You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
Even with Democrats doing very well in recent elections and poised to flip the U.S. House and perhaps even the Senate in November, center-left pundits continue to complain that the party has not moderated enough, particularly on issues such as immigration and transgender rights. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that this criticism is misguided. In the latest edition of Right Now, Grumbach describes his research showing that more centrist candidates often don’t do much better than progressives. Voters don’t see politics on purely a left-right ideological spectrum, says Grumbach. Instead, politicians who are perceived as inauthentic struggle, even if they are fairly centrist. And candidates can connect with voters by emphasizing issues, such as reducing the role of money in politics, that aren’t really about the liberal v. conservative divide. Grumbach also emphasizes that it’s important for the Democratic Party to balance electoral considerations with moral and substantive ones. It would have been bad, Grumbach says, for party officials to distance themselves from civil rights protests in the 1960s because they offended some white voters. Democrats today should not totally discard transgender rights and other causes because they don’t poll well, he says.
