POLITICO'S PROOF OF DEMOCRATIC INFIGHTING IS DEMOCRATS BASICALLY AGREEING WITH ONE ANOTHER

The victory of Democrat Conor Lamb in a solidly pro-Trump Pennsylvania congressional district is -- of course! -- bad news for the Democrats. Politico has the story, under the headline "Democrats’ Civil War Flares After Lamb’s Upset Win."

Conor Lamb’s triumph in Trump country is being heralded by conservative Democrats as a major victory in their ongoing turf battle with the far left — and an object lesson on the kind of candidates the party needs to promote and win to take the House in November.

Lamb is "an object lesson on the kind of candidates the party needs to promote and win to take the House in November"? That's what this lead paragraph says -- but that's not what we're told in subsequent paragraphs. We're told that Democrats should run some Lamb-like candidates. And both progressives and moderates seem to agree.

For the Blue Dogs, Lamb’s successful center-left campaign is proof that the Democratic Party’s “big tent” mentality is still a winning electoral strategy, despite an aggressive push from liberals for candidates that more closely adhere to the progressive purity made popular by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

But while liberals have praised Lamb’s win in Pennsylvania, they’ve also been quick to caution that his message shouldn’t be copied by Democrats across the House map.

So Blue Dogs believe in a "big tent" -- i.e., a party open to lefties and centrists -- while liberals think Lamb's approach "shouldn’t be copied by Democrats across the House map" (that is, in every district), even though they're happy that Lamb won. Sounds to me as if everyone's basically in agreement.

A direct quote:

“[Lamb] didn’t run on an identity politics, one-size fits all message,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), co-chairman of the Blue Dog PAC, the fundraising arm for the conservative Democratic coalition. “He ran on the Blue Dog message.”

If Schrader thinks "one-size-fits-all" is bad, it would seem that he thinks the Blue Dog might be inappropriate in blue districts. I agree.

And then there's this pair of quotes:

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Rust Belt Democrat who ran against Pelosi for leadership in 2016, [said,] “At the end of the day, ... I hope that whoever our nominees are, we let them be who they are. And run the kind of races they think is best for their district.” ...

“People [who] say this is the direction all of us should take are kind of missing where the energy is coming from,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He mentioned issues such as universal health care, the minimum wage and regulating Wall Street as being especially important to base voters.

There's disagreement here, but Ryan says that candidates should run with district-appropriate messages, while Grijalva says centrism isn't "the direction all of us should take." They're both saying that there's more than one ideological route to victory, and it depends on the district. Works for me.

Obviously I'm simplifying, and obviously these people have some significant disagreements. In addition, we don't know whether genuine progressives can surprise us by doing well in centrist districts. There will be mismatches, probably in both directions, and those will be missed opportunities. There'll be some bitter fights, like the progressive challenge to Dan Lipinski. But what I'm seeing is Democrats largely agreeing to disagree. This is not a civil war -- we may have one in 2020, when only one person can be the presidential nominee, but I don't see one taking place now.