[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by GGG

Unfortunately it’s paywalled.

I thought you get one free Economist article a month. Here’s the link to the source for the graph:

https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/

And more of the Economist article itself:

… The drift of the Democratic Party towards its progressive faction has been apparent for a long time. Joe Biden, whose personal policies have shifted with the party’s political winds for decades, is as good a weathervane as any. The lifelong moderate, who once decried mandatory busing to integrate schools in the 1970s and enthusiastically supported welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s, reversed himself completely and ran well to the left of Barack Obama in 2020. Yet he was still the relative moderate of the primary field.

… One year after Floyd’s murder, voters in Minneapolis defeated a referendum to eliminate the police department and replace it with a new department of public safety. City councillors in Austin, Texas, cut the police budget by one-third in 2020, then scrambled to add funding later as homicides spiked. In New York City, voters passed over many progressive champions to elect Eric Adams, a showboating former police captain, as their next mayor. Liberal-leaning suburbanites helped Mr Biden win the state of Virginia by ten points in 2020. Just one year later, fears that schools were being overrun by progressive indoctrination led them to elect Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, as governor.

(graph below shows how out of sync progressives are with popular opinion)

Spoiler!

… In theory, a muscular progressive agenda of bigger social-welfare benefits and public-jobs programmes should be winning over the working class. Instead they have been defecting to the Republicans for nearly a decade. While this erosion has been widely noticed among whites without college degrees, the same trend is wreaking havoc among Hispanic and black voters, many of them socially conservative. Rather than the Democratic Party wooing economically marginalised people of colour and marshalling them to lead the progressive revolution, the proletariat is being lost (see chart 3).

Spoiler!

The warning signs are flashing brightest for Hispanic voters, who were supposed to be the key to the permanent Democratic majority of the future. Between 2016 and 2020, Mr Trump improved his margins among Hispanic voters by a remarkable eight points, the largest shift among any major ethnic group. A hardline immigration policy and the campaign to build a wall hardly deterred Hispanic voters in border states like Texas and Florida, which swung even more strongly Republican.