What Joe Biden and the Democratic Party Need To Do Now
Democrats still don’t understand how Americans think about politics and elections
In May 2022 I published a piece here on Medium titled “Democrats need to get real about how and why America votes”. As I’ve been thinking about the dark place Democrats find themselves in today, I realized this post said many things that I wanted to say again. What follows revisits several key points from that post and explains how they are relevant to our current situation and how they might be applied to help the Party out of its current impasse.
Say goodbye to the folk theory of democracy, say hello to identity group politics
For decades, there has been a “folk theory of democracy” that ascribes great powers of analysis and wisdom to the American people. The idea is that people have opinions on issues and policies. They then compare those opinions to the positions of candidates for office and choose the candidate who comes closest to their preferences on issues they care most about. By this theory, enough voters in the right states in 2020 assessed the political positions of Biden and Trump, found Biden to be more in line with their preferences, and voted for him. The people listened, learned, and rendered…
