Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP by Patrick Ruffini
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A book written by a Republican that Democrats should be paying attention to. Patrick Ruffini wrote this book before the 2024 election, and for those who have expressed some shock at the Donald Trump victory maybe a look at some of the key data contained in this book might have lessened that shock or helped to explain it after the fact.
I picked up knowledge of the book from the Ezra Klein podcast that produced a fascinating show with Ruffini. I do not think you can review this book without a reference to the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Roy Teixeira (and Ruffini refers to it often) in framing the discussion. (They have since written a follow-up, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?”)
Judis and Teixeira, in 2002, forecasted, with some caveats, that the demographic tide that was increasing minority numbers in the United States would accrue to the electoral benefit of the Democratic Party. The assumption was that Hispanics, and Asians, would continue to vote predominantly for the Democratic Party. In combination with increasing Democratic strength with the professional class this theory of the case had Democrats emerging with an electoral base that would make them the majority party. I remember discussions of Texas being in play. I have, of course, oversimplified the Judis-Teixeira theory, but it will suffice for this review.
Ruffini gets to hard data, which was available to everybody before the 2024 election. We know that the basic divide in the country is between those with a college degree and those without a degree. The “professional class” had been, traditionally, solidly Republican. That has changed dramatically in favor of the Democratic Party. The Democratic hold on the white working class, a traditional source of strength over the years, has been slipping. It is not slipping any longer but is in free fall. To go back to Judis-Teixeira these losses for the Democrats would theoretically be made up by the strong hold of the party on so called minority groups. That is where Ruffini starts this evaluation.
The 2020 Presidential data, even with a Trump loss, should have set off alarm bells for Democrats. It would appear to me that no alarms were sounded. Some examples:
“With the suddenness of an Infinity Gauntlet finger snap Miami-Dade reset the conventional wisdom, thrusting the political world into a new reality, one where a second Trump term was within sight. In the largest Hispanic metropolis in America, Trump had gone from a 29-point drubbing four years earlier to just a 7 point deficit, a 22-point swing. …Trump had surged all along the Mexican border with Texas, including a 55-point swing in rural StarrCounty in the Rio Grande Valley, nearly winning a county that Clinton had captured four years earlier by 60 points. He won next door Zapata County, the first Republican since 1920 to do so.”
Ruffini, Patrick Party of the People pg. 10
These were not simply outliers, but reflective of nationwide trends. What was the constant? The college/non college divide was now being reflected in minority communities.
As Ruffini dives into the data he gets to one of his theories of the case. The gravitational pull of college educated white liberals has pulled the Democratic Party so far left that they have moved way beyond the ideological comfort zone of much of its rank and file, including and especially working class minorities.
“The ‘Latinx’ debacle provides an obvious and extreme example. A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that the gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina is known by fewer than one in four U.S. Hispanics, and used by just 3 percent. When we asked in a 2022 survey what term was best to use to describe Hispanics or Latinos in America, 9 percent of white liberal Democrats said Latinx, but zero Hispanics did. …Democratic representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona has pleaded with the parties allies to stop. ‘To be clear my office is not allowed to use ‘Latinx’ in official communications,’ tweeted Representative Gallego in December 2021. ‘When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use.’”
Ruffini, Patrick Party of the People pg. 109
You might think that is an example that does not mean much, but it is reflective of a mindset that is separating key constituencies from the Democratic Party. The drift of the working class away from the Democratic Party is not new. Ruffini goes back to the 1976 political science journal article by Everett Carll Ladd (link at my blog post.) The “hard hat riot” in New York where construction workers attacked Vietnam War protestors was an early sign of the divergence. That divergence moved to the cultural, where the chasm has just continued to widen. After continued labor support for the Nixon position on the Vietnam war a young aide named Patrick Buchanan saw the possibilities and outlined them in a memo to Nixon:
“It should be our focus to constantly speak to, to assure, to win, to aid, to promote the president’s natural constituency-which is now the working men and women of the country, the common man, the Roosevelt New Dealer. There is a great ferment in American politics; these, quite candidly, are our people now.”
Ruffini, Patrick Party of the People pg. 166
Even the younger Buchanan saw the potential that he would attempt to exploit as a Presidential candidate many years later, and that Donald Trump would successfully exploit in 2016.
There is just so much more to talk about on this subject. Ruffini, using data, has shown some things that we knew, but some things that were maybe not so well known.
1. The main split in the electorate is between those with college degrees and those that do not have degrees.
2. This divide, which had principally shown itself in the white working class, has begun to spread to other segments of the population (minority groups that had been seen as reliably Democratic)
3. The Democratic losses can be attributed to a misreading of the cultural values of some of these groups. Kitchen table issues, fear of crime, and a strong dislike of illegal immigration are key issues for many in these groups, with these issues not at the top of the Democratic Party agenda, or where they were the messaging was poor.
I thought the last quarter of the book was weaker than the strong start, but it gets five stars as the message, especially for Democrats, is critically important to understand. The follow-up by Judis-Teixeira has to be next up.
The Ezra Klein Interview with Patrick Ruffini
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HL_YhlMbheQ?si=9Kh4ZdgH5G4r_H_X
Liberalism Upside Down by Everett Carll Ladd Jr.
An interview with Ruy Teixeira
https://www.youtube.com/embed/XGdSSJ6uVHw?si=Otk0xJ2nkBPj80df
Bill Manzi.com 