“What you are seeing is a growing division among Democrats as to what the future of the Democratic Party should look like,” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who finished as the runner-up in the last two open Democratic presidential primary races, said in an interview....On Friday, The Atlantic gave us "Democratic Momentum Could Be a Mirage," and now follows up with "The Limits of the Democrats’ Big Tent," in which Elaine Godfrey attends a convention thrown by Crooked Media, the company behind the Obamaist podcast Pod Save America. Perhaps because Ezra Klein wasn't available for comment, Godfrey quotes Matthew Yglesias:
An impatient next generation of ambitious politicians is ratcheting up the pressure on the old guard. These Democrats are chafing over style, substance and strategy — just as the party’s ideological direction is at an inflection point.
But on which issues will Democrats accept disagreement—and on which will they stand firm? No speaker at Friday’s convention offered any real specifics. Meanwhile, the no-shows were notable. “John Bel Edwards is not here. Mary Peltola is not here. Jared Golden is not here,” the panelist and Substack author Matt Yglesias told me about the past Louisiana governor, former representative from Alaska, and current Maine congressman, all of whom have won in red areas. Those lawmakers don’t have a secret sauce—they simply “have more conservative voting records,” Yglesias said. “And people just don’t like that answer.”John Bel Edwards, who left the governorship in 2023 because of term limits, presumably wasn't at this confab because he's no longer in politics; he announced last month that he won't run for Bill Cassidy's Senate seat next year. Jared Golden announced in May that he wouldn't run for the Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins and just announced that he won't seek reelection in his House district, probably because recent polling shows that he's extraordinarily unpopular in his district and would lose to troglodytic ex-governor Paul LePage if he ran. Peltola might run for governor or senator next year, but why the hell would an Alaska politician want to be seen at a gathering of pasty-faced East Coast Democrats?
The implication of the media's renewed sneering is that Democrats need to pick their lane, but it really doesn't matter, because whichever lane they pick, left-centrist or progressive, they'll inevitably alienate voters and lose again (which would return "liberal" pundits to their happy place, where Democrats are for bashing).
My take is that Democrats should remember the lessons of 2010.
That was the year of the first Tea Party elections, and Republicans had their own fights between Establishmentarians and rabble-rousers. Some of the Tea Party candidates failed miserably -- see for instance, Christine ("I'm not a witch") O'Donnell, who lost a race for Joe Biden's old Senate seat that Republicans could have won with a different candidate. Republicans also lost a close race in Colorado because they nominated Ken Buck, who opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest.
But overall, Republicans gained 6 seats in the Senate and 62 seats in the House. They had a net gain of 6 governorships even though one of their gubernatorial nominees, Carl Paladino, was found to have been a serial recirculator of racist and obscene email forwards, and another candidate, the aforementioned LePage, revealed himself as a foul-mouthed Obama-basher in a state Barack Obama had won by more than 17 points. (Paladino lost badly to Andrew Cuomo, while LePage won a three-way race.)
The moral: A party doesn't have to be perfect to win. It just has to do better than the other party.
Democrats need to win a greater percentage of the close races in 2026 than Republicans did in 2010 in order to win the Senate, and redistricting could mean that the same is true for the House. But they won't benefit from endless self-criticism, or endless criticism from their favorite news outlets and Substackers. Democrats just need to get on with it -- hold the primaries, rally the voters after the primaries, and refuse to cooperate with any journalist writing a "Democrats are doomed" article or post. They'll make mistakes -- but they'll make fewer if they hold their heads up and run as if they think they deserve to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment