The Time Has Come for the Left to Sink the Democratic Party

“If the Left were to abstain from participating in this election en masse, the consequences would be deep.”

The end of Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign is a clear setback to the American Left in the electoral arena. Importantly, this is the second time this has happened. The end of the 2016 Democratic primary, even though it ended with a similar defeat for the Left, was a victory in important ways. The 2020 primary largely revolved around the issues set by the Sanders campaign in 2016, and Senator Sanders went from being a virtually unknown politician to a national phenomenon. This time, however, the stage was set for Senator Sanders to win the Democratic nomination. The campaign already had a nationwide operation set up before any of his rivals, and the conversation inside the Democratic Party had been essentially built by the Left. What is more, the race was looking up for Senator Sanders until Super Tuesday when a series of perfectly timed campaign suspensions and endorsements overturned the results expected from the polls. Importantly, there is some evidence that the party machinery actively engaged in the process behind the scenes.

In the end, the establishment of the party won again, and now even Senator Sanders has endorsed former Vice President Biden. All of these issues put the American Left in a very difficult position. Senator Sanders’ endorsement means little to nothing. Left-wing organizations already issued a large list of demands that would have to be met before they would consider endorsing Vice President Biden. These are demands that, in my opinion, are very unlikely to be met. So with a grim outlook for personnel or policy concessions from the Biden campaign, all that the Left has in its arsenal is organizing around a voting strategy, for which there are few options. Yet none are optimal.

To understand what is the best course of action, it is important to look—not just at the immediate choice before the Left—but at the long term, through the lenses of history and party demographics. One model that I believe is highly relevant for the present political moment, especially from the perspective of the Left, is that of critical realignment and realigning elections. This was originally developed by Harvard political scientist V. O. Key and then further expanded by his mentee, Walter Dean Burnham. Critical realignment is a historical model devised to explain how particular elections—provided the correct demographic composition—can have a decisive impact on political party dynamics. Like any model, it has limitations and is not meant to explain everything. Instead, it tries to capture important aspects about historical events.

There is much debate about whether the critical realignment model continues to be relevant—or if it is only useful to explain the past. In fact, one of the more recent scholarly works on the subject is a book edited in 1991 by Byron E. Shafer titled The End of Realignment?: Interpreting American Electoral Eras. It includes a chapter by Burnham entitled “Critical Realignment: Dead or Alive?,” in which the author gives two conditions that must be met for an election to be critical.

First, politically relevant minorities must change their voting patterns, whether that means switching parties, starting to vote when they previously did not, or vice versa. Secondly, this shift must have significant and enduring consequences in the political landscape. These can come in the form of changing policy priorities, a change in the dominant political parties or elites, or an alteration in the constitutional roles of different branches of government, among others. Two clear and generally accepted examples, therefore, include the 1860 election (in which the Republican Party supplanted the Whig Party as one of the two dominant party forces) and the 1932 election (which ushered in the New Deal coalition).

Realignment is not usually seen as a deliberate strategy of change. That is, voters in the 1860 presidential election were not looking for long-term change to the party structure of the United States. It is, of course, possible that some people did, but it was not a concerted effort as much as a confluence of many factors. That does not mean it cannot be used as such. This is especially true given that all the necessary conditions are set for a realigning election, and it looks as though the coalition of Left-wing voters and organizations could be one of the politically relevant minorities present in realigning elections. To see why, we need to understand the current configuration of the American Electorate. Political scientist Lee Drutman has done an in-depth analysis of the voting patterns of Americans in the 2016 election, according to their ideology. One of his most striking findings becomes readily visible when looking at a graphic that maps Americans’ ideology along two different axes, along with their presidential candidate of choice. The resulting graphic looks like this:

The horizontal axis measures voters’ position on economic issues, while the vertical axis maps their stances on social and cultural issues. Drutman divides the electorate according to the four resulting quadrants. Starting from the top left and moving clockwise he calls them populists, conservatives, libertarians and liberals. The largest of the four is the liberals, which make up 44.6% of the electorate. This is followed by populists with 28.9%, then conservatives at 22.7%. Libertarians are far and away the smallest group, comprising not even four percent of American voters.