This is the title of an article which talks about why progressives are not able to win elections. About Trump’s win in 2016 and Biden’s wins in this years primaries.
Trump’s win in 2016 and Biden’s win in the 2020 primary seem unrelated at first, but they’re more similar than you might realize. Trump and Biden have one thing in common: nobody you know wanted them to be President. All of your friends probably hate Trump, and while some of your friends may have voted for Biden in the primary, they only did so after their first choice dropped out.
Twice in a row, a Presidential contest has yielded an unconscionable outcome for the progressive activist class. But Biden and Trump’s wins are related events with related causes. The reason that progressives can’t seem to beat either moderate Democrats or Republicans is that the progressive worldview — open and enthusiastic about change — is a minority opinion of which the vast majority of Americans are deeply skeptical.
Ultimately it says that there are more moderates and conservatives in the US than there are progressives who desire major structural changes. That the key metric of a progressive is the openness to change but that is not how majority of the country is wired, including the black population in south who gave Biden the victory.
To understand why the majority of African American voters powered Biden to victory while rejecting the more progressive candidates in the race, let’s go back to what we know about openness. The general rule is that high-openness people are liberals and low-openness people are conservatives.
But this rule does not apply well to African Americans. Since almost all African American voters are Democrats, there are millions of low-openness African American Democrats. This is not true of White voters — there are very few low-openness White Democrats. Low-openness Whites are just Republicans now.
Subsequently, African American Democrats are much more psychographically diverse than their White progressive peers — they’re on average much older, more skeptical of radical change, and more religious.
I thought it was a very interesting read and makes a lot of sense to me.