New Democrats, also known as centrist Democrats, Clinton Democrats, or moderate Democrats, are a centrist ideological faction within the Democratic Party in the United States. As the Third Way faction of the party, they are seen as culturally liberal on social issues while being moderate or fiscally conservative on economic issues. [1] New Democrats dominated the party from the late 1980s through the mid-2010s, and continue to be a large coalition in the modern Democratic Party.
However, with the rise of progressivism with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, higher support for protectionism in the United States, [2] and a general leftward shift of the Democratic Party since the 2010s, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) challenged the New Democrat Coalition (NDC) for the largest party plurality. As of April 2024, the seat margin between the two caucuses remains a source of dialogic contestation because almost thirty members of the NDC (and Blue Dog Coalition) self-signify as both Progressive and New Democrat. This dialectical vestige of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Third Way does not necessarily denote triangulation (politics). With the notable exception of Sara Jacobs, delegates who currently hold seats in both caucuses were all born before 1979, with a supermajority born in, or well before, 1973. They also began their partisan careers on the eve of, or prior to, the Presidency of Barack Obama. [3] [4] [5] [6]
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In 1974, the Yellow Dog, Atari, and Watergate Baby factions within the Democratic Party found a common thread in "liberal" iterations of "illusory" supply-side progressivism, advancing their mutual conceptions of "centrism" and post-industrial society. Michael Dukakis, for instance, was a Watergate Baby who, after establishing the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation (1978), increasingly garnered attention from "private" start-up investors and, conversely, state auditors, as an Atari Democrat. Democratic voter "tax revolts" that began in the Carter administration, and continued into the first Reagan administration, unraveled this common thread. [7] [8] [9]
After the landslide defeats to the Republican Party led by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 1980s, a group of prominent Democrats began to believe their party was out of touch and in need of a radical shift in economic policy and ideas of governance. [10] [11] The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was founded in 1985 by Al From and a group of like-minded politicians and strategists. [12] They advocated a political Third Way as an antidote to the electoral successes of Reaganism. [10] [11]
The landslide 1984 presidential election defeat spurred centrist Democrats to action, and the DLC was formed. The DLC, an unofficial party organization, played a critical role in moving the Democratic Party's policies to the center of the American political spectrum. Prominent Democratic politicians such as Senators Al Gore and Joe Biden (both future Vice Presidents, and Biden a future President) participated in DLC affairs prior to their candidacies for the 1988 Democratic Party nomination. [13] The DLC did not want the Democratic Party to be "simply posturing in the middle", and instead framed its ideas as "progressive" and as a "Third Way" to address the problems of its era. Examples of the DLC's policy initiatives can be found in The New American Choice Resolutions. [13] [14]
Although the New Democrat label was briefly used by a progressive reformist group including Gary Hart and Eugene McCarthy in 1989, [15] the term became more widely associated with the New Orleans Declaration, [16] Bill Clinton's subsequent criticism of Democratic Presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson's variant of Rainbow/PUSH, [17] and policies of the DLC which in 1990 renamed its bi-monthly magazine from The Mainstream Democrat to The New Democrat. [18] When then-Governor Clinton stepped down as DLC chairman to run for the presidency in the 1992 United States presidential election, he presented himself as a New Democrat. [19]
William Jefferson Clinton, then the Governor of Arkansas, and additional partisans subsequently organized the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 and, four years later, the Progressive Policy Institute. [20] The DLC and PPI promoted post-1985 configurations in fiscal and monetary "leadership" for a revival of the front. [21] Elements of DLC convocations and PPI research later (re)introduced Joseph Schumpeter's innovation economics, and creative destruction as revolution, to Democratic Party platforms on political economy. Their efforts also produced electoral recoveries and even gains, especially during the 1992 elections. [20] The PPI persisted into the present day, recently sponsoring "young pragmatists" at the rechristened Center for New Liberalism [22] (formerly known as the Neoliberal Project) to "modernize progressive politics." [23]
Historian Michael Kazin argues that the shift marked a divergence from Keynesian public spending, which aimed to stimulate a consumer market rally in a given economic sector, particularly by "laboring" individuals and families. These were fiscal and monetary goals of the latter half of the Second New Deal, as well as early Cold War liberalism. For this thesis, Clinton's "the era of big government is over" partially signified a reduction in government standards for determining levels of consumer resurgence, and the limits of public spending, in an economic sector. Kazin favored an updated version of these platforms for the Progressive Caucus and Bernie Sanders, albeit with a more diversified consumer base, in his "moral capitalism." [24] This Kazin concept was connected to, yet distinct from, Ethical consumerism in the moral economy of capitalism.
Bill Clinton became the Democratic politician most identified with the New Democrats due to his promise of welfare reform in the 1992 United States presidential campaign and its subsequent enactment, his 1992 promise of a middle-class tax cut and his 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor. [11] New Democrat successes under Clinton, underpinned by the writings of Anthony Giddens on the duality of structure, sustained a unity of opposites that became the hallmark of Third Way political economy. Allusions to this Third Way as syncretic politics and unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno , should be explicated and the concepts assessed in shifting contexts. New Democrats are often regarded to have inspired Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and his policies within the Labour Party as New Labour, as well as prompting the continental conflation of Third Way approaches to social democracy with previous notions of democratic socialism. The two were often used interchangeably by political scientists and fostered popular conceptions of democratic socialism as a social democratic variant of libertarian socialism. [25]
Clinton presented himself as a centrist candidate to draw White middle-class voters who had left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. Until 2016 and even after, the Third Way defined and dominated notions of centrism in U.S. partisan politics. In 1990, Clinton became the DLC chair. Under his leadership, the DLC founded two-dozen chapters and created a base of support. [13] Running as a New Democrat, Clinton won the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. [26]
Legislation signed into domestic law with bipartisan support under President Clinton includes:
New Democrats dialectically adopted GOP proposals and platforms during the campaigns for the 1992 Congressional/state elections and 1992 United States presidential election. Below are subsequent Congressional legislative authorships and voting percentages. Please note that both the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act became law three months before the 1996 Congressional/state elections and 1996 United States presidential election.
Legislative Authorship
Congressional Democrat Voting Percentages
The Clinton Administration, supported by Congressional New Democrats, was responsible for proposing and passing the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which increased Medicare taxes for taxpayers with annual incomes over $135,000, yet also reduced Medicare spending and benefits across all tax brackets. Congressional Republicans demanded even deeper cuts to Medicare, but Clinton twice vetoed their bills. The Clinton Administration in turn taxed individuals earning annual incomes over $115,000, but also defined taxable "small business" earnings as less than approximately $10 million in annual gross revenue, with tax brackets for high-gross incorporated businesses beginning at that number. According to the Clinton Foundation, the revised brackets and categories increased taxes on the wealthiest 1.2% of taxpayers within these new brackets, [28] while cutting taxes on 15 million low-income families and making tax cuts available to 90% of small businesses. "Small businesses" and taxpayer classifications were reconfigured by these new tax brackets. [29] Again, according to the Clinton Foundation, these brackets raised the top marginal tax rate from 31% to 40%. Additionally, it mandated that the budget be balanced over a number of years through the implementation of spending restraints.
Bill Clinton's promise of welfare reform was passed in the form of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Prior to 2018, critics such as Yascha Mounk contended that Clinton's arguments for the virtues of "negative" notions of "personal responsibility [New Orleans Declaration: 'individual responsibility']," propounded within DLC circles during the 1980s, stemmed more from Ronald Reagan's [2] : 116 and Peggy Noonan's specific conception of "accountability" than any "positive notion of responsibility" or even multifarious approaches to "accountability." Additional critics distinguish the New Democrat idea of "personal responsibility" from arguments over the extent of limitations on government, if any, in platforms that advance social responsibility. The 1996 United States presidential election, the temporary relegation of Hillary Clinton to the global promotion of microcredit (argued by Claremont McKenna College historian Lily Geismer), [30] partisan compromises over this act, conflicts within the Democratic Party, as well as the act's multivalent consequences, all contributed to deliberations over passage and execution of the PRWORA. [31]
Democratic partisan criticism of the first Clinton Administration as well as the formation of the Blue Dog Coalition, particularly in response to proposals and actions by the First Lady, followed 1994 Congressional New Democrat losses in the southeast and west coast. [32] Bill Clinton's reassertion as a New Democrat during the 1996 presidential elections, and passage of the PRWORA, contributed to the founding of the New Democrat Coalition, reaffirming Clintonian Democrats as New Democrats. [21] As of August 2023, 23% of the New Democrat Coalition have become simultaneous members of, or declared an intention to vote for more proposals by, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. A number of these delegates, most notably Shri Thanedar, faced backlash from pundits and constituents alike, as evidence surfaced of alleged involvement in post-2016 attempts to rally neoconservatism. [33]
In March 2009, Barack Obama, said in a meeting with the New Democrat Coalition that he was a "New Democrat" and a "pro-growth Democrat", that he "supports free and fair trade" and that he was "very concerned about a return to protectionism". [34]
Throughout the Obama administration, a "free and fair trade" attitude was espoused, including in a 2015 trade report entitled The Economic Benefits of U.S. Trade that noted that free trade "help[s] developing countries lift people out of poverty" and "expand[s] markets for U.S. exports". [35]
Throughout Obama's tenure, approximately 1,000 Democrats lost their seats across all levels of government. [36] Specifically, 958 state legislature seats, 62 house seats, 11 Senate seats, and 12 governorships, [37] with a majority of these elected officials identifying as New Democrats. Some analysts such as Henry Eten at FiveThirtyEight , believe this was due to the changing demographic shift, as more Democrats identified as liberal in 2016 than moderate. [38]
Consequently, many pundits believed that Obama's tenure marked an end of the New Democrats' dominance in the party, although the faction still remains an important part of the party's big tent. [3] [4] [6] [5]
Ahead of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, many New Democrats were backing the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, the wife of former New Democrat president, Bill Clinton who served as a Senator from New York during the 2000s and as Barack Obama's Secretary of State during the early 2010s. Originally considered to be an expected nominee, Clinton faced an unexpected challenge from Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders, whose campaign garnered the support of progressive and younger Democrats. Ultimately, Clinton won 34 of the 57 [lower-alpha 1] contests, compared to Sanders' 23, and garnered about 55 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, commentators saw the primary as a decline in the strength of New Democrats in the party, and an increasing influence of progressive Democrats within the party.
Ahead of the formal announcement of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published the Democratic National Committee email leak, in which DNC operatives, many of whom were New Democrats, seemed to deride Bernie Sanders' campaign [39] and discuss ways to advance Clinton's nomination, [40] leading to the resignation of DNC chair, and New Democrat member, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other implicated officials. The leak was allegedly part of an operation by the Russian government to undermine Hillary Clinton. [41] [42]
Although the ensuing controversy initially focused on emails that dated from relatively late in the primary, when Clinton was nearing the party's nomination, [40] the emails cast doubt on the DNC's neutrality towards progressive and moderate candidates. [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] This was evidenced by alleged bias in the scheduling and conduct of the debates, [lower-alpha 2] as well as controversial DNC–Clinton agreements regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. [lower-alpha 3] Other media commentators have disputed the significance of the emails, arguing that the DNC's internal preference for Clinton was not historically unusual and didn't affect the primary enough to sway the outcome. [55] [56] [57] [58] The controversies ultimately led to the formation of a DNC "unity" commission to recommend reforms in the party's primary process. [59] [60]
The winner of the 2020 United States presidential election, was Joe Biden, who served as Vice President to Barack Obama. Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States. In the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, 13 Democrats lost their seats. All thirteen Democrats that lost their seats had won in the 2018 mid-term elections. Of those 13 members, 10 of them were New Democrats.
During the 117th United States Congress, the New Democrat Coalition lost its status as the largest ideological coalition in favor of the more left leaning Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC was founded in 1991, but only began catching up and eventually surpassed the New Democrat Coalition in the 2010s. [61] [6]
As of December 2023, Biden has largely maintained Trump's protectionist trade policies, and has not negotiated any new free trade agreements. Labor unions, an important constituency for Biden’s re-election, opposed removing Trump's tariffs. [62]
According to Dylan Loewe, New Democrats tend to identify as fiscally moderate-to-conservative and socially liberal. [1]
Columnist Michael Lind argued that neoliberalism for New Democrats was the "highest stage" of left liberalism. The counterculture youth of the 1960s became more fiscally conservative in the 1970s and 1980s but retained their cultural liberalism. Many leading New Democrats, including Bill Clinton, and Gary Hart, started out in the George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party and gradually moved toward the right on economic and military policy. [63] According to historian Walter Scheidel, both major political parties shifted towards promoting free-market capitalism in the 1970s, with Republicans moving further to the political right than Democrats to the political left. He noted that Democrats played a significant role in the financial deregulation of the 1990s. [64] Anthropologist Jason Hickel and historian Gary Gerstle contended that the neoliberal policies of the Reagan era were carried forward by the Clinton administration, forming a new economic consensus which crossed party lines. [65] [2] : 137–138, 155–157 According to Gerstle, "across his two terms, Clinton may have done more to free markets from regulation than even Reagan himself had done." [2] : 137–138, 155–157
New Democrats have faced criticism from those further to the left. In a 2017 BBC interview, Noam Chomsky said that "the Democrats gave up on the working class forty years ago". [66] [67] Political analyst Thomas Frank asserted that the Democratic Party began to represent the interests of the professional class rather than the working class. [68] In his 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders said that "the Democratic Party has become a party of the coastal elites, folks who have a lot of money, upper-middle-class people". [69]
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was a non-profit 501(c)(4) corporation that was active from 1985 to 2011. Founded and directed by Al From, it argued that the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it had taken since the late 1960s. One of its main purposes was to win back white middle-class voters with ideas that addressed their concerns. The DLC hailed the election and reelection of Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story.
In American politics, a superdelegate is a delegate to a presidential nominating convention who is seated automatically.
From January 3 to June 3, 2008, voters of the Democratic Party chose their nominee for president in the 2008 United States presidential election. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was selected as the nominee, becoming the first African American to secure the presidential nomination of any major political party in the United States. However, due to a close race between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the contest remained competitive for longer than expected; neither candidate received enough pledged delegates from state primaries and caucuses to achieve a majority, without endorsements from unpledged delegates (superdelegates).
The 2008 Iowa Democratic presidential caucus occurred on January 3, and was the state caucuses of the Iowa Democratic Party. It was the first election for the Democrats of the 2008 presidential election. Also referred to as "the First in the Nation Caucus," it was the first election of the primary season on both the Democratic and Republican sides. Of the eight major Democratic presidential candidates, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois received the most votes and was ultimately declared the winner of the Iowa Democratic Caucus of 2008, making him the first African American to win the caucus and the first African American to win a primary state since Jesse Jackson in 1988. Former U.S. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina came in second place and then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York finished third, though Clinton received more delegates than Edwards. Campaigning had begun as early as two years before the event.
The Democratic Party of the United States is a big tent party composed of various factions. The liberal faction supports modern liberalism that began with the New Deal in the 1930s and continued with both the New Frontier and Great Society in the 1960s. The moderate faction supports Third Way politics that includes center-left social policies and centrist fiscal policies. The progressive faction supports progressivism.
Debates took place prior to and during the 2008 Democratic primaries. The debates began on April 26, 2007, in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
The 2008 Michigan Democratic presidential primary took place January 15, 2008. Originally, the state had 156 delegates up for grabs that were to be awarded in the following way: 83 delegates were to be awarded based on the winner in each of Michigan's 15 congressional districts while an additional 45 delegates were to be awarded to the statewide winner. Twenty-eight unpledged delegates, known as superdelegates, were initially able to cast their votes at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.
This is the electoral history of Barack Obama. Obama served as the 44th president of the United States (2009–2017) and as a United States senator from Illinois (2005–2008).
The 2016 Democratic National Convention was a presidential nominating convention, held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from July 25 to 28, 2016. The convention gathered delegates of the Democratic Party, the majority of them elected through a preceding series of primaries and caucuses, to nominate a candidate for president and vice president in the 2016 United States presidential election. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was chosen as the party's nominee for president by a 54% majority of delegates present at the convention roll call securing it over primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders, who received 46% of votes from delegates, and becoming the first female candidate to be formally nominated for president by a major political party in the United States. Her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia, was confirmed by delegates as the party's nominee for vice president by acclamation.
Presidential primaries and caucuses were organized by the Democratic Party to select the 4,051 delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention held July 25–28 and determine the nominee for president in the 2016 United States presidential election. The elections took place within all fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories, and Democrats Abroad and occurred between February 1 and June 14, 2016.
The following is a timeline of major events leading up to, during, and after the 2016 United States presidential election. The election was the 58th quadrennial United States presidential election, held on November 8, 2016. The presidential primaries and caucuses were held between February 1 and June 14, 2016, staggered among the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories. The U.S. Congress certified the electoral result on January 6, 2017, and the new president and vice president were inaugurated on January 20, 2017.
Hillary Clinton is an American politician from the state of New York who was the Democratic Party's 2016 nominee for president of the United States. Clinton is the first woman in U.S. history to be nominated for president of the United States by a major political party. She was defeated in the 2016 general election by Republican Donald Trump.
A total of ten debates occurred among candidates in the campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for the president of the United States in the 2016 presidential election.
Since 1983, the Democratic Party of the United States holds a few debates between candidates for the Democratic nomination in presidential elections during the primary election season. Unlike debates between party-nominated candidates, which have been organized by the bi-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates since 1988, debates between candidates for party nomination are organized by mass media outlets.
The 2016 Wyoming Democratic presidential caucuses were held on April 9 in the U.S. state of Wyoming, representing the first tier of the Wyoming Democratic Party's nomination contest for the 2016 presidential election. Only registered Democrats were allowed to participate in the closed precinct caucuses.
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails stolen by one or more hackers operating under the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0" who are alleged to be Russian intelligence agency hackers, according to indictments carried out by the Mueller investigation. These emails were subsequently leaked by DCLeaks in June and July 2016 and by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. This collection included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States Democratic Party. The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members dating from January 2015 to May 2016. On November 6, 2016, WikiLeaks released a second batch of DNC emails, adding 8,263 emails to its collection. The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party's national committee favored Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been cited as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump.
Presidential primaries and caucuses were organized by the Democratic Party to select the 3,979 pledged delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention held on August 17–20 to determine the party's nominee for president in the 2020 United States presidential election. The elections took place in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories, and through Democrats Abroad, and occurred between February 3 and August 11.
Democrats Abroad holds a primary awarding delegates to the Democratic National Convention to represent expatriate voters. This primary is conducted as part of the Democratic Party's presidential primaries. In some earlier elections, in place of a primary, a caucus system was used by Democrats Abroad to determine their convention delegations.
That would bring the caucus' total to 96 members, or about 40 percent of the House Democratic Caucus ― by far the largest bloc in the party.
In 2001, most Democrats — 47 percent — identified themselves as "moderate," while only 30 percent said they were "liberal." By 2016, the proportions were reversed, with 44 percent of people within the party calling themselves "liberal" and 41 percent calling themselves "moderate."
This article ... contends that the overwhelming weight of evidence makes clear the 2016 Democratic nomination process was not rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Second, this article argues that the Democratic Party rules and state election laws actually hurt Clinton and benefited Sanders.
Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left on almost every salient political issue ... on social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party's base cheer ... .
review of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Based on an analysis of the 1,042 bills that the governor signed or vetoed this year, Gavin Newsom is more moderate than any other Democratic state senator and sits to the left of only two Democrats in the Assembly.