


Party leadership seems to want a divorce from identity politics. Or a trial separation, at least. On July 24, they unveiled “A Better Deal,” a new package of economic reforms which they believe will empower working-class voters. Several members of Congress, including minority leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, staged a launch event in a predominantly white Northern Virginia district that Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock won by fewer than six points last November. It was red, but perhaps not so red that they felt it couldn’t become blue. In the latest quixotic move from the party that can’t seem to get out of its own way, the Democrats were clearly there to chase Trump voters. To entice them, for the time being at least, they weren’t talking about L.G.B.T.Q. rights, immigration, or police reform. “The focus starts on economic issues,” Schumer told reporters. “That’s where the American people are hurting. That’s what we most felt was missing in the past in the last several elections.”

It’s easy enough to see why Schumer thinks this is a good idea. Trump is bleeding support, even among his supposedly ironclad base of Rust Belt voters, and Democrats see an opening. But that doesn’t mean that these folks are ready to vote Democratic, especially if all they can offer is a whitewashed retread of D.N.C. talking points. Even if the party aims to only focus on “economic issues,” it’s difficult to see how the “Better Deal” helps them. The branding is awful, for one. They tried to evoke Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” but one-day-only sales have superior slogans. Worse, the platform is vague and cautious. Raising wages, lowering the cost of living, and modernizing the economy are not difficult to agree with. But the same ideas were presented with much more specificity in 2016, featured in the platforms of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And both found they could not win the primary without placing those issues in the context of identity. It was particularly notable that Clinton’s campaign issued direct challenges to white voters to get more involved in the fight against white supremacy. Planned Parenthood made its first-ever presidential endorsement in its 100 years, thanks to Clinton’s strong support of reproductive freedoms. Sanders, after an initial scuffle with Black Lives Matter, recalibrated his message to include a focus on criminal justice reform.


The current party leadership appears ready to trash all that goodwill. Congressman Ben Ray Luján, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, declared last week that the party won’t withhold support from Democratic candidates who oppose abortion rights. “There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” Luján told The Hill, effectively declaring that the party’s defense of Obamacare would not extend to a woman’s right to make her own health-care choices. If that wasn’t clear in April, when Sanders campaigned with Heath Mello, an anti-choice Democrat running for Omaha mayor, it’s crystal clear now. The fact that attacks on abortion rights and access primarily affect black women, the most loyal and consistent group of voters that the party has, only exacerbates their error.

Video: How Democrats Can Beat Trump in 2020

Yes, there were Obama voters who switched to Trump. That doesn’t mean that Democrats need them to win the 24 seats required to regain House control next year. FiveThirtyEight reported in May that even if House Republicans won every district where Trump won a majority in 2016, Democrats could still end up with 230 of the 435 House seats. Yet the party’s approach to that race is to pursue the mythical Trump Democrat, prioritizing conservative white men over the party’s most loyal voters. It’s a suicidal choice.

This convenient flexibility reveals a certain cowardice, but also a strange willingness to buy into the conservative framing of identity politics. While Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are doing their best to highlight how issues like pay disparities and marijuana prosecution are directly related to race and gender, they risk being drowned out by party leaders who refuse to make an argument to the American public about why those issues matter. The Democrats surely remember that Trump wouldn’t have sniffed the presidency without his exploitation of identity politics. Cultural resentment and outright bigotry motivated more of his voters than did “economic anxiety,” yet Schumer utterly misdiagnoses Clinton’s loss in November as a way of promoting this “Better Deal.” To the extent that Trump is governing effectively and his administration is effective, it is in areas directly related to civil rights: the discriminatory travel ban, backing voter purges, and removing civil-rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Shortly, we may be able to include an emerging attack on affirmative action by the Justice Department. The president is openly calling for harsher police violence.


Every one of those issues, and more, is an economic issue. Which makes Democrats’ calm submission even more infuriating. They aren’t just giving up a chance to strengthen their ties with voters of color, women, or other marginalized groups. They’re also surrendering their electoral future. According to Steve Phillips, author of the prescient political book Brown Is the New White, Democrats should be able to reclaim control of the House of Representatives if they get 84 percent of the turnout Clinton received. The party won’t benefit from a browning nation if it doesn’t hone its pitch to black and Hispanic voters, many of whom were disaffected in 2016 without Obama on the ballot. Demographics are trending decidedly liberal, but that won’t mean a thing if liberals don’t vote.

If the Democratic leadership truly want to advance its economic agenda and win back Congress, it needs to employ identity politics as forcefully as Donald Trump did. Rather than focusing on energizing their multicultural base, however, Democrats are off chasing white unicorns. Even worse, they misunderstand those elusive targets. They’re trying to open their doors to voters who have rejected them by stripping out all of the parts of their platform that might be upsetting in the worst sort of capitulation to reverse “political correctness.” This is a clear recognition that Democrats know that Trump’s supporters understand identity politics very well, and have shown they’re more than willing to engage in it. The party needs candidates who will fight back, not retreat.

McGrath’s approach suggests another way—one that begins by separating appeals to social justice from the stain of machine politics. Like iron worker Randy Bryce, who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan, McGrath is, before all else, a veteran, a neophyte, and an outsider. That’s a powerful combination in the Trump era, and one that has the potential to help reshape a largely unearned reputation Democrats have for being effete elitists. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a concession to conservative ideas of toughness, but it is also a reclaiming of reality. Both McGrath and Bryce released ads that project conventional ideals of strength without betraying who they are. They reach key constituencies that the left wants under its wing: white mothers, military veterans and their families, union members, and folks in red states who work with their hands for a living. McGrath, in particular, did that while being unafraid to talk about her gender. How is she already doing this better than Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi?