culturally moderate positions.
So it’s not just a case that Donald Trump was running on the Mitt Romney platform of 2012. He wasn’t. He moved the party to the center on Social Security. He said he was going to protect these popular entitlements like Social security and Medicare. He even said that he would deliver real universal healthcare that was better than anything Obama was going to.
And this year, he took pains to separate himself from the right of his party on abortion. He said that this is unlike a lot of conservatives. I’m not going to say that we should have a federal abortion ban. I’m going to say that it’s a state issue, so that if you swing voter in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, who are pro-choice, you can vote for me and not worry about losing your own access to abortion. And that combination, outsider movement energy, and positioning yourself where the voters you want to win over are, that is how politics is done in 2024, and it’s a game that Democrats need to learn how to play again.
Jeff: Timothy Shenk. His book is Left Adrift, What Happened to Liberal Politics. Tim, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Timothy: Thank you so much for having me.
Jeff: Thanks. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
