Daily Kos Writers: Left Wing Is Ascendant in Today’s Democratic Party

Conservative and moderate Democrats are rapidly losing strength in the Party of John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman

Would Harry S Truman recognize what has become of his Democratic Party?

The following is an excerpt from the leftist (and occasionally hateful and nasty) website, Daily Kos. The piece is titled, “The Unmistakable Lesson of the Sanders Campaign: The Left Wing Is Ascendant in the Democratic Party, ” by Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel. The writers are authors of a new book, “Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left.” This is not exactly news, but it’s interesting to hear leftists describe how they are taking over the Democratic Party. Obviously, the Democrats’ and Obama’s embrace of All Things “Gay” & :Transgender” is a big part of that leftward drift. —@PeterLaBarbera, AFTAH:

From Daily Kos, July 13, 2016

The progressive left–fueled by an increasingly liberal Democratic rank and file and a well-coordinated network of maturing netroots groups and established progressive issue advocacy organizations–is ascendant in the Democratic Party. The competitiveness of the Sanders campaign was shocking to the political world because, generally speaking, it did not recognize this ascendancy was underway. However, if they had been paying attention, the signs were all there, years beforehand.

Increasingly liberal Democratic rank and file

Over the past decade and a half, the Democratic rank and file has become much more liberal. The trend has been so pronounced that Democrats have transitioned from being a party dominated by self-identified moderates to one dominated by self-identified liberals. As we write in Next Generation Netroots:

Not long ago, self-identi?ed liberals were a small minority of all Democratic self-identi?ers. At the start of the previous decade, not only were moderate Democrats a clear plurality within the Democratic coalition, there were almost as many self-identi?ed conservative Democrats as there were self-identi?ed liberal Democrats. According to Gallup, liberals in 2000 constituted a mere 29% of rank-and-?le Democrats, barely edging out conservatives (25%) while being swamped by moderates, who made up 44% of the party base. The share of liberals began to rise in 2003 and has been increasing ever since. By 2007, liberals had caught up to moderates, and in 2011 surpassed them. In 2014, fully 44% of Democrats were self-described liberals, while only 36% claimed to be moderates. At 19%, conservative Democrats have become an endangered species.

Liberals are not only increasing as a percentage of Democrats, they also far more likely to turn out to vote in Democratic primaries than moderates and conservatives, thus increasing their influence beyond their numbers. As Harry Enten wrote for fivethirteight.com back in April, liberals made up 46% of Demcoratic primary voters in 2008, and an astonishing 61% in 2016:

Moderate and conservative voters, meanwhile, are a much smaller part of the Democratic primary vote than they were eight years ago. In 2008, they made up 54 percent of primary voters in the states that have voted so far this year. That’s down 15 percentage points and generally matches the decline of self-identified moderate and conservative Democrats we’ve seen in national surveys.

What’s more, as Enten notes, this trend toward an increasingly liberal Democratic Party is likely to continue, as “it’s the youngest Democrats who are more likely to identify as ‘very liberal.'” [read the full article HERE]