Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and co-wrote a New York Times best-seller on the future of politics in the United States.

From 2000 to 2008, no one did more to unite the Democratic Party than George W. Bush. But Democrats haven’t fallen apart in the years since Bush exited the political stage. Instead, President Barack Obama has maintained their cohesion thanks in large part to his personal popularity with the base, unrelenting Republican opposition and strong Democratic congressional leadership. But simmering beneath the surface of this united front is an ascendant progressive and populist movement that is on the verge of taking over the party.

The very forces that have held the Democratic Party together are forestalling the takeover. Many of Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters have been loath to criticize him publicly—even when the president’s idea of “change you can believe in” hasn’t matched up with his campaign promises. As long as the party is defined and controlled by the sitting president, these progressive impulses will remain somewhat muted.


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The lead-in to the 2016 presidential campaign could force a tipping point as early as next year if Hillary Clinton declines to run and a broad field emerges. If that happens, candidates will feel a great deal of pressure to appeal to the highly engaged, energized and well-funded activists who have been clamoring for a robust progressive agenda. Even if Clinton runs, her candidacy won’t preempt the party’s eventual takeover by the activist forces. It will only slow it down. Candidate Clinton, who appears to have the overwhelming support of the activist base, will nevertheless feel pressure from the left to pursue a more economically populist approach to solving our country’s problems.

And now, with the left lining up around a Clinton candidacy, the activist base will continue to make incremental progress toward assuming control of the Democratic Party. Absent any countervailing forces that have yet to emerge, there won’t be the same kind of intra-party battles between liberals and moderates that took place in the 1970s and 80s. Those conflicts were finally resolved in the ‘90s when Bill Clinton brought together the competing forces that had divided the Democrats and alienated swing voters since the 1960s, largely by focusing on improving the lives of the middle class while not betraying the core values of the party.

But Hillary Clinton will take control of a different party than her husband did because Democratic activists and elected officials have only become more liberal over the last two decades. Last month, the Pew Research Center released the findings of one of its largest studies of U.S. political attitudes ever undertaken. The 10,013-person survey quantified the increase in the share of Democrats holding mostly or consistently liberal views over the last 20 years. In 1994, only 30 percent of Democrats considered themselves mostly or consistently liberal, but this number increased sharply to 56 percent of respondents in 2014.

The study also found that 70 percent of politically engaged Democrats are mostly or consistently liberal in their views—double the 35 percent that fell into this category 20 years ago.

Several factors are driving this transformation, including the country’s changing demographics and growing concerns about a disappearing middle class and stagnant social mobility. Wealthy liberal donors are accelerating the change, as are grassroots activists who rely increasingly on new technologies to expand their ranks.

These progressive forces are coalescing around a populist-inspired desire to combat income inequality and rein in large financial institutions, as well as an interest in focusing on priorities at home rather than abroad. It’s difficult, in this environment, to imagine a viable Democratic presidential candidate who isn’t willing to take clear positions on issues like increasing the minimum wage, securing comprehensive immigration reform, supporting women’s health and their reproductive rights, addressing climate change and eliminating or at least curtailing fracking.

(See Doug Sosnik’s other political memos: Which Side of the Barricade Are You On? and Groucho Marx's Republican Party)

The left’s rise is aided by the fact that it is more organized than ever before. Following George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in 2004, a coalition of progressives from politics, philanthropy and business came together to build a long-term infrastructure—independent of the Democratic Party—to advance their progressive agenda and beat back the influence of the right wing. The Democracy Alliance was officially launched in 2005 as a forum where partners who shared core progressive values could coordinate their resources more efficiently to advance their common goals. Politico estimates that Democracy Alliance-backed groups plan to spend $374 million this election cycle.

Another factor empowering the left is that the culture war is pretty much over—and the left won. Since Richard Nixon’s presidency, Republicans have used social issues to divide the Democratic Party and marginalize them from the rest of the country. But today, many of the issues that once drove deep divisions within the Democratic Party, from gay marriage to immigration reform, are now utterly mainstream, and progressives see an opportunity to deploy them against Republicans. The country’s increasingly diverse population and the millennial generation’s coming of age will make the progressive shift on cultural issues even more pronounced in the future.

The June 2014 Pew Research Center survey demonstrates how far the country has moved in the past 20 years. On immigration, a wedge issue that Republicans have used against Democrats since the 1980s, the survey finds that the public’s support for the contributions of immigrants has almost doubled in the past 20 years (from 31 percent to 57 percent). By a margin of 57 percent to 35 percent, Americans today say immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents rather than burden the country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.

There’s a similar trend on gay marriage, another favorite wedge issue for Republicans. Only a decade ago, President George W. Bush won Ohio in part because he promoted a constitutional amendment banning the practice. A recent Gallup poll found that support for gay marriage has doubled in the last 18 years from 27 percent in 1996 to 55 percent today.

Twenty years ago it would have been hard to imagine that the president of the United States could legally be offered a joint in a Denver bar. Now, it barely makes news. A recent Gallup time series showed that support for marijuana legalization has more than doubled in the last 18 years from 25 percent in 1996 to 58 percent today.

The progressive domination of the Democratic Party is already being felt across the country at the state and federal levels. Much less ticket-splitting is taking place these days, as the overall political leanings of most states increasingly determine how people vote from the top of the ticket down to the local level. As a result, a growing percentage of Democratic federal and statehouse officeholders come from blue states and districts across the country where progressive views tend to predominate. Democrats elected in more purple areas often tend to be more moderate in their views, but when these seats open up due to retirements or defeats, the more progressive forces will likely determine the primary election outcomes.

Just look at the U.S. House of Representatives. Democratic House members are overwhelmingly liberal, due in large part to 2010 midterm election losses and the 2012 reapportionment and redistricting process, when they were packed into as few seats as possible by Republicans intent on keeping control of the House. As a result, moderate Democrats are somewhat of an anomaly in the House—there are currently only nine Democratic members of the House in seats carried by Romney in 2012. And this number is certain to drop due to retirements and defeats in the upcoming midterm elections. The House Blue Dog Caucus, a moderate-to-conservative group of Democratic lawmakers, currently has only 19 members—down from 54 only four years ago. This number will also decrease after November.

The last bastion of moderate elected Democrats is the U.S. Senate—but even that base appears threatened. Although there are currently 12 Democratic seats from states that Romney carried in 2012, seven of them are up for re-election in November. As in the House, this bloc will almost certainly shrink.

The state and local level is heading further left, too. There are currently 21 Democratic governors. More than half of them come from states where Obama received 56 percent or more of the vote in 2012. In these deep blue states, governors have been more inclined to pursue progressive governing agendas. After the midterms, there could be as few as four Democratic elected governors in states carried by Romney in 2012.

Perhaps the greatest examples of emerging progressive strength around the country, though, are the large and medium-sized cities where growth is increasingly fueled by Democratic-leaning voters. Newly elected Democratic mayors are using their budget and regulatory powers to advance the progressive policy ideas they championed during their campaigns—including raising the minimum wage, increasing the availability of affordable housing and establishing universal pre-kindergarten. Led by politicians like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, these cities’ efforts could serve as incubators for future progressive policy agendas at the state and federal levels.

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The victory of cultural liberalism has not been accompanied by a desire for a more active federal government. If anything, the country’s diminishing faith in its institutions has translated into a desire for less government, not more.

It is difficult to overstate the depth of the anger and alienation that a majority of all Americans feel toward the federal government. A June 30, 2014, Gallup poll found that Americans’ level of confidence has dropped to near record lows for all three branches—the presidency (30 percent), Congress (7 percent) and the U.S. Supreme Court (29 percent).

For more than a decade, the public has consistently believed that the country is headed in the wrong direction, regardless of which party holds the White House or controls Congress.

There is an overriding belief that our political and economic systems are either broken or corrupt and that they’re out to favor the few at the expense of the many. These beliefs transcend partisanship or philosophical orientation as discussed in a previous memo. The dissatisfaction cuts across all major institutions in our country—including corporations, health and financial institutions, religious organizations, news organizations and our schools.

Since Obama became president, the number of Americans who want to expand the role of the federal government has decreased sharply. Ironically, last year’s Republican-led government shutdown was overwhelmingly unpopular, but it further hardened the belief that our federal government is broken and that it’s time to stop looking to Washington to solve the country’s big problems. The most recent Pew Research Center poll,released on June 26, 2014, found that just 24 percent of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time. Three in four (75 percent) say they trust government only some of the time or never.

The botched launch of Obamacare last October only reinforced those perceptions. A Gallup tracking poll found that since Obama took office there has been a 15-point increase in the percentage of people who believe that it isn’t the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health-care coverage.

More broadly, since 2009, there has been a 10-point increase in the percentage of Americans who say that government is doing too much, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted on June 15, 2014. When Americans are given a choice between a government that does more to solve the problems and help meet the needs of people or a government that is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals, half say that government is doing too many things; only 46 percent say they want a government that does more.

The negative attitudes toward government haven’t just been limited to Republicans. In the last five years that the Pew Research Center has tracked ratings of the federal government, favorability ratings among Democrats have dropped by 20 points (from 61 percent in July 2009 to 41 percent in March 2013), and the number has undoubtedly decreased even more in the last year.

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With just over 100 days to go before the November elections, all signals point to an outcome that is more a reflection of a midterm political map that favors Republicans than it is about the future direction of the country. The Republicans’ short-term midterm strategy, as well as their presidential nomination process, will make it more difficult for them to take back the White House in 2016.

But the left nonetheless faces an important existential question in the years ahead: Yes, the Republican Party’s inability to adapt to America’s cultural shifts and demographic changes is creating an enormous opportunity for Democrats. However, in an age of political alienation where the majority of Americans lack faith in their institutions in general—and their federal government in particular—Democratic activists will need to reconcile the public’s desire for smaller government with their own progressive impulses.