Voices on the left are loud, but moderates like Biden and Eric Adams are doing the winning

One of the most enduring but false pieces of conventional political wisdom is that, for Democrats, all the energy is on the left. Powering that myth is the misconception that most voters of color skew hard to port. This fallacy is dangerous, because if Democrats get it wrong, the midterm elections and future presidential contests will be in deep jeopardy.

To be sure, there is plenty of far left energy online, where the loudest voices stand out. But Twitter dominance and political strength are not the same, as the New York City mayor’s race has once again underscored. Out in the real world, where people vote, it is moderates, running on ambitious but actionable ideas, who are doing the winning. And they are earning the support of Black and Latino voters by significant margins.

The left is not dominating primaries

In New York, the moderate Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams topped the first round of voting at 31% and won the Democratic primary with a majority after voters' ranked choices were allocated. He beat runner-up Maya Wiley, the most left-leaning of the credible candidates, by 10 points in the first-round ballot. If Twitter followers were predictive, Adams would have finished in fourth place.

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This is part of a clear trend. In the 2018 midterms, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the far left’s leader, declared that his style of politics would dominate the cycle. The reality? Moderates handily defeated far left candidates in virtually every Democratic primary for a winnable seat.

That continued in the 2020 presidential race. The media all but declared Sanders the winner, but African American voters in South Carolina disagreed, and moderates in subsequent states delivered the final blows. In this year’s major gubernatorial primary, in Virginia, moderate Terry McAuliffe easily beat his left-leaning opponents, winning every county and independent city in the state, including communities of color.

Moderate voters of color powered the Adams win as well. In a recent poll by Data for Progress that came close to nailing the exact outcome, Adams outpaced Wiley by 23 points with Black voters and 10 points with Hispanic voters. In that poll, Wiley bested Adams with white voters by 11 points.

These were Democratic primary outcomes. As we look toward future general elections, it’s even more vital that Democrats don’t buy into myths about the electorate, go too far left, and take voters of color for granted. That’s why Third Way, the Collective PAC, and Latino Victory co-sponsored a searching retrospective on the 2020 congressional elections.

Protect our moderates: Republican lies helped defeat us in 2020. We're going to shield House Democrats in 2022.

If Black, Latino and Asian American Pacific Islanders all leaned hard to the left, none would support Republicans in general elections. But we found that many did, and they should be regarded as “persuasion” voters who must be convinced to choose a Democrat over a Republican.

Voters of color are not far left on crime

Black voters are, for the most part, still Democrats, and their increased turnout in 2020 did make the difference for the party in some close races, including the two Senate run-offs in Georgia. But there were warning signs: Black support for Democrats dipped slightly since 2016, especially in rural areas.

Starker was the erosion in vote share of Latino and AAPI voters. Their turnout spiked dramatically, but so did their tendency to vote for Republicans. Democrats saw significant drops in support in places with high concentrations of Latino voters, like South Florida and South Texas. Ditto for AAPI voters in places like suburban Los Angeles, where congressional Democrats saw real erosion with that diverse community.

On policy questions, Democrats misread voters of color sentiment on issues like crime and policing at their peril. In New York, local advocacy groups and a major union all tried to make “defund the police” a key issue in the race. Adams went the other way, hitting his liberal opponents for favoring defund. And while they hedged a bit rhetorically, Wiley and others did support defunding the police. The fact that two defund skeptics, Adams, a retired NYPD captain, and Kathryn Garcia, finished 1-2 in an ranked choice vote suggested to many that the “defund” was toxic to Democrats of all races.

That, too, was confirmed in our study. We found that in districts in which Republicans had harped continuously on “defund” as undermining “law and order,” they won a higher share of Black, Latino and AAPI votes.

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To be clear, voters of color are deeply invested in reforming the police. Adams deftly pitched himself as the only candidate “proposing a comprehensive vision for delivering the justice we deserve with the safety we need.” But in 2020, the GOP was able to efficiently weaponize the “defund” brand, and Democrats must not fall into that trap again.

The recent victories by Eric Adams, Terry McAuliffe and Joe Biden should be a wakeup call both for pundits and Democrats. Democratic voters – across demography and geography – want candidates with mainstream ideas who can win and get them enacted. They will leave the shouting and sloganeering to the Twitterverse.

Steve Benjamin (@SteveBenjaminSC) is the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, former president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and a Third Way board member. Matt Bennett (@ThirdWayMattB) is a co-founder and executive vice president of Third Way.