Ruy Teixeira was once known as a Democratic oracle, but these days he’s more of an apostate. In 2002, Texeira and John B. Judis published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a hugely influential book that theorized Democrats had the potential to ride America’s changing demographics to electoral dominance — if they could hang onto what then seemed like a reasonable slice of their traditional working-class constituency. Barack Obama’s two election victories seemed to bear this thesis out, but it fell apart when Donald Trump harnessed enormous white working-class support to capture the presidency in 2016. That election proved to be a turning point, since which Democrats have morphed into a party whose base comprises college-educated white voters and a solid-but-slowly-eroding majority of Black and Hispanic voters, while Republicans dominate among the largely small-town white voters that swung so hard for Trump.

In recent years, Teixeira has taken Democrats to task for, in his telling, alienating these voters by speaking a cultural language anathema to them. He has laid out his critique in many articles and in his most recent book, 2023’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Again co-written with Judis.) For almost 20 years, Teixeira was associated with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; his move to the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in 2022 underlined his disillusionment with the cultural left. I spoke with Teixeira about how Kamala Harris’s presumptive nomination might shake up the party’s coalitions, whether her move to the center is enough to win over disaffected white and non-white voters, and which of her vice-presidential picks makes the most sense for working-class appeal.

You wrote a piece the other day that pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris is reassembling the Obama coalition. But she is certainly doing considerably better than Biden was in polling just a couple of weeks ago. Would the loss of working-class voters among Harris voters matter if there are offsetting gains among college-educated voters? In other words, does the composition of her coalition matter so much?
If you gain among group A and those gains balance out your losses among group B, then it’s a net benefit. The question is always “What is the net?” I’m just trying to point out how different the Obama coalition was, and how relatively high the support rates were among working class voters in general, including both whites and non-whites — that Obama’s coalition was much less dependent on white college-educated voters. It was just a different look.

Things weren’t as class-polarized under Obama as they are now. The Republican and Democratic coalitions haven’t exactly traded places, but they have certainly changed in some important ways. So what Harris is doing right now shouldn’t be confused with reassembling the Obama coalition. Really, what she’s been able to do at this point is push back against some of the losses that Biden was experiencing in his 2024 coalition, relative to the Biden 2020 coalition. In other words, Harris, with her recent success, is getting a little bit closer to where the Biden coalition was in 2020, but that in and of itself is quite different from the Obama coalition.

You’re talking about young and Black and Hispanic voters that she seems to be winning back to some degree, which had been Biden’s big weakness in polling relative to his 2020 results.
It’s a little hard to tell exactly where the gains are coming from, but certainly I think what we’re seeing is that she’s doing a bit better among younger voters, a bit better among Hispanic voters, a little bit better among Black voters, but not necessarily much better among working-class voters. And it appears like she might actually be doing worse among white working-class voters. So that’s the nature of the beast at this point. How all that nets out in terms of building a coalition that can actually win is yet to be determined. Right now it seems to have brought her close to something like parity, but parity is not what you need. As Nate Silver has observed, you need about a two and a half point national popular vote margin to actually be favored within the Electoral College, given the biases attended upon the Electoral college today.

She’s not there yet, but she’s getting there and the question is, where is she going to make further gains? The thing that would bulletproof her coalition would be to bring those working-class numbers in general back at least closer to where they were under Biden in 2020, even if they won’t get to the Obama coalition level. In other words, to try to reduce some of the class polarization in her coalition. And also, critically, she’s got to stop the bleeding among white working-class........

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