Three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative, while only half of Democrats call themselves liberals—and for Democrats, that’s a historic high point. Self-identified moderates outnumbered liberals in the Democratic Party until 2008.5 What that means is Republicans have been able to appeal to their party through ideology. Democrats haven’t. They’ve had to appease a coalition of whites and nonwhites, liberals and moderates, the fixed and the fluid. They’ve done that by promising different policies to different groups—offering a transactionalist, more than ideological, approach to party
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