Centrism is Dead

Lee Drutman was cited in an article for Slate about the ways that the upcoming policy agenda for the Democratic Party spells doom for Third Way centrism. 

What do we actually know, nonanecdotally, about what kind of economic policies American voters want? For many years, Third Way has made a habit of waving around poll data showing very few Americans identify as liberals. “At the national level,” William Galston and Elaine Kamarck wrote in a report for the group called “The Still-Vital Center,” “self-identified liberals constitute barely one-fifth of the electorate; in most states, they are nowhere near a plurality—let alone a majority.” This has long been true. It has also long been true that when asked about specific proposals and political values, American voters are far more economically liberal than the numbers on ideological self-identification suggest.

For the Democracy Fund’s June 2017 report on the 2016 electorate, political scientist Lee Drutman created indices aligning voters in YouGov’s survey data along social and economic political axes. Based on answers to questions including “whether we need a strong government to handle complex economic problems” and “whether distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair,” Drutman found that more than 73 percent of the 2016 electorate was economically liberal, including, of course, the economically liberal and socially conservative populists who swung for Trump. Drutman also found that Clinton voters and Trump voters were both highly supportive of Social Security and Medicare, a result that won’t surprise those who witnessed the “hands off my Medicare” days of the Obama presidency.