An Electoral Abundance Agenda (Part II): The Staffer Problem
Democratic staffers are richer, whiter, and more educated than the party's voters. That’s a problem for candidates and campaigns working to win the middle.
We recently called for “An Electoral Abundance Agenda.”
As the political scientist Andrew B. Hall notes, voters and candidates alike generally want moderation, but the perverse incentives in the political and attentional marketplaces have elevated extremists that make running for offices less appealing. The result is a relative scarcity not only of moderate-branded candidates running and breaking through elections, but also a scarcity of common sense punditry on people’s screens.
But there’s another form of scarcity affecting moderates that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: an apparent scarcity of ideologically big-tent and empathetic staffers who can help mainstream candidates win the middle.
The Democratic ecosystem is rife with places for “progressives” to meet each other, share ideas, and get plugged into campaigns and organizations — either as staffers or members. But there aren’t many outlets for explicitly moderate talent to do the same.
The ubiquitous nature of today’s progressive movement — combined with the ideological ambiguity Democratic establishment — has enabled the far-left and their allies to capture much of the Democratic establishment’s core infrastructure without much pushback.
The problem isn’t a lack of talented Americans who can empathize with middle-of-the-road voters. The problem is a lack of explicitly middle-of-the-road staffers operating as part of an explicitly moderate ecosystem working on explicitly big-tent projects.
This is important because, under the current dynamics, almost any entity left of center that is not explicitly moderate eventually becomes another piece of the left’s infrastructure.
Staffer Capture
As the academics Daniel Kreiss and Adam Saffer argue, “Democrats have an Ivy League problem”:
Taken together, an astonishing 20% of all hiring by Democratic campaigns comes from just seven schools: Harvard (5% of Democratic hiring), Stanford (3%), NYU (3%), UC Berkeley (3%), Georgetown (2%), Columbia (2%), and Yale (2%). In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired 16% of its staffers from just four schools: Harvard (6%), Stanford (4%), NYU (3%), and Georgetown (3%).
Kreiss and Saffer argue that “elite universities on the coasts dominate Democratic hiring” while “a very different picture emerges on the other side of the aisle”:
The top three Republican schools are state public institutions: University of Texas, Austin (3%), Ohio State University (2%), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1%). The rest of the schools in the Republican top twenty are a mix of public and private institutions, including state schools such as George Mason (2%), the University of Alabama (2%), and Missouri State University (1%) and Brigham Young (2%).
In other words, more than Republicans, Democratic staffers tend to look, sound, and think differently from the rest of the country.
In a 2021 profile of the Democratic data wonk David Shor, Politico’s Ian Ward explored how “The Democrats’ Privileged College-Kid Problem” drives the party’s challenges with working class voters and voters of color.
The face of the problem is the archetypical foot soldier behind the members of Congress, candidates, and think-tanks that form the Democratic Party’s elite scaffolding. Legions of liberal young people — “bright-eyed, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to rent one without insurance fees, maybe taking a gap year before starting college or else filling a period of post-graduation, pre-employment idleness” — disproportionately staff the Democratic infrastructure.
But some think they’re hijacking the party’s ability to message authentically to voters from outside the elite liberal bubble. Here’s how Ward describes it:
Shor’s theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions.
The result is that:
Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.
This dynamic makes sense: college students with a passion for politics study it (and sociology, philosophy, history, etc.) in school, have the mind-expanding experience of reading Marx, Durkheim, Weber and the rest, and have energizing conversations with their friends about it through organizations like the DSA and the Sunrise Movement. They get fired up to volunteer their time for progressive candidates and causes and eventually make their way to DC after college.
When they arrive in DC, these uber-progressive college graduates find themselves at progressive happy hours and campaign bootcamps. They don’t just go to work for AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Justice Democrats, but for the entire smorgasbord of Democratic candidates, outfits, and organizations (“The Groups,” whose far-left staffer tribulations have been well-documented).
But the far-left isn’t just on the far-left. It feels increasingly like they’re everywhere in the Democratic universe. A lot of Democratic (neither left nor centrist) operations have been subsumed by what Matt Yglesias calls “the generalized goo of progressive politics.”
It’s how we end up with statements from leading national pro-choice groups emphatically endorsing the defunding of the police:
Some call this “death by intersectionality”.
The progressive left has become ingrained in all but the most explicitly moderate and centrist organizations. The mainstream must build a competing pipeline to ensure an equally abundant cohort of mainstreamers in DC and across the country.
We Need an Abundance of Moderate Staffers
This problem can take a real toll on candidates trying to win the middle — or those who have won it and need to govern in line with their campaign promises. Where do they go to find talented staffers who think and talk in line with mainstream voters?
As we often do, it’s helpful to turn to the far-left for a sense of what the middle should do. The far-left political entrepreneurs who emerged energized from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign have achieved an outsized impact in shaping the Democratic Party’s brand by stepping into a void in the political ecosystem.
As we explored last March, the far-left was so successful so fast because they:
Targeted unprepared incumbents, creating a shock that focuses (and scares)
Fed the media delicious bits of conflict, novelty, and interesting characters
Built a symbiotic relationship with the far-right, a vicious but profitable cycle to raise far-left profiles
Harnessed unprecedented energy after Trump’s 2016 victory with focus in deep-blue areas
Defined the post-2016 election lessons to set terms of debate in 2020
They not only built new factional institutions like Justice Democrats and Our Revolution to power their political insurgency, but built a community that cultivated a new generation of talent to power their movement. That community became an accelerator, onboarding the thousands of energized staffers who worked for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — and shared their explicit brand of progressivism — into the broader scaffolding of the Democratic ecosystem. Unfortunately, many on the far-left are whiter, richer, and more educated than the rest of the country, so this pipeline only exacerbates the Democratic Party’s Privileged College Kid Problem.
There’s a clear demand for mainstream, middle-of-the-road staffers willing to roll up their sleeves and go to work reaching out to swing voters with empathy and winning the middle.
We just need to welcome them aboard first.
Is "20% coming from the top 7" really such a slanted distribution?