YOU SAY "TEA PARTY MOMENT" AS IF THAT'S A BAD THING

In The New York Times, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck have a dark warning for Democrats:

Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment?

A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.

But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.

In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.

As I told you on Wednesday, the mainstream political world expected Hong to win her primary, which would have confirmed the preferred narrative of mainstream journalists: that radical barbarian outsiders are taking over the Democratic Party, and hurting the party as a result. When Hong lost, Flanagan -- who's not an outsider (she's been the state's lieutenant governor for nearly eight years and was in the state legislature for four years before that) -- was simply swapped in. A few paragraphs later, Lerer and Glueck write:

The next major tests for the left will come this fall in a smattering of battleground House districts, and as Dr. El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, a progressive former state senator in Maine, fight to win seats that Democrats need to capture control of the Senate.

Jackson is also not an outsider -- he served in the Maine House of Representatives for six years and in the Senate for fourteen years; he was the Senate president for six of those years. A party committee chose him to replace Graham Platner (an actual outsider) on the ballot. But the narrative is more important than the facts.

According to the narrative, progressive Democrats want to build a Tea Party of the left, but this will probably cause the party to lose winnable races, which means the movement is doomed. Lerer and Glueck write:

As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left — mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.

But Tea Party Republicans lost their share of winnable races, too. Here's a Politico story from October 2010:

Tea-party-backed outsider candidates became the superstars of the midterm elections, drawing national attention after big Republican Senate primary wins — and leading tea partiers to pour millions into those campaigns, seeking credibility. But on Nov. 2, the tea party itself could get a mixed return on those investments.

With about a week to go until Election Day, several candidates stamped with the tea party seal of approval are either locked in statistical ties with their Democratic opponents or sinking in the polls....

Examples included several Senate candidates -- Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Angle, Buck, and O'Donnell lost to Democrats. Miller lost to incumbent Lisa Murkowski, who won as a write-in canddiate after losing her party's primary. (This was before the days of ranked-choice elections in Alaska.) Rand Paul won, of course. Democrats held the Senate and maintained their hold in 2012.

But you can't call the Tea Party a failure because some of its candidates lost races the party could have won. On balance, the Tea Party made the GOP a lot stronger than it was after the 2008 Democratic blowout. Here were the numbers at the end of Barack Obama's final term in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it's okay -- or at least it can be okay -- if an insurgent movement produces a few candidates who prove to be unelectable, as long as the infusion of energy makes the party more competitive overall.

(It helps not to attack your own candidates. Mainstream Republicans did a lot less of that establishment Democrats are doing now.)

Elsewhere in the Times, data guy Nate Cohn asks:

Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?

Cohn begins his analysis with a factual error:

When the midterm election campaign began, Michigan seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted in their pursuit of the Senate. Yes, it’s a presidential battleground state, but that makes it the kind of state that Democrats would ordinarily win easily in what seems like a strongly Democratic midterm cycle.

No, Michigan never "seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted." It's a state Donald Trump had won twice. In 2020, the only year Trump lost the state, the incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, won reelection by less than two points. The state's other Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, won the state by less than half a point in 2024.

And as of the end of January, two of the three top Democratic candidates for the Senate seat -- El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow -- were trailing Republican Mike Rogers in the Real Clear Polling averages. Only Haley Stevens was leading Rogers, and that was by a margin of just 1.3 points.

Cohn continues:

It’s not a state Democrats can take for granted anymore. There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances.

According to Cohn, "ordinary" progressive Democrats like Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker "do only about a point worse than other Democrats," but candidates "of the activist progressive left" do noticeably worse. How does he define the latter group?

They might ally themselves with the democratic socialists, define themselves in terms of their support for activist causes like Gaza or the climate, run against the Democratic Party, engage in righteous fights with Republicans, post clap-backs on social media, or champion activist slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police.”

This is how far we've fallen: In a year of massive heat waves and wildfires, "climate" is deemed one of the "activist causes" that can get a candidate branded as a radical. Also radical: being a candidate who "engage[s] in righteous fights with Republicans." Fighting your opponent makes you an extremist outlier in the Democratic Party -- as does posting "clap-backs on social media." (Apparently, it's extremist to be better at online messaging than Chuck Schumer.)

I suspect that past support for defunding the police can be a drag on a candidate's popular support. Criticism of Israel? Maybe that too, if only because it worries some Jewish Democrats and leads other voters to believe you're one of those crazy radicals.

But I also have to wonder how Abdul El-Sayed would be doing in the polls if he were running the identical campaign under the name Al E. Sanders. Michigan might be no more ready for a Muslim senator than America was for a Catholic president when Al Smith got trounced in 1928. The national Republican Party is certainly running against Islam nationwide. But neither of these Times pieces mentions El-Sayed's religion as a reason why he might be underperforming other Democrats trying to win Senate races in purple states. The narrative -- radicalism bad! -- can't be challenged.