These Are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails

Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Democratic centrists bitterly complained that Jesse Jackson and his progressive allies were pushing the party too far left.

“We were losing because the people weren’t buying the message we were selling,” Al From, the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, then the leading moderate Democratic group, told Time magazine in 1992.

Jackson, in turn, called the D.L.C. the “Democratic Leisure Class.”

Using the leverage of his Rainbow Coalition and the support he gained through presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, Jackson pushed the party conventions to adopt more liberal stances than the nominees wanted. Now, some 40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.

White,........

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