Democratic Party – Beesquared

The United Kingdom’s Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the United States share a problem, which is their struggle to win over working-class voters.

Despite adding 32 seats in Thursday’s general election, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, who espouses left-wing populism, lost working-class votes at the expense of the Conservatives, who gained such votes despite losing their parliamentary majority.

The higher the share of people with a university degree, the better Labour fared – and the larger the swing to Labour from the Conservatives. Despite the election being seen by many as a disaster for the Conservatives, the party has gained working-class votes.

Is the Labour Party under Corbyn capable winning more than 40.3% of the vote, as it did on Thursday? And if not, what must Labour do to reclaim a majority? Dump Corbyn, centrists say. “We could have won this election if we had a half-decent leader, as [May has] imploded,” one anti-Corbyn Labour candidate told BuzzFeed News.

The challenge on this side

Democrats here in the U.S. confront a similar challenge. Donald Trump became president in part by winning significant support in the Midwest and Rust Belt among whites without a college education.

But the distance that Democrats find themselves from such voters may be farther than they think. Writing in the Times, Tom Edsall surveys the extent of Democratic losses among working-class voters, which, it happens, was not limited to whites.

As many as 9.2 million people who voted to re-elect Barack Obama voted for Trump, based on estimates cited by Edsall. Many of the counties that switched to Trump from Obama are concentrated in the Midwest and Rust Belt.

Amazingly for the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, “Obama-Trump voters were more likely to think more Democrats look out for the wealthy than look out for poor people,” Geoff Garin, a pollster whose firm conducted the surveys and focus groups, told Edsall.

Edsall quotes Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, who wrote recently that “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class problem.’ They have a ‘working-class problem,’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.” (In his latest column, Frank Bruni reports on Democrats’ difficulties connecting with voters in New York’s Hudson Valley.)

The data that Edsall summaries shows a pullback in support for Democrats among working-class voters of all races, including many turned off by the party’s support for trade agreements that voters perceive as costing jobs, as well as a perception of the party’s being out of touch with the economic stress of voters, particularly older ones, in small town and rural America.

“For all the harm he has done, continues to do and proposes to do, Trump has successfully forced Democrats to begin to examine the party’s neglected liabilities, the widespread resentment of its elites and the frail loyalty of its supporters,” Edsall writes.

A dearth of superdelegates (Photo: Jeff Solari, Wikimedia Commons) — A dearth of superdelegates (Photo: Nick Solari, Wikimedia Commons)

Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders have lost their bid to block the Democratic Party’s use of superdelegates at this week’s convention in Philadelphia.

The First Amendment does not give individual members a right to control internal processes of the party, which is expected to nominate Hillary Clinton for president, a U.S. district court in Manhattan ruled recently in a challenge filed by Jeff Kurzon, an attorney and Sanders supporter.

Kuzon charged in court paper’s that the party’s use of superdelegates dilutes the power of the popular vote and sought a court order that would bar them from voting at the convention. The Democratic Party has 713 superdelegates, who include members of Congress and party leaders, and who can vote for the candidate of their choice. Clinton leads Sanders among superdelegates, 602-48.

“An individual’s First Amendment associational rights do not empower him to compel nomination procedures that guarantee his preferred candidate a ‘fair shot’ at winning a party’s nomination,” Judge Paul Oetken wrote in a ruling dated July 18.

Oetken, who noted that the party has “countervailing First Amendment rights – which would be clearly infringed by the injunction that Kurzon seeks in this case,” also rejected a contention by Kurzon that weighting the votes of superdelegates as the Democrats do violates party members’ rights to equal protection of the law. The prohibition on valuing one person’s vote over another does not apply to party nominating conventions, Oetken said.

The court disagreed with Kuzon that use of superdelegates constitutes a breach of contract. Even if rules for selection of delegates could be construed as an enforceable contract, they “are suffused throughout with references to the role of superdelegates and clearly permit their use,” wrote Oetken.

Because of the unlikelihood that Kuzon could succeed on the merits of his challenge, the court declined to determine whether the actions of a national political party constitute state action – a “difficult question,” according to Oetken and a prerequisite for Kuzon to have prevailed on his constitutional claims.

Eighty-five percent of the Democratic Party’s delegates to the convention are pledged, which means they are required to vote for a particular candidate based on the result of their state’s primary or caucus. The remainder are superdelegates.

The party’s rules committee, at the urging of Sanders’ supporters, agreed on Saturday to narrow the pool of superdelegates to elected officials within the party in future nominating contests