Polling Shows Democrats Aren't Too 'Woke,' They're Too Weak

One of the most common refrains you'll see across corporate U.S. media is that if the Democrats want to win elections, they need to spend less time worrying about identity politics and instead focus on "kitchen table issues." The volume, scope, and redundancy of this messaging is utterly relentless:

This sales pitch is disguised as sage wisdom that advises the party to abandon many of its core principles on equality and become more corporatist and conservative.

The advice in these columns almost always creates a mythologized version of "real Americans," paired with a distorted caricature of the Democratic party, capped by policy non-solutions that don't actually address any of the "kitchen table issues" the authors claim to be so desperately concerned about.

This idea that Democrats are a party full of pronoun-obsessed radicals is Republican and corporation wedge propaganda, specifically designed to peel voters away from Democrats. A lie that some Democrats simply love to inexplicably parrot under the pretense of informed leadership.

This was deftly demonstrated recently by Democratic Presidential frontrunner Gavin Newsom, who recently insisted that Democrats can't win elections unless they become more culturally "normal" (this is code for "stop talking so much about the rights of trans Americans because it will scare rural Americans"):

"Less prone to spending disproportionate amount of time on pronouns, identity politics. More focused on tabletop issues, things that really matter. The stacking of stress in terms of the electricity bills, childcare costs, healthcare, and obviously housing costs, and how easily we get trapped in that."

There's several problems here, the first of which being that establishment Democrats don't really spend all that much time obsessing about pronouns. In fact you'll routinely find most Democrats running as far away from defending trans Americans as possible (trans Americans have definitely noticed).

But the biggest problem with this argument is that if you actually look at polling data, it indicates that the majority of Americans don't think the Democrats are too progressive or too radical, they think they're too weak:

The post-2024 conventional wisdom says Democrats need to moderate ideologically to win in 2026 and 2028. Some recent advice to the party has been to stop talking about immigration, climate, and LGBT issues, and to move to the right on spending. The idea here is fairly intuitive: if voters think you’re too extreme, become less extreme.

But the survey data among independents above suggests this gets the problem exactly backwards. Independent voters do not think of the Democrats as more extreme than the Republicans.

This doesn't stop Newsom or former Obama Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who last week also claimed the solution for the Democratic party is to abandon not just trans Americans, but other "extreme" policies such as acknowledging climate catastrophe or advocating for humanist immigration reform.

The grand irony is the Democratic party establishment's time isn't spent in "extremist" defense of any sort of radical ("woke" or otherwise) agenda. Most of it is spent bumbling on effective messaging, crumbling on key fights, refusing to meaningfully support trans Americans, normalizing or enabling authoritarianism, and just generally being feckless brunchlords.

So no, the path forward for Democrats does not involve pandering to a mythologized, featureless caricature of the American voter some older dudes made up in their head. The path forward is bolder choices (which can involve actively shaping polling and public opinion on issues like trans rights through courage, education, media reform, and effective messaging) and authenticity.

"Affordability" is almost always a cornerstone of this specific brand of bullshit.

Recommendations for this purportedly new Democratic trajectory almost always fixate on affordability. But inevitably in a way that's utterly superficial, and avoids acknowledging that most U.S. dysfunction and consumer frustration is caused by unchecked corporate power and grotesque levels of corruption.

Even if "affordability" and "kitchen table issues" are genuinely your primary concern, pickling yourself in false right wing dogma and amplifying their false claims about your party's purported identity politics obsession is one hell of a counterproductive way to do it.

When the progressive wing of the Democratic party proposes solutions that would genuinely help said "real Americans," they're routinely punished for it by a Democratic establishment (and corporate media) clearly more afraid of progressive reform (functional regulators, equitable taxation, antitrust reform, merger scrutiny) than of outright fascism.

Even with their warts, Democrats spend exponentially more time on affordability issues than Republicans. Biden's FTC boss, Lina Khan, was one of the most progressive antitrust busters in a generation. The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and infrastructure bills drove massive systemic improvements the press and many prominent Democrat pundits couldn't be bothered to support or notice.

Republicans, in contrast, have elected one of the most corrupt politicians in U.S. history (which is truly saying something), gutted the entirety of U.S. corporate oversight, created a pay-to-play government free of any ethical guardrails, pummeled struggling Americans with illegal taxes and tariffs, and created untold chaos and harm with gestapo-grade racial policing and unnecessary, costly war.

The U.S. right wing can obsess over pronouns and genitals and white supremacy all day, every day, and not be subjected to this bottomless media tutscolding for being "too obsessed with identity politics" and "ignoring kitchen table issues."

Democrats inconsistently stand up for marginalized Americans at a documentably high risk of cultural violence and somehow that's extreme.

At the core of the Democratic party fecklessness is an unwillingness to stand up to corporate power.

Corporate America wants a Democratic opposition party that's largely decorative. They want a two-party system that's comprised of either far right wing corporatists, or center-right corporatists cosplaying as an effective left wing alternative.

They want to maintain the illusion of a functional Democracy so the plebs don't recognize the cause of the vast majority of U.S. dysfunction is unchecked billionaire power, unify in their outrage, and start rolling out the guillotines.

Much as they did with gay marriage in the 90s and early 00s, Republicans have leveraged the basic human rights of trans Americans to divide and disorient the under-traveled and broadly misinformed U.S. electorate. They've done this via brutally repetitive propaganda that paints the Democratic party as radical leftists if they so much as dare to stand up to violent attacks on vulnerable populations.

The extraction class is keen to have everyone fighting over whether candy marketing has become too sexy while simultaneously deriding government for failing to attend to "kitchen table issues" they don't actually care about.

Corporate America (and an ad-based engagement-based press) really likes the division created by this shallow culture war outrage baiting, both because they profit off of the overall clicks and engagement of the infighting, and because it keeps people distracted from the fact that the country is being stripped for parts by the country's real extremists: corporate power and the U.S. extraction class.

Democrats that serve corporate interests pick up and perpetuate these narratives aren't actually afraid of "extreme identity politics," they're afraid of meaningful progressive reform that might impose more equitable tax rates or public interest regulatory obligations that might hurt their investments.

It's cliche but true, but in the United States it really is always about the money.

There's dozens of avenues for this sort of rhetoric to pummel the electorate, including the vibes-based corporatist deregulatory "abundance" movement, which I'd argue is a well-funded, well-coordinated effort to pre-empt genuine progressive reform as the obvious solution to surging authoritarianism.

Prominent Democrats, usually without backing evidence, help Republicans and corporate power distort not just what the Democratic party represents; but what the path forward should be. This is then picked up by a corporate press as evidence of "well, if the Democrats are saying it about themselves, it must be true."

But "the Democratic party needs abandon identity politics" is an elaborate stage play wherein "real Americans" become caricatures, "affordability" becomes a prop, and the only acceptable policy solution involves abandoning key principles and, always and relentlessly, shifting policy proposals further to the right.

This country will not survive authoritarianism if the Democratic party isn't heavily retooled with a focus on challenging corporate power, demonstrating authentic passion, mastering modern media, embracing ruthless tactical efficiency, and maybe, as a bonus, not parroting lazy misrepresentations of your own party by self-serving assholes keen on throwing marginalized human beings under the bus.