Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Democrats have been running away from the “liberal” label for a long time, but recent polling shows that rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly happy to pin the scarlet “L” on themselves. It may seem counterintuitive, but the rise in liberal pride is crucial to liberals building a long-lasting relationship with moderates and cementing a post-Obama leftward trajectory.

“Forty-seven percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now identify as both socially liberal and economically moderate or liberal,” Gallup’s Frank Newport announced on Thursday. That’s up eight points since 2008 and 17 points since 2001. Earlier this year, the NBC/Wall Street Journal polling team deduced that 26 percent of voters overall self-identify as “liberal,” a four point spike since 2011. These new numbers are in line with longer-term trends: last year Pew found a 26-point increase since 1994 in “mostly or consistently liberal” Democrats.


As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama suggested he wished to emulate Ronald Reagan in how he “changed the trajectory of America.” Is this surge of liberal pride evidence that Obama has succeeded in moving the center of American politics leftward? Or has Obama, aided and abetted by the Bernie Sanders road show, unleashed an epidemic of delusion inside America’s deep blue dots?

Former Bush Administration aide Peter Wehner last month argued in a New York Times op-ed that Obama moved the Democratic Party too far to the left. While acknowledging that the country is more socially liberal, Wehner points to polls showing Republican edges on the economy and foreign policy. He touts Republican election wins for the House, Senate and state governments, staking the claim that “the Republican Party is the governing party in America” while Obama is falling short of being a “Franklin Delano Roosevelt-like transformational political figure.”

That’s too dismissive of the liberal revival. Anyone can cherry-pick polls to argue that their side is winning the ideological war. Wehner, for instance, notes that “[s]elf-identified conservatives significantly outnumber self-identified liberals.” But that’s not exactly a new development—it has been the case for at least five decades. And focusing on that data point obscures the fact that, according to the NBC/WSJ poll, “conservative” identifiers have tumbled four points since 2014.

Just comparing “conservative” and “liberal” identification levels leaves out the big kahuna: the “moderate” plurality. The ultimate question is: are moderates increasingly overlapping with liberals, and moving the country left?

On one hand, throughout Obama’s presidency less than a quarter of Americans said “they trust the government in Washington always or most of the time”—ratings that are at historic lows. And Obama’s biggest liberal policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, has long struggled to attain majority support.

Yet whatever misgivings Americans have about governmental effectiveness, they aren’t dampening the desire to have government do more things. This month a CBS/New York Times poll found that 57 percent want “the government [to] do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.” Last year a Pew poll found that 54 percent believe that raising taxes on the wealthy for government programs would help the poor while only 35 percent bought that “lowering taxes on wealthy people and corporations in order to encourage more investment and economic growth.”

The electorate’s internal tug-of-war between distrusting government and wanting more government comes to a head in this muddled Pew finding from February: 49 percent believe “government aid to the poor does more good than harm” and 44 percent believe the opposite. The left retains the edge, but it is slight.

Still, there is little evidence as of yet that moderates are punishing Democrats for moving left. Following the market crash, moderates broke big for Obama. He won them by 21 points against McCain and 15 points against Romney. The conservative poll drops, the solid numbers we see for government action and the lead Hillary Clinton holds in 2016 trial heats all suggest that moderates are not running away from their implicit alliance with the Left, even if other poll numbers remind us that the alliance is tenuous and not unbreakable.

At minimum, six years of Obama hasn’t soured America on the idea that active government can help solve tough problems. But why have voters, after electing Obama twice, reversed course in the midterms by giving Republicans more power in Congress and in the statehouses?

It’s best to not read too much into the midterm results. They were typical for a two-term president. As Larry Sabato explained in Politico Magazine, “Every eight-year presidency has emptied the benches for the triumphant party.”

This is even true for our “transformational” presidents. FDR suffered two horrible midterms, the most painful in 1938 when his attempt to purge Democrats of conservatives backfired, leaving him with an anti-New Deal majority that thwarted additional reforms for the rest of his presidency. Ronald Reagan lost Republican control of the Senate in 1986, dooming his chance to drive the Supreme Court farther to the right. (The following year, the Court added who would become a gay rights hero, Anthony Kennedy, after the Democratic majority torpedoed Reagan’s first choice, the consummate conservative Robert Bork.)

Obama lost the Senate in his second term too. But within that loss were worrying signs for conservatives that the political center has ticked left—that for Republicans to win in swing states, they have to don some liberal trappings.

Most of the Republican Senate pickups in 2014 were in states that went for Romney in 2012. Only two were in Obama states: Iowa and Colorado. Joni Ernst famously won the Hawkeye State primary by promising to apply hog castration techniques to the federal budget. But it is important to remember she moderated her rhetoric on Social Security and abortion for the general election. She also had the luck of having for her opponent the worst Senate candidate of the year in Bruce Braley, who couldn’t live down slamming Iowa’s other Senator as a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.”

Colorado’s Cory Gardner offers a clearer window into the Republican future. Having secured the nomination without the hassle of a primary, Gardner offered Rocky Mountain voters a moderate face from start to finish, posing in front of wind turbines, supporting the legalization of undocumented immigrants and assuring women he supported easy access to birth control—which made Democratic attacks on his abortion record harder to land.

Republicans came up empty in other blue state races they hoped would be competitive. Scott Brown’s hard right turn on immigration failed to dislodge Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire. Terri Lynn Land’s reliance on thin conservative talking points didn’t get her any traction in Michigan. Republicans may shrug off these losses as the product of inherently flawed candidates. But that only strengthens the argument that the center of gravity has shifted: Republicans need exceptional candidates, candidates who can adapt to the terrain, in order to compete outside of Red America.

For decades, liberals were embarrassed to be liberals. Back in 2004, when a surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry dismissed “the label game” on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Lindsey Graham shot back, “The label game is a result of how you behave. Call me a conservative … I am. I'm proud of it. I vote that way … Is there anybody in the Senate who will admit to being Liberal?”

He spoke a core truth: If you’re not proud of your own beliefs, why would anybody else want to join your team?

Since then, Barack Obama gave liberals more spring in their step. He stops short of fully embracing the label, but he forthrightly defends everything associated with liberalism. In turn, most Americans consider him a liberal, and still rewarded him with two-terms.

While candidates like Michael Dukakis got tongue-tied when confronted with the L-word, candidate Obama took it in stride. “We know all those old tricks,” he during a February 2008 rally, assuring Democrats he was ready for the attack. “Oh, well you know, he's liberal. He's liberal. Let me tell you something. There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce the influence of money in politics … There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare.”

While Bill Clinton dealt with the shadow of Reagan by declaring “the era of big government is over,” at key moments of Obama’s presidency he has sought to make the case for a robust, problem-solving government. At his 2012 Democratic convention speech he said, “…we have been told by our opponents that bigger tax cuts and fewer regulations are the only way; that since government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing … You know what? That’s not who we are.” For this year’s State of the Union address, weeks after another midterm loss, he continued to tout his regulatory approach: “We believed that sensible regulations could prevent another crisis, shield families from ruin, and encourage fair competition … we were told … that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade…”

With the relentlessly confident Obama setting the tone, the left has one-upped Lindsey Graham’s 2004 challenge. There’s now a senator who admits to being a socialist. He’s been welcomed by the Democratic Party into the presidential primary. And it isn’t hurting the party’s standing with the public one bit. Bernie Sanders may define himself as a socialist, and hold some positions that wouldn’t fly in a general election campaign—like single-payer healthcare. But by and large, his populist platform is seen as enriching the Democratic debate. The Republicans are still the ones worried that their primary process will yet again be hijacked by unserious and extreme candidates who will complicate the party’s attempt to rebrand itself and compete for the middle.

The new polls are far from the last word on America’s ideological journey, as conflicting signals abound. Americans are quicker to embrace the L-word when it comes to social issues than economic issues. Economic conservatism still struggles to impress voters who remember the collapse that capped the George W. Bush presidency, while Americans still seem to be watching the economy’s slow mend and weighing a final verdict on Obama’s remedies. What the polls do crystallize is the sense that American liberals have a newfound confidence. And confidence can be infectious.