The Democrats’ Culture Divide
Daniel Bonthius was never much interested in politics before Donald Trump came along. Both his parents are involved in the labor movement, but he earned a musical theater degree in Boston and moved to New York City to make it as an actor. Like many of the city’s aspiring actors, Bonthius, 33, was waiting tables and working for an event planner—and had been doing it for most of a decade when Donald Trump obliterated the political system in 2016.
After the election, a shocked Bonthius invited friends over to his home in Sunnyside, Queens, a one-time Irish enclave that has seen an influx of new residents. “I just wanted to talk out what happened with people who felt the same way I did,” he says. That gathering eventually morphed into an Indivisible group, a grass-roots left-wing answer to the Tea Party, and in early 2017 it hosted a new candidate for Congress the first time she met with an organized group of voters: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“It just seemed like she is a real person running for office,” says Bonthius, who ended up volunteering for her campaign and now works for her. “Everybody in the room, we are all the same generation, the same generation she is, and there is just this comfort level, like, you are one of us. You are going to be fighting for us.”
Indivisible was mostly dedicated to flipping Republican seats to Democrats, or at least nudging moderate Democrats to the left. Bonthius’ district, however, was already represented by a liberal Democrat, Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent who served as the powerful head of the Queens Democratic Party and who was thought by many to be a potential speaker of the House. Crowley, whose family has deep roots in Queens, owns a home in Woodside, another Irish enclave next to Sunnyside that has likewise undergone rapid gentrification over the past several years. But by the time 2016 came along, Crowley was spending most of his time in Washington, or flying around the country to stump for Democratic candidates.
“I think most voters were pretty happy with him. There wasn’t a specific vote or issue where we could get up in our representative’s face or have a sit-in in his office,” Bonthius says. “We figured she didn’t have a chance, but that it would at least push Crowley to the left.”
A year later, Ocasio-Cortez pulled off one of the most shocking upsets in a generation, sending Crowley packing by a 15-point margin. The results were widely portrayed as a victory for a new and empowered Democratic grass-roots constituency.
New York's 14th Congressional District is more than 70 percent people of color, and 50 percent Hispanic. Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican mother, fit the district’s changing demographics, and neatly fit a larger narrative of a national Democratic Party in which increasing progressivism and diversity go hand and hand.
But a closer examination of the data tells a different story. Ocasio-Cortez’s best precincts were places like the neighborhood where Bonthius and his friends live: highly educated, whiter and richer than the district as a whole. In those neighborhoods, Ocasio-Cortez clobbered Crowley by 70 percent or more. Crowley’s best precincts, meanwhile, were the working-class African-American enclave of LeFrak City, where he got more than 60 percent of the vote, and portions of heavily Hispanic Corona. He pulled some of his best numbers in Ocasio-Cortez’s heavily Latino and African-American neighborhood of Parkchester, in the Bronx—beating her by more than 25 points on her home turf.
Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people. “It was the Bernie Bros,” one top Crowley adviser said as he surveyed the wreckage the day after the election. “They killed us.”
“He didn’t lose. New York lost,” says Moin Choudhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the president of a local political club, who credits Crowley for intervening several years ago to get a client of his out of immigration detention. “To have somebody in that position, a big leader in Congress, maybe a speaker who could represent us in Congress, to lose in that moment—New York lost. I don’t know what is going to happen next.”
What really changed in Queens, and what does it mean for the Democratic Party? The scenario has played out over and over again in the months since Trump was elected, and suggests a rift that the party has yet to grapple with publicly. Energized liberals, largely college-educated or beyond, have been voting in a new breed of activist Democrat—and voting out more established candidates with strong support among the party’s largely minority, immigrant, Hispanic, African-American and non-college-educated base.
“It’s a new world,” says Ari Espinal, a 30-year-old New York assemblywoman and daughter of Dominican immigrants who first met Crowley when she was a neighborhood activist as a teenager and grew up as part of Crowley’s Queens County organization. That connection worked against her this year, however, when her upstart opponent with an inspiring anti-Trump story—a young Colombian immigrant who wanted to be the first Dreamer elected to office in New York—aligned herself with Ocasio-Cortez and against Crowley. Espinal lost in the September primary. “The millennials came out. I am a part of that group, and for them politics isn’t the first thing on their mind,” she says. “They don’t know who their local rep is and what they are bringing to the table. They know who is hot and sexy at the time.”
In San Francisco, London Breed, an African-American politician raised by her grandmother in public housing, barely held off two challengers from the left, both from arguably more privileged backgrounds and both drawing strength from the city’s large and growing population of upscale white progressives. In a recent congressional primary in Boston, Ayanna Pressley, vying to become Massachusetts’ first black congresswoman, beat the longtime liberal stalwart Mike Capuano by running up big numbers in wealthy Cambridge, while losing big in the working-class and immigrant enclaves of Chelsea and Everett.
The party’s culture clash took another form at the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Chicago, where a bloc of reformers who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, many of whom hadn’t been involved in party politics prior to that race, pushed through rules changes that longstanding African-American delegates opposed, saying that they amounted to the newcomers skipping their place in line. One provocatively compared it to the Fugitive Slave Act, a compromise between conservative and liberal whites to keep blacks under control. Donna Brazile called the changes, which were designed to empower rank-and-file voters, a backdoor way to disenfranchise party leaders and “an insult to democracy.”
As the party’s attention turns to the presidential nominating season, one of its biggest challenges will be navigating this culture war in its own ranks. The energy at the moment is with the liberal wing, centered around cities and college towns and on the coasts, its members mostly white and college-educated and far to the left on social and cultural issues compared with the rest of the party. But its voting majority is still more blue-collar and diverse, many of whom favor an incremental approach on social issues and who are more interested in preserving the clout of longtime powers like Crowley and Capuano than in notching symbolic victories for the “resistance.”
In many of the cases outlined above, the policy differences between the candidates are microscopically small. Nearly all Democrats favor tackling income inequality, raising taxes on the wealthy and the minimum wage, and reforming the criminal justice system. There is some dispute over how fast to move and how far to go, but the broad outlines are the same. The differences, in one analysis, are stylistic, and so it is easy to imagine that they will be worked out over the next year as the party settles on another presidential nominee.
But there remains another possibility: that the split will prove to be more fundamental, that the party’s diverse base and its growing share of college-educated voters don’t have the same values or the same amount at stake—and that as Americans increasingly self-segregate, and even left-leaning elites close the gates of privilege behind them, that the party's wings will drift too far apart to unite behind anyone.
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The Democratic party has always been a loose coalition; a century ago, it was an uneasy mix of agrarian farmers and big-city political machines with a handful of lefty intellectuals sprinkled on top. But in the past two decades, it has seen a new sea change: It has become the preferred party of college graduates. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1994, voters with college degrees favored Republicans over Democrats 54 to 39; by 2017, those numbers were exactly reversed. Among voters with post-college degrees, the Democratic lean is even more extreme.
Implicit in this division is a class and race divide as well. Those more educated voters are also whiter and richer. But when it comes to reliable support, it’s still voters of color who deliver for the party. Nonwhite voters went 3-to-1 for Clinton in 2016, according to exit polling, and the most reliable group, black women, voted an astonishing 94 percent for Clinton in 2016.
Increasingly, the Democratic Party features what social scientists call an hourglass structure, with a smattering of elites at the top and a vast working class on the bottom. It is those on the top who drive policy, and their interests don’t always coincide with the party’s longtime base. Lee Drutman, senior fellow on political reform at New America, puts it more bluntly: “Democrats have an upstairs/downstairs coalition with an affluent class that does quite well. And they are in a coalition with a poorer set of voters who don’t seem to get ahead but who are trapped in that coalition, since if they are poor African-Americans or poor Latinos they view the Republicans as a racist party.”
The Changing Make-Up of the Democratic Party
In recent decades, the Democratic Party has undergone changes that have made it less white and more educated.
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As the upper end of the party gets more and more liberal, it risks moving away from what the base really wants. Surveys show that less-educated Democrats tend to harbor a host of more conservative views—more skepticism of government regulation, for example, more concern about illegal immigration, less interest in the environment and gay rights, and even less interest in a robust social-welfare state. The only area in which better-educated Democrats lean more conservative than their less-educated counterparts is on the question of corporate power: Better-educated Democrats are slightly more likely to think that corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit. (Republican views on such matters are far more homogeneous across income groups.)
In 2017, David Winston, a Republican pollster, did a study of the American electorate for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, an organization of more than two dozen scholars and analysts that researches the views of voters, and he identified five distinct groupings of voters based on their policy priorities. One of these groupings he called “Democrat/Independent Liberal Elites,” or “DILEs,” and in looking at both their policy preferences and their demographics, he found they had little in common with the rest of the electorate—and even with their fellow Democrats.
As a group, DILEs are younger, whiter, richer and better-educated than the rest of the country. Strikingly, it is the only cohort across the political spectrum not to rank jobs and the economy as a top priority, preferring the environment and climate change. Polls show that people like Winston’s DILEs are also far less religious and far more socially liberal than the rest of the Democratic Party on issues like abortion and LGBT rights. In evaluating candidates, these Democrats consider diversity, and hailing from outside the political establishment, hugely important.
Except that hailing from outside the establishment isn’t much of a selling point to people who actually need things from government, who rely on social services or federally enforced fairness-in-lending laws, or decent government jobs in their districts. For these voters, what matters is relationships, and an ability to deliver. And when they see a Crowley or a Capuano unseated by a fresh new challenger, they see decades of seniority vanishing for largely symbolic reasons.
“Any loss of seniority in any legislative position is hard,” says Jeffrion Aubry, a longtime New York state lawmaker from LeFrak City. “It takes forever to be able to deliver. And if the Congress is taken back by the Democrats, it will be a huge loss, whether Joe ended up as speaker or just at a high level in the majority. You won’t have the power to take care of some issues you might want taken care of.”
Such internal fissures have appeared periodically among the parties. Establishment Republicans are still facing a restive far-right base that views any compromise with Democrats as betrayal, even as they grab scalp after scalp and have installed a fellow traveler in the White House. In the 1970s, the Democrats tossed aside a generation of senior lawmakers in favor of the “Watergate Babies,” who saw the old order as corrupt and compromising. But then again, those older Democrats were a pre-civil rights cohort that had fallen outside the mainstream of the party. This time, it is good liberal seats getting taken, their biggest crime being length of service.
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It can be hard to find Democrats who are willing to speak openly about these matters, cutting as they do among the fault lines of race and class. “For people on the left, the fact that black and Hispanic voters aren’t with them on everything is a huge source of embarrassment," said one social scientist, who asked to not be named in order to wade freely into the fraught territory of race and class in America.
It is unclear whether the mainstream of the Democratic Party is really ready to get behind the redistributive polices of the most energized end of the Democratic left. It is one thing to come out in favor of a $15-per-hour minimum wage, or free public college, or even a federal jobs guarantee; for most people, this will not require a meaningful relinquishment of their privilege. But for the educated top of the Democratic hourglass—to say nothing of the donor class whose members get one-on-one meetings with aspiring party leaders—embracing massive taxes on upper incomes, or much higher inheritance taxes, or robust neighborhood and school desegregation plans, or even a "Medicare for all" proposal that means giving up your doctor is going to be a much harder sell.
“A lot of professional people, they are embarrassed their kids get these advantages,” says Jeffrey Stonecash, a pollster and professor emeritus at Syracuse University who wrote a book called Class and Party in American Politics. “They are aware they are building barriers around who succeeds and who doesn’t. A lot of people disparage all of this, but a lot of white guilt is built around the fact that the world can be unfair.”
Perhaps the most dramatic new development on the left has been the rise of the “democratic socialist” banner, a once-fringe political label embraced by Bernie Sanders, which increasingly has drawn enthusiasm from college-educated voters since the 2016 election. Socialism in its serious form involves significant changes in society—in theory, much higher taxes on the rich, which are paid out in the form of much more generous welfare programs for the less well-off. But upper-income Democratic voters, especially older ones, have never shown much appetite for deeply redistributive policies. In 2015, when President Barack Obama proposed ending the deduction for college savings accounts—a tax break whose benefit goes almost entirely to upper-income voters—he was shot down by liberal powerhouses Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. It’s one thing for progressive candidates to call for free college, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee or universal basic income. Those remain abstractions and don’t touch the lifestyles of the well-off. Propose a new tax on household incomes above $100,000 a year—the top 25 percent of households, a group overrepresented in some of the bluest districts in America—and see how well it goes over.
Up to a limit, social scientists say, upper-income voters will stick with Democrats even at some cost to their bank accounts. Much as evangelical Christians voted against their economic interest to get a Supreme Court that would ban abortion, well-off Democrats will support higher taxes if it means voting for candidates who protect abortion rights, the environment and civil liberties. Upper-income voters, according to Geoffrey C. Layman, a professor at Notre Dame, “can afford to put principle over pragmatic politics, or principle over party. Groups that are needier and more disadvantaged may have to be more pragmatic.”
At the ground level, however, those needs can start to rub well-off voters the wrong way. When it comes to actual working-class and immigrant demands on the hyper-local level—like integrating schools and building more affordable housing and reduced quality-of-life enforcement—college-educated liberals have been more reluctant partners. It's a situation that often plays out in prosperous deep-blue cities—like Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan's Upper West Side. The conflict has already made its own appearance in Ocasio-Cortez’s new district in New York.
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For Ocasio-Cortez, Crowley was the perfect target. At issue in the race wasn’t what he stood for so much or what he did in Washington, but who he was. It was the perfect storm, says a Crowley aide. “You have anti-establishment voters rising up all over the country. It’s the Bernie Sanders anti-establishment voter, and you can’t get more establishment than chair of the House Dems and chair of the Queens County Democratic Party.”
Over nearly 20 years in office, Crowley could boast of delivering a raft of goods to his district. He established a Crime Stoppers program in the district to reduce crime and improve quality of life, funding more than $1 million in graffiti clean-up, after-school programming, and street patrol efforts; he helped get money for hospitals and schools. His presence in the House leadership meant that even his staffers arguably had greater sway on Capitol Hill than many junior members of Congress.
As Ocasio-Cortez told it, this experience wasn’t a strength, but a symbol of the right-hand-washing-the-left quality of insider politics. She knocked him for flying around the country fundraising for Democrats as he ascended the House leadership. She lit into his holding the job of Queens County Democratic boss while running for Congress. “Imagine if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders was the chairman of the national DNC while responsible for their own endorsement and the endorsement of others,” she said at the start of their only televised debate, calling the arrangement “completely inappropriate.”
Crowley was defensive. “I am very proud of my record of electing progressive Democrats in Queens County, whether it is in the judiciary or in elective office,” he responded. His fundraising, he said, was a hedge against the “serious, incredible damage [that] will be done to our democracy” if Democrats don’t retake the House.
For many voters in Queens and the Bronx, Crowley was someone they knew. He had spent 12 years in the State Assembly and 19 years in Congress. His family was steeped in the civic life of the district: His father was a cop and a lawyer, he had an uncle on the City Council, and a first cousin who served on it, too, one of dozens of Crowley first cousins on his father’s side. Crowley’s politics shifted along with the district’s lines, moving from a self-identified “New Democrat” in the 2000s to a committed progressive, especially on immigration, as more of the district included the Bronx.
But Crowley had not had a competitive election in 20 years, and for many of the voters newer to the neighborhood, the “Queens Machine” meant no more to them than Tammany Hall did. In the days leading up to the vote, I spent some time trailing Ocasio-Cortez as she went door-to-door in a heavily Black and Latino portion of the district. When she knocked, most residents just seemed surprised and pleased to see someone show up, even if many of them needed first to register as voters, something Ocasio-Cortez helped them to do, saying that her goal was more about community organizing than about winning any given election.
In many ways, the policy differences between Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez are slim. It was Crowley, the establishment guy, who blocked a street in Washington during an immigration protest and said he would refuse to shake Donald Trump’s hand. Both Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez called for a $15 minimum wage; both promised to help close the jail at Rikers Island and push to end the federal financing of private prisons. (In Massachusetts, the differences between Capuano and Pressley were even smaller.) They did disagree on corporate PAC fundraising, which Ocasio-Cortez swore off but which Crowley would have accepted to grease the engines of a Democratic takeover.
On hyper-local issues, however, upstairs-downstairs divides can become acute—and the symbolic positions that feel good on a national level can turn into real-world decisions that impact people’s lives. Most voters in liberal cities have seen these fights: Upscale parents in Democratic neighborhoods whose liberalism vanishes when it comes to bringing in students from poorer neighborhoods (as on Manhattan’s Upper West Side) or pooling PTA funds between richer and poorer schools (as in Santa Monica, California). This is even more common in the area of housing, and in particular affordable housing, where well-off liberals tend to lose interest in “affordability” the minute it threatens to change their neighborhoods or dent their real-estate values.
This problem played out in Queens as well, in a way that suggests the gulf between insider get-it-done politics and symbolic wins. On 82nd Street, just down the road from Crowley’s district office, developers proposed converting an abandoned movie theater into a 13-story mixed-use project with three stories of affordable units in it. Crowley was in favor of it—it meant permanent jobs at the Target that was going in on the ground floor, union construction jobs in the building of the thing, and more housing, in particular affordable housing.
Ocasio-Cortez opposed it, saying that it would bring gentrification and that the affordable housing wasn’t affordable enough. Politically, it was a winner for her: It gave her a chance to bash Crowley for being in thrall to the real estate industry. The portion of the district where it is slated to go up isn’t so much gentrifying as changing; Latinos are moving away and Asian immigrants are moving in. It has grown less white over the past decade, if anything, but she got a boost from the surrounding, whiter neighborhoods that have helped spearhead the opposition, fearing that the project was out of scale with the neighborhood and would increase vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
Ocasio-Cortez won the election, and three weeks later, the local councilman who supported the project withdrew his support. Neighborhood activists claimed victory—over the real-estate industry, over gentrification, over the old insider system.
Just one thing: The project is still going forward.
Crowley and other local elected officials had been negotiating with the developers to add more affordable housing, but once he lost, any leverage to add it to the project vanished. Legally, the developers can still build 10 stories without any go-ahead from the government—and without bringing any new affordable housing to Queens at all. Which is what the developers have suggested they intend to do.
