Transcript: Ruy Teixiera

The author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? weighs in on the election

With Donald Trump winning the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House, in what The New York Times has described as a “crushing electoral rebuke” of the Democrats, there is a lot of soul-searching going on in the party. My guest on the program today tried to warn the Democrats in his previous book. He says the progressive moment in American politics is now over — and the Democrats are going to have to face that fact if they want to win again.

Ruy Teixeira is a cofounder and politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter on Substack and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, with John B. Judis, is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen the interview for free here.

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TH: This week, I've been thinking about our previous interview and about your book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, which now seems prophetic.

RT: It didn't sell that well when we put it out. I think it was almost boycotted a little bit by the more left-leaning media. But I think maybe now they'll be more willing to listen and it'll get out there more.

TH: You would think. Because of course Donald Trump has won the presidency, all seven battleground states, the Senate, likely the House, and the popular vote, in what The New York Times has called “a crushing electoral rebuke” of the Democrats. What were your initial reactions when you learned Trump had won?

RT: Like a lot of other people, I wasn't surprised that he won, but I was a little surprised at the sweeping nature of the win. It's not a landslide, but it is pretty decisive. He did better in more places and better among a lot of demographics than I thought even my expectation of a Trump victory would be like. My first reaction was, "Hey, I tried to warn them." I did sketch out in some detail in many posts, and in the book you alluded to, that there were fundamental weaknesses in the Democratic approach to building their coalition, and it could all fall apart if they didn't take corrective action. They didn't, and it did.

TH: I want to get into, in a moment, how the Democratic coalition fell apart. But first I want to talk about a piece you published before the election, “The Progressive Moment Is Over,” which really resonated with me. It is important to note that according to Pew Research, the progressive left is about 7% of registered voters. But they really have had an outsized voice in culture in recent years. You argue that the progressive moment is now done, and in this essay, you analyze why the movement fell apart. I want to go through a couple of the reasons that you offer. Walk us through your thinking on how progressives lost the public with their policies on immigration.

RT: We cover this a bit in our book, how it wasn't always the case that Democrats were “more immigrants the better, even if they're illegal, so what? Let's legalize them.” Back when the Democrats were a little bit more closely tied to the labour movement, the labour movement was always very suspicious of having high levels of unauthorized immigration, or indeed immigration in general, particularly low-skill immigration. Because it undercut the low-wage labour market and unions.

There was even a commission headed by Barbara Jordan in the '90s, a Texas Democrat, who basically recommended that they put the lid on some of this stuff. They implemented the e-verify system for employers who are using illegal labour and all that. As we go into the 2000s, and obviously forward to where we are today, Democrats become ever-more queasy about border security and ever more seemingly dedicated to the idea that, as famously it became summarized in that sign you see a lot of neighborhoods in the US, “no human being is illegal,” right?

Of course, famously, in Democratic circles — maybe that's about to change, we'll see — you can't refer to an illegal immigrant as illegal. They're undocumented or something else. Which is absurd. The reason they call them illegal immigrants is they're illegal. They broke the law. Again, famously in the Democratic primary in 2019-2020, one of the moderators asked the assembled candidates, “Who among you wants to decriminalize the border?” Everybody raises their hand, or maybe Joe Biden only halfway up. It's pretty bizarre that we got to this point where the idea that a nation has borders which need to be enforced, and people who are illegal immigrants are in fact illegal, and we should try to deal with them in a policy way if we're going to change the immigration system, rather than the de facto way of just letting a ton of people come in who are unauthorized — that just really got lost.

Of course, when the Biden administration comes in on the heels of the first Trump administration, they basically send out signal after signal that “We're not Trump. We're kind and gentle people. If you want to come to the U.S., you will be treated humanely. We're not going to deport anybody. We're not going to do the remain in Mexico thing anymore.” In fairness they didn't say, "Illegal immigrants, please come." But the signal that was sent to potential migrants, and a lot of the cartels who are going to benefit from this traffic, was that this was going to be a lot easier than it used to be. A lot easier.

Why do people want to come to the U.S.? It's because it's better than where they are. It's as simple as that. The idea that they're all seeking asylum was completely ludicrous, and that in fact was gamed vigorously by migrants and the cartels. And we got what we got. Which is this massive spike in illegal immigration, and a ton of people released in the country pending court dates under pseudo-legal regimens like the parole system that was originally supposed to be for about five people who were in specific situations, and literally hundreds of thousands were let in under Biden.

Basically, I think one of my points in the article you're alluding to was that promoting lax enforcement at the border and downgrading border security was a terrible idea and voters hate it. They really did hate it. They didn't like the disorder that they saw at the border. They didn't like the lack of control. They didn't like all the migrants who would descend upon given cities and towns, and would strain social services, and otherwise make demands on municipalities that were a burden they weren't prepared to make. Democrats only very, very belatedly did anything about this, as we know. This year, they started to clamp down. Mexico cooperated, which was key. Basically, the U.S. said, "Please, don't let them come to the border because we're likely to let them in. Keep them away from the border." They did tighten up the asylum system and so on, so it led to a downward trajectory. Up until that point, which is basically the middle of this year, it was open season to get into the U.S. As a New York Times reporter put it, why do people come 1,000 miles, 2,000 miles to get to the border of the United States? They come because they're convinced if they can get to the border, they can get into the U.S. And if they can get into the U.S., they can stay forever. By and large, they're not wrong.

It's pretty simple. It's like supply and demand, right? If you make it really cheap to come to the U.S., the benefits are high, the costs are low. It's pretty easy to do, so more people did it. This is the bizarre policy/cultural thinking that just drove voters in the United States nuts. Because this is all done at the behest — and back to your progressive activists who are not a big proportion of the population, who are concentrated in these advocacy groups that have a particular ideological stance toward an issue like immigration, seeing it in race terms, seeing it in terms of the U.S.'s supposed obligation to the rest of the world to let anybody in who wants to come. They had a huge influence on the administration and on its policies but did not at all reflect the views of the median voter. As a result, the Biden administration’s whole policy set on this issue, and the results of that policy, were very off-putting to most voters. Obviously, it's a big issue in this election. It's a big part of the reason why Trump did as well as he did. Up until the very last — again, until about the middle of this year — people were kicking and screaming about this stuff on the left of the Democratic Party. "We must not do this. This is cruel. This is xenophobic. This is like the Republicans. This is like Trump."

Once Harris was running and some of this stuff had been in place for a while, they held their fire because they assumed that once Biden was out and Harris was in, once they succeeded in beating Trump again, they could just go back to their normal operating procedure. It didn't turn out that way. As it turned out, it was a poor bet. They lost. Now they're going to have to suffer the consequences because, hey, this is a democracy. The dogs, as they say, didn't like the dog food. There's a million other explanations out there, but at the end of the day, it really does come down to that. The voters weren't buying what Democrats were selling, and that was part of what they were selling.

TH: I read a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in The New York Times recently, and they said “there is no constituency left in this country that favours large-scale immigration.” Do you think that's hyperbole or do you think that's accurate?

RT: I think that's pretty accurate. But again, we do have a constituency. It's these progressive activists and their associated advocacy groups. I think there's still some support for it there. In terms of a mass constituency, a voter bloc, a big part of the country, no, there's no real constituency for it. It always was a boutique issue that somehow managed to take over the Democratic Party and achieve considerable policy success. You wouldn't go out into the hinterlands of America and have people grabbing you by the collar and shaking you up and down and saying, "We must have mass migration. Please, Joe Biden, please let more immigrants into the country because I love immigrants," or something. People actually are fine with immigrants. They like people who come to the country in the right way and they work hard and that's fine. But they don't like the feeling that people can get all the benefits of being in the U.S. just by strolling across the border. That's not how nations work and that's not the way most voters think it should work. That's where we are today. I think that's right. There is no constituency for the de facto migration policy of the Biden administration anymore.

TH: In that same essay, you wrote about criminal justice reform post-George Floyd, and that the Democrats, of course, associated themselves with “defund the police” and are now facing a backlash concerning social disorder and public crime, public safety, all of those things. This is something we're seeing in Canada as well. In a new American Enterprise Institute report with Yuval Levin, Politics Without Winners, you draw on survey data on attitudes towards policing. Can you just say a little bit about what you found?

RT: Sure. We found in our survey — and other surveys have found this too — that there's actually very little interest in defunding or even reducing police budgets. People never bought the idea that policing actually doesn't matter for stopping crime, which was the hardline position of a lot of people on the left of the party, that policing doesn't matter. We need violence interrupters, we need to solve the root causes of crime, and that in the meantime, all we'll do if we enforce the law is have disparate impact, throw more Black and brown people into jail and so on and so forth. It was always a terrible idea.

This goes back to one of my points in that article: lax law enforcement and reducing police budgets was always a terrible idea and people hated it. They really did. From the moment Black Lives Matter put the slogan “defund the police” into circulation during the George Floyd protests, we knew from data that were gathered at the time that even among the Black population, there was very little support for what is apparently meant by defunding the police. There just wasn't. Yet people were acting like this was a demand of the masses of honest Black workers, that they were all out there wanting police to get out of their neighborhoods, that they didn't really need police. That was bullshit. What they wanted was more and better policing. That was always clear from the data, and our survey underscored that. Other data show that even among Democrats, Black and Hispanic Democrats are much more likely to be for more police funding than white Democrats. Particularly white liberal Democrats. Particularly white liberal college-educated Democrats. Which is really the constituency for anything like defund the police. It's not normally working-class voters of any race. This was just a tragic mistake.

I think James Carville once said “defund the police” are the three dumbest words in the English language. James was pretty sure this was something that really hurt the Democrats in the course of the Biden administration, being associated with lax law enforcement, social disorder, open-air drug use, tents on the street. This whole “do no harm, laissez-faire, people want to ruin their lives in public, that's fine, we can't be too tough on people because, again, we'll have disparate impact, we just have to get at the root causes of the problem” is basically insane.

No one who has any appreciation of the way the world works and the way people work and the way cities work would think that if you reduce the costs of doing crime or public disorder … then you'll get more of it. People will take advantage of it. One liberal I quoted in the article you alluded to said, "I might have made a mistake not being skeptical enough about the idea that policing doesn't deter crime. Now that I think about it, actually, yes, it's pretty clear policing does reduce crime." Wow, okay. Glad you figured it out finally. Meanwhile, we had this national experiment with lax law enforcement and police drawback that had terrible outcomes. The rearguard action on this is now crime is going down a bit, therefore, it's not a problem. I don't think people found that very convincing.

TH: You also touched on DEI and identity politics, and cite survey data to show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support a colourblind ethos and believe that people should be treated equal and should enjoy equal opportunities. It is interesting in the campaign, Harris really backed off from identity politics. But it seems that the backlash, the hangover from those years, particularly 2020, still impacted her. Do you think that's the case?

RT: Absolutely. Look, you can't change the brand of a party overnight. If you spent the last 10 years or so — and obviously it accelerated in 2020 — basically promoting DEI-type programs and bureaucracies whose essential purpose is to promote equity, not equal opportunity, promote a preferred language for even talking about these issues, and essentially an anti-meritocratic approach to how people should succeed in the world or be allowed to succeed or be rewarded or get jobs or whatever, it's going to become identified with you.

Harris, she didn't run against DEI. She just didn't talk as much about that she was Black and that she was a woman as perhaps she would have four years ago. That's remotely not enough to change people's sense that Democrats are four-square behind DEI regimes that have emerged all over the country in their workplaces, in government, in who gets into college, who gets certain jobs, how we even talk about certain things, the language, again, you are approved to use. It doesn't pass the smell test just to say, "Oh, we don't talk about it as much as we used to. Therefore, everything's fine." People think it's not fine. People hate this stuff. They just really hate it. It's anti-American.

Americans believe in opportunity, they believe in merit. They believe you should be judged by content of your character, not the colour of your skin, and that everybody should get a fair shake and be judged on how much they can achieve. That's America. America isn't like handing out the goodies based on characteristics of you as an individual that you cannot change. That's ridiculous. Everybody's opposed to discrimination, but everybody is also opposed to the DEI madness that seemed to take over so much of the country in the last 10 years, and again, which Democrats are indelibly associated with. To pretend they are not is just silly.

TH: It's been interesting for me, knowing the data, knowing how much people dislike this, that message has not filtered down to the media in many ways. I think that harmed the Democrats as well.

RT: Because the media all talk to each other. They like it. Or at any rate, you could say that they think they have to like it. There's an enormous amount of preference falsification that goes on in these elite professional circles and in the media, the nonprofits, the foundations, academia. It's all over the place. Where educated professionals hang out, there is obviously a certain part of that group that are true believers in this stuff. I think there's a lot of other people who are signed onto it because they are absolutely petrified of saying anything different. There is, as I say, a lot of preference falsification going on.

An interesting question about Trump's victory and the political and cultural implications of it is, will this finally start blowing apart some of that preference falsification network that I think sustains a lot of this stuff? There's Timur Kuran, I think his name is, he's at Duke. He talks about a preference cascade. Where, all of a sudden, people start not falsifying their preferences and say what they really think, which then starts to create the permission structure for other people to say the same thing and so on and so on as it cascades. We'll see if we get something like that in media and other professional circles.

So far, again, it's just baby steps. I think we are seeing a little bit of it, but the stake hasn't been driven through the heart of the woke vampire as it were. It's still out there. I think it will be somewhat slow to change. Particularly, again, because a lot of these people are ensconced in bureaucracies. They owe their jobs to it. They've been talking about this stuff for years. There's also the DEI departments and the HR departments. There are enforcers out there who may in fact give you trouble if you start to dissent from the orthodoxy. This is just a long-winded way of saying there's a lot of money and power still behind the DEI regime. And they will not give up easily.

TH: I want to turn now and speak about how the Democratic coalition has blown apart. You write in an article on this that “the priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated liberal America, which only partially overlap, and sometimes not at all, with those of ordinary Americans. This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces.” We saw this with the non-white vote. We saw this with the working class non-college vote, the youth vote. Those didn't surprise me as much as the female vote. As you write, the Democrats invested a lot of hope in that vote and it didn't pan out, but the male vote did pan out for Trump. Can you walk us through those trends and how you interpret them?

RT: The women's vote was, I think, extremely interesting. There was, as you say, a massive shift among the male vote. Among young men, I think it was basically the Democratic advantage went from plus 15D to plus 14, 15R, so about a 30-point swing. That's massive. There was about half that among young women as well. Among women as a group, there was actually a decline in the advantage for the Democrats. I think it went from about 12 points for Biden to 7 points for Harris. That wasn't supposed to happen. Women were supposed to rescue the Democrats because all they care about is abortion and they hate Trump because he's such a bad man. They will reach back for something extra. The Democrats will get a spike in support. They'll turn out at much higher rates and everything will be great.

It turned out none of that stuff was true. Turns out that women as a group are not single-issue abortion voters. I could have told them that before the election, but they persisted in believing it was a magic bullet for the Democrats. To some extent, that was driven by the relative success in 2022 and 2023, which are much lower turnout elections where the more activated, engaged base of the Democrats is more likely to turn out, particularly the college-educated women for whom abortion is a key issue.

I think on net, the abortion issue helped at the margin for the Democrats, but it just wasn't enough to move the election in the direction that would be decisive for them, even among women. Makes you think, right? It should perhaps remind us that women, they aren't a unified demographic by any stretch of the imagination. They don't all care about the same things. They have a variety of issues they care about. The idea that they were going to be galvanized by this one single issue was just a huge mistake. Particularly, I think, for working-class women. The idea this was going to be that big a deal for them or at least overwhelm all of their issues was just wrong. Just wrong. By and large, America is a pro-choice country in the limited sense that they think abortion should generally be available, though maybe not past a certain point in pregnancy. The last trimester, people are very queasy about that, including women. Trump to some extent did defang the issue a little bit by saying, "I will not pass the national abortion ban and I'm going to leave it to the states. If you want to have a liberal abortion law in your state, fine. Or a conservative law, fine." He never wavered from that, which really pissed off the hardcore pro-life activists in the Republican Party. But it was a smart thing to do. I don't think he will pass the national abortion ban. I think that's ludicrous.

It just didn't have the overwhelming power as an issue that people thought. It was just in microcosm a lot of the problems that Democrats had with various demographic groups. They were essentially placing their bet on a series of issues like abortion, “democracy is on the ballot,” how racist Trump is or whatever, that did not have the cachet that they thought it did among the groups they were targeting. Look at the Hispanic population — massive shifts among Hispanics toward Republicans. They basically cleaned up the border counties in Texas, but it was really all over the country.

I think if you compare 2016 to 2020, the Democratic advantage declined by about 16 points in that election. It looks like we're having a similar shift in this election. Between 2016 and 2024, we're seeing the Democratic advantage among Hispanics writ large dropped by 25 or 30 points. That's huge. It just shows the shift there is not a one-off, it's been happening for a while. Despite the Democrats' best effort to paint Trump as the avenger of white supremacy, nobody believed it.

Look what happened with Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans were supposed to be appalled by the “island of garbage” joke at the Madison Square Garden rally that Trump had before the election. There were tons of stories in the center left-ish media, mainstream media. They would wind up talking to some person who was like a Democratic organizer in Redding, Pennsylvania, or something like this, "Oh yes, people are really upset about this. It's really going to change the election." Of course, it didn't at all. Puerto Ricans swung pretty hard toward Trump, including in parts of Pennsylvania where they thought, "Oh, this ought to put us over the top." Instead, the Puerto Rican precinct swung harder toward Trump than the rest of the state. It just goes to show you that they are starting with the wrong theory about voters. Since they are starting with the wrong theory, they are getting the wrong results.

Unless they change their theory about how to appeal to a lot of these different demographics, I think they are going to continue to have trouble. Now, Trump may screw things up pretty fast and maybe they'll have a bad midterm in 2026, but Democrats … Again, back to the dog food. They have to change the formula for the dog food or the dogs ain't going to eat it. I think that's what they are still resisting.

TH: To talk about your theory, you have argued that the Democrats need to move towards economic liberalism and to take moderate stances on social issues. They don't appear to be doing that at this time. But I'm curious what you think about, on the right, the economic populist movement that we're seeing from Oren Cass that's now going to have its representation in the White House through JD Vance. What do you make of that? Because a lot of those guys are economic populists, but are very moderate or even socially conservative on social issues.