In a Vox explainer last week, Rachel Cohen described the political science case against “deliverist” explanations of Kamala Harris’ loss, which are gaining ground on the left of the Democratic party. Cohen’s counterargument relies on the “essential research” of two political scientists, Dan Galvin and Chloe Thurston, who argue that policies are unlikely to generate durable partisan support.
But the relationship between the brewing fights among Democrats and Galvin and Thurston’s research is more complicated than Cohen suggests. Galvin and Thurston’s arguments do not fit neatly into the dispute between deliverists and their “popularist” opponents, which are roiling the Democratic party. Instead, they make the case for a third position, which might be dubbed “partyist.”
Deliverists versus popularists
Fights among Democrats over why Harris lost draw implicitly or explicitly on political science research, but are really disagreements over the political legacy of the Obama presidency. Crudely simplified, deliverists believe that Barack Obama failed to build a durable coalition because his technocratic administration was too cautious on policy. Popularists instead believe that Obama was right to think that Democrats should tack to popular opinion rather than taking potentially risky big policy measures.
Each view potentially draws on a different approach in political science. Deliverists – like David Dayen in an article that Cohen links to – believe that successful policy measures will generate partisan support for Democrats. This ties into the claim by some political scientists who study “American Political Development” (APD) that big ambitious policies can generate their own support. Measures such as Social Security may be controversial when introduced – but over time these policies can become incredibly popular, generating support for the party that introduced them. Under this diagnosis, when Obama tacked to the center or hid potentially popular policies to make them more effective, he paved the way for Hillary Clinton’s election loss.
Popularists – like David Shor and Matthew Yglesias – argue that Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, were absolutely correct. In Ezra Klein’s pithy summary, popularism suggests that to get reelected, politicians “should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” According to this view, leftists’ vociferous defense of unpopular measures and groups regularly dooms the Democratic party to defeat.
Popularists, however, draw on a very different approach to political science. Their connections are not to APD scholars, who favor historical evidence and big enduring changes, but to statistically oriented scholars, who use survey analysis to capture the ever-shifting beliefs and desires of voters.
Maybe something else explains what is happening
Popularists regularly caricature deliverists as unrealistic wishcasters, who believe that big unpopular policy measures will magically generate their own support. Deliverists, for their part, suggest that not only does popularism not work but that it is morally obnoxious, along the lines of this famous dril tweet:
While each position draws on a political science tradition, political science can’t easily adjudicate between them. Both the big structural changes that APD scholars focus on and the more immediate shifts in public opinion that statistical scholars draw on are plausibly important. However, there aren’t good ways of reconciling them. They draw on different structural accounts of what matters in politics. Nor is it easy to use empirical data to adjudicate between the two approaches. Nationally important elections are relatively infrequent, and are affected by many factors besides policy measures and party messaging.
Indeed, Galvin and Thurston’s actual argument is that we need to pay attention to a third factor. As Cohen rightly says, they are criticizing the assumption that policy results deliver partisan support. However, they are doing so within the APD tradition, disagreeing in part with other APD scholars about how structural change actually happens. They argue against deliverism, so that they can argue instead for building up party structures and group identity.
This builds on a different diagnosis of the Obama presidency, which Galvin lays out in a 2016 TMC article.
The problem was that neither Obama nor Clinton did enough [party building] to make much of a difference in the near-term … both treated policy successes as tantamount to political successes. Both … argued that successful health-care reform would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth in the long run. But policies don’t always generate their own political supports, which is the main difficulty Obama is confronting now.
As Galvin and Thurston note, Obama recognized this later.
Partly because my docket was really full … I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as … President …. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.
In other words, Galvin and Thurston aren’t either deliverists or popularists. They are partyists. They think that what went wrong in the Obama administration (and in other Democratic administrations) is that Democratic leaders did not focus enough on building grassroots organizations that would connect politicians to voters and vice versa.
There isn’t sufficient empirical evidence to say whether they are right or wrong, but their diagnosis highlights different plausible explanatory factors in the intra-Democratic fight. In a world where Democratic party organization is weak, it is more difficult to explain both parties’ positions on popular issues, and their policy successes to voters. Furthermore, the policies that Democrats introduce are more vulnerable to being weakened or subverted, if they do not have active, organized constituencies that are connected to the party. This partyist diagnosis gets less attention than the other two because it does not have an ideological constituency behind it.
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