Dear John,
NDN has been working on a new project, building upon our body of work in recent years, that examines the comparative performances of the Democratic and Republican parties since the end of the Cold War. Simon first touched upon this subject with several op-eds in US News & World Report in 2016 and 2017 (here and here), where he encouraged Democrats to more strongly embrace the party's strong governing legacy over the past 30 years, and we expanded upon it in our public "Patriotism and Optimism" presentations. We will update this argument with a PowerPoint presentation over Zoom this Wednesday, April 29th at 2pm and would like to invite all of you to join us then. If you'd like to attend, you can register at this link. We will be hosting these webinars every Wednesday at 2pm through the end of May, so you can also attend a later Webinar if you can't make it this week.
The central idea of this project is that the Democratic and Republican parties aren't mirror images of one another, but rather that they have followed separate, organic pathways in a big, diverse country like the US. The result of this differing evolution is that the Democrats have been a remarkably successful governing party since 1989, while the Republicans have presided over three straight recessions, disastrous disaster responses, and foreign policy failures. One example of this stark contrast is in job growth under Democratic and Republican presidents, an important indicator in this data-centered project. As can be seen below, Democrats in 16 years have created almost 34 million jobs, while Republicans in 15.5 years have seen a net loss of over 15 million jobs.
People who have grown up in this post-1989 era - those under 45 - understand this divergence, and view the parties very differently as a result. In 2018, voters under 45 voted for Democrats by a margin of 25 points, whereas in the seven elections from 1992 to 2004, voters under 45 (who had grown up in a fundamentally different political landscape) voted for Democrats by an average margin of just 0.3 points.
For more on this argument and data examining the performances of each party in power, please join us this Wednesday at 2pm!
Sincerely,
Chris
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