Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, who is surprisingly close in polls against Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, attributes that strong standing to her campaign strategy. She says her secret sauce is avoiding the “culture wars.” “I think that has to be the way forward for Democrats, to focus on the economic issues and not take the bait when it comes to the culture wars,” she told Politico in an interview last week.
Politico treated that comment as a bold, surprising declaration. It isn’t. While progressive and centrist Democrats disagree on a lot, politicians in both camps often make comments similar to Hinojosa’s. And this perspective is widely shared among many pundits. Writers at both the socialist publication Jacobin and the center-left Bulwark have recently echoed this view.
But just because there’s a consensus doesn’t mean it’s correct. The “economic issues not culture wars” frame shared by much of the Democratic Party is entirely wrongheaded. It’s an example of intellectual dishonesty, moral cowardice, historical inaccuracy, and flawed electoral politics all wrapped together. The sooner Democrats drop this perspective, the better off the party and country will be.
Let me start with the intellectual dishonesty. When most people think of “cultural” issues, I suspect their mind goes to movies, music, sports, or other elements of popular culture. “Democratic politicians should not focus on which musicians perform at the Super Bowl or which shows win Emmys” is perfectly fine advice. But Democratic politicians are rarely fixated on football or Taylor Swift. What gets lumped into “cultural issues” these days includes all manner of meaty matters: higher education, K-12 education, immigration, racism, transgender rights, policing, abortion, sexism, religion, voting rights, and numerous other matters. And it’s true that some Democratic politicians and activist groups emphasize those issues.
As they should. Labeling those issues as “cultural” or “social” trivializes them. But Republicans trying to restrict the teaching of sociology, African American studies, and other academic fields they disagree with, bar transgender Americans from getting the medical care they need, deport people to countries that they have never lived in, and the hundreds of other radical actions that the Trump administration and state-level Republicans have taken on the vast range of issues I listed above is very important. Overly aggressive police departments kill innocent people. Restrictive voting laws limit Americans’ participation in our democracy. These efforts to rig the political system are no mere “culture war.”
The idea that you can easily separate “economic” issues from these “cultural” issues is nonsense. It’s very expensive for transgender Americans to move to blue states so they can live freely. It’s harder to buy a house in a neighborhood with rising home values if you are Black and harder to get a job if your name is Shanice, Terell, or something else synonymous with African Americans.
I suspect that Hinojosa, who has worked as a civil rights attorney, knows all that. So why is the longtime state representative acting as if she doesn’t? Because “cultural issues” is a coded way to hint at the realities of American politics. Despite all the fixation these days on the Democrats’ declines with voters who don’t have college degrees and voters of color, the real fissure in American politics remains the same as it was four decades ago: race. In most states, white voters favor Republicans, while Asian, Black, and Latino voters combined favor Democrats. In 2024, Trump won about 66 percent of white voters in Texas, compared to about 43 percent of voters of color.
“Democrats must get more support from white voters to win elections, and white voters in particular either don’t care that much about policing, racism, and immigration or have conservative views on those issues” would be an accurate statement. But such frankness wouldn’t help Hinojosa or other Democratic politicians win over those white voters. Hence, they engage in misleading rhetoric about the electorate and the issues.
But this rhetoric isn’t just words. Labeling a whole suite of matters as “cultural” provides the pretext to ignore or even adopt Republican positions on them. And that’s exactly what Democratic politicians are doing. The party was extremely slow last year to react to Trump’s hyperaggressive deportations and deployment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to terrorize liberal cities because of the post-2024 consensus that Democrats were too liberal and focused on so-called cultural issues. It’s why national Democrats have been silent as the Trump administration forced colleges across the country to eliminate diversity and inclusion programs. It’s why Democratic politicians are adopting conservative language (“transgender ideology,” “boys playing in girl sports”) and conservative ideas (restrictions on gender-affirming care) instead of forthrightly defending transgender Americans from the full-scale assault they are facing from the Trump administration.
This is moral cowardice. The overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians are in heavily blue states and districts. They can defend immigrants, transgender Americans, professors, and anyone else with absolutely no fear of losing reelection. But the “cultural issues” frame has not only given Democratic politicians an excuse to not stand up for the marginalized but allowed them to cast that silence as smart and savvy. It’s not. It is the height of irresponsibility and fecklessness to refuse to defend the victims of an authoritarian, bigoted regime.
The usual explanation given for the Democrats’ “economic issues not culture wars” mantra is electoral history. According to centrist Democrats and even some on the left, the story of the last several years is one of cultural excess by the party. Democrats won the 2020 elections but would have gotten more seats in the House and Senate but for the backlash to the “Defund the Police” slogan that emerged from the George Floyd protests, according to this narrative. The party lost the 2024 elections because Kamala Harris was perceived as too liberal on these so-called cultural issues. Some in the party take the story even further back: The Democratic Party has ignored economic issues and obsessed on so-called cultural ones dating back to the 1980s.
That’s historical inaccuracy bordering on fiction. There was a time when the Democratic Party leaned heavily into racial issues: the 1960s. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts was followed by a white backlash that eventually turned the entire South Republican. It’s sad and unfortunate that some of the greatest actions taken by a political party in the history of the United States became an electoral albatross. But if anything, the Democrats have over-learned the lessons from that backlash. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden, Democratic Party leaders for the last six decades have relentlessly focused on “economic issues” and not racism or anything that could be labeled cultural, desperate to win back those white voters.
Biden somewhat reluctantly embraced the 2020 protests. But once in office, he governed on economic policies, like expanding infrastructure, that were intended to win over moderate and conservative white voters. By early 2022, he declared, “Fund the police, fund them, fund them” in his State of the Union address to distance himself from the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, Harris not only didn’t emphasize liberal stands on these so-called cultural issues but called for more restrictive policies on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The idea that somehow Democrats have too often “taken the bait” on cultural issues, as Hinojosa suggested, is wildly inaccurate. What’s actually happened is that Republicans have harped on race, immigration, and other “dog whistles” for decades to appeal to white voters, in particular, and also some conservative-leaning people of color. Democrats occasionally respond, in part because African Americans, transgender people, and other members of the party’s coalition plead for support from the politicians that they voted for. Usually, that Democratic support is half-hearted and temporary, like what Biden and Harris offered to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Then the party makes a big show of regretting even its half-hearted defenses. The rhetoric from Hinojosa and other Democrats that the party lost in 2024 because it was overly focused on so-called cultural issues is nothing new. Such critiques also emerged after Democratic defeats in 1984, 1988, 2004, and 2016. If moving to the right or ignoring these issues were the key to winning elections, Democrats would never lose. They have been adopting this strategy for decades—lather, rinse, repeat.
That brings to my final point: “Economic issues not cultural wars” is a terrible electoral strategy. What issues resonate with voters is entirely dependent upon the conditions of the country at that time. Casting Trump as a racist authoritarian helped Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Leaning into abortion rights aided the party in 2022, in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Democratic candidates are smartly tapping into the backlash against ICE this year. The reality is that the number of issues that Democrats and the media have labeled as “cultural” is so vast that the party is bound to be on the politically useful side of some of them at any given time. And while Americans may not agree with Democrats on every “cultural” issue, polls suggest that most Americans favor the multiracial, pluralistic society pushed by Democrats over the white, heterosexual, Christian, male-dominated society advanced by the GOP.
Campaigning on economic issues isn’t some panacea. Democratic candidates who relentlessly harp on such issues lose all the time. Which economic issues Democratic politicians push and when really matters. Talking about raising the minimum wage rarely helps Democratic politicians win elections. Most Americans agree with paying low-income workers more, but that’s not an issue that energizes or engages them. In contrast, calling for limits on data center expansion, as Hinojosa and other Democratic candidates are doing, is really useful right now, as hostility to billionaires and Big Tech companies is rising. But that tactic would not have been as effective in, say, 2016.
Hinojosa claims that she’s doing well in the polls because she’s emphasizing economic issues and downplaying so-called cultural ones. Bullshit. The reality is that Hinojosa is doing well because Trump is deeply unpopular overall and has lost huge ground with Latinos, a big bloc in Texas. Those are national trends, so I seriously doubt they have much to do with Hinojosa offering the usual Democratic boilerplate of expanding Medicaid and supporting public schools. What’s driving Trump’s unpopularity is a specific economic issue: high gas prices. And what’s making Trump toxic among Latinos is those high prices and also the excesses of his immigration policies.
“Emphasize economic issues not cultural wars” isn’t even good advice for Hinojosa, never mind something that the rest of the party should adopt.
I hope that Hinojosa and other Democrats who have adopted this “economics not cultural wars” frame win their races, because they will support better policies than Republicans once in office. But I am deeply concerned that if a few Democrats in red states win on this rhetoric, this perspective will become even more entrenched in the party. And that would be terrible. “Economic issues not cultural wars” produces a party that both loses elections and abandons moral causes and vulnerable people. That’s not a theoretical argument—it’s the story of the Democratic Party of my entire adulthood.
The reality is that there are no silly culture wars happening in America. There are equality wars and justice wars and fairness wars. Democrats should try to win those wars—and the elections that involve them.
