We really do need to move on from the WWC. This is only going to get worse. I don't like the "economically moderate" suburbanites we're getting in exchange but our base of urban voters and minorities is progressive enough to keep the ball rolling on Medicare For All, ect.
There's zero evidence these suburbanites are actually "economically moderate". That's just media framing and incorrect perception. Studies have shown Romney-Clinton voters to be more liberal on economics than Obama-Trump voters, with far less racial resentment.
In any case, we saw candidates that weren't hiding being progressive like Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke do really well in those "moderate suburbs." Both of them made big gains on even Hillary's gains in those areas.
Okay this puts me in a position to make a point I haven't fully made on here since the election.
If I were to list people who would be the most likely to benefit from left wing fiscal policies, the suburbs would be towards the bottom of the list. But, 2018 made clear that our partisan divide is cultural rather than policy based (it somewhat has been since 1980 but prior to that the divide was less intense and more importantly less secular; it's escalated more the past cycle or two) which is why the bolded paragraph is true. There's not much the Democrats can really do about it either. With our politics so cultural, I don't expect anything but gridlock for the forseeable future. At this point, Dems are best off focusing on being progressive without catering to a specific region, waiting for the dam to break, where the Dems would take advantage of the contrast between them and the GOP.
With that said, I don't think it's productive to just sit there and call Republicans racist. There's obvious truth to it but shaming people into voting for you since the other sides mean comments is not a winning strategy. Credit to the Dems for avoiding this in 2018 though.
Shaming people for racism may not exactly be a winning strategy, but codding voters with racist views would constitute a moral abdication. A lot of populist left-wingers think that we need to wholly focus on economic issues and like to join right-wing calls for "abandoning identity politics." This is a two-fold mistake. First of all, if you aren't willing to call out people for supporting racist policies, you will end up inherently coddling their racist views. New Deal Democrats had no problems doing this for several decades when they ignored race issues to avoid alienating white Southern labor. Some people are displeased with the fact that economics is no longer the center of politics and how much the partisanship has come to revolve around identity and cultural issues. That leads into point number two; these people stopped voting Democratic due to cultural grievances and racial anxiety. Boatloads of studies support this conclusion, and ignoring the fact that these voters have high degrees of racial resentment is foolish.
They're angry at an "urban elite" they feel ignores them and suffer anxiety over the country's changing racial demographics. That's why they vote Republican, not for practical economic reasons; the Democratic economic agenda would be far more helpful for them objectively speaking. They just don't care because it's not their main concern, they're motivated by far more psychological abstractions that lead to a sense that America is changing, that they're becoming strangers in their own country. Yes, globalization and all of its attendant effects have played a role in this, but in order to maximize success with these types of people, the Democrats would actually have to emulate Republicans on cultural and social issues, and that's simply a no-go.
