After every Democratic loss, the same argument returns: the party needs to move to the center, or it will die. The post-2024 version has been especially loud, with elites in politics and the press uncritically adopting the theory that Democrats lost the last election because of progressive policy positions.But, Morris tells us, this belief is at odds with the data:
... in many Democrats’ eyes, [Bill] Clinton is the model Democrats should follow today. By publicly rebuking the left (Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment”), moving to the right on entitlements, and holding the line with southern whites, the usual explanation goes, Clinton broke 12 years of national Republican rule ushered in a new era for the New Democrats.
According to the American National Election Studies (a quadrennial academic survey of the American public) voters perceived Bill Clinton as more liberal than Michael Dukakis, and also rated Clinton as less favorable.Morris writes, "I see Democrats endlessly relitigating an ideological debate that the electorate isn’t having," by which he means this:
... The Sister Souljah narrative assumes voters rewarded Clinton for tacking right — but political scientists have found voters didn’t even perceive Clinton as particularly moderate.
Instead of poring over troves of polling data and statements of issue positions, voters mostly react to national conditions and (only the most significant) moments in campaigns. The data does not support the case that Clinton won in 1992 because he ran to the center. But it does show a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who lost faith in the Republican Party to handle the economy.The 1992 election took place before Morris was born, but I remember it, and he's right: normal people didn't see Clinton as a center-left candidate -- they saw him as the first major-party candidate to have emerged from the 1960s counterculture, a pot-smoking hippie horndog...
... who had cleaned himself up and now seemed, at least to those who warmed up to him, like a smart, articulate, vigorous man in early middle age who might be able to extricate America from Poppy Bush's stagnation.
In the 1992 campaign, Clinton expressed support for the death penalty (and, as a sitting governor, carried it out), and chastised Sister Souljah, the rapper and activist, for saying, "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" -- but unlike today's anti-progressive Democrats (Rahm Emanuel, John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and others), he didn't spend the campaign flamboyantly drawing attention to his disagreements with the left.
*****
In Maine, it appears that Governor Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate for the Senate seat currently occupied by Susan Collins, is trying to draw attention to the fact that she's AWOL in the fight against the White House immigration war. Drop Site News reports:
On January 24, the morning that federal agents murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, more than 500 Mainers packed into the former St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church ... for the state’s first large-scale ICE protest, an “ICE THEM OUT” rally. That week, masked federal agents launched “Operation Catch of the Day,” a mass deportation campaign aimed at the nearly 6,000 Somalis who live in Maine....There's more:
The Lewiston event featured many of the state’s prominent Democratic politicians.
Speakers included [Senate candidate Graham] Platner, as well as gubernatorial candidates Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Hannah Pingree, and Angus King III; Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline and Portland Mayor Mark Dion, the leaders of Maine’s two largest cities; and Rep. Chellie Pingree.
Gov. Mills was notably absent.
The day ICE launched its Maine operation, Mills was caught jetting off to California. Dinner invitations obtained by Axios reveal Mills planned to attend a trio of big-money Senate fundraisers in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley on Wednesday, and the East Bay on Thursday. The Wednesday invitation described an “intimate dinner” in San Francisco’s financial district....Mills is so conspicuously absent from the fight that Adam Jentleson -- the president of the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank that has begged Democrats not to say "Abolish ICE" -- has criticized her cowardice:
On January 30, six days after Mills was a no-show at the Lewiston rally, a city-wide service worker strike took place in Portland, Maine’s largest city. Almost 200 businesses shut their doors to protest ICE. Thousands of people marched through the city....
At this event, one of the largest protests in Portland’s history, Mills was again absent. That evening, Mills was photographed dining at Scales, an upscale seafood restaurant in Portland’s gentrified Old Port District. The pictures from Mills dinner have now been viewed millions of times across platforms.
What the hell? She’s the governor, total failure of leadership. https://t.co/fwjqsbLBd5
— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) January 24, 2026
She could show up and call for ICE reform rather than its abolition, as Jentleson recommends. But she's making a great show of being out of the picture altogether.
This is probably what Chuck Schumer thinks she should be doing. It's the conspicuous-rush-to-the-center strategy that G. Elliott Morris tells us isn't really effective.
There hasn't been much polling of this race, but a couple of surveys conducted late last year suggest that Graham Platner, Mills's key opponent in the primary, would do slightly better against Susan Collins than Mills would. Platner is campaigning as a leftist.
Dismantling ICE is the moderate position.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) January 7, 2026
Unmask these thugs, arrest them, and make them answer for these horrors.
We'll see whether the Mills/Schumer approach is the right one. I think Mills -- a septuagenarian like Schumer (and Clinton) -- simply doesn't understand the moment.
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