This piece first appeared in the New York Daily News. Read it here.
Hailed by many credulous observers as the future of U.S. politics, the progressive left is on an epic losing streak. Democratic primary voters in Cleveland last week dealt the latest rebuff, choosing Joe Biden loyalist Shontel Brown over Nina Turner, a combative acolyte of Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the race to fill a vacant congressional seat.
Brown’s upset victory followed centrist Eric Adams’s comfortable win over the progressive favorite in New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary in June, as well as recent drubbings of leftist hopefuls in primaries in Virginia and Louisiana.
Progressives also stumbled in last year’s main event — the 2020 presidential nominating contest. It began amid lavish media coverage of the jockeying by Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julian Castro and Bill de Blasio for “more progressive than thou” honors. It ended with Biden, the unfashionable old party warhorse, coasting to the nomination on his way to a resounding victory over Donald Trump in November.
The country got a preview of the left’s narrow electoral appeal two years earlier, in the 2018 midterm. No doubt Democrats benefitted from activist energy, but they won back control of the House mainly by recruiting mainstream candidates who wrested 41 swing districts from Republicans. Sanders-style progressives fared badly.
The activist left was cheered by socialist India Walton’s victory in June’s Democratic primary for this fall’s mayoral race in Buffalo. Otherwise, the campaign by Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Squad and allied activist groups to refashion the Democratic Party in their image isn’t going very well. The insurgents keep stumbling over the same obstacle and, it’s not a monolithic party “establishment” that exists mostly in their imagination. It’s grassroots Democrats, anchored by Black and Brown working-class voters and moderate suburbanites.
These voters seem to like their party and share its pragmatically liberal outlook. Like Brown, they also trust Biden and want him to succeed. No wonder they are put off by Sanders’ monotonous railing against “corporate Democrats,” or AOC’s lament that she has to run in the same party as Biden, or Turner’s infamous crack that having to vote for Biden was like being forced to eat excrement.
Nonetheless, the party’s Jacobin faction keeps insisting that its ideas are popular, even if its candidates aren’t. That’s probably true in some deep blue urban districts, but across wider geographies, the progressive catechism clearly repels voters Democrats need to build majorities. A confident prediction: In competitive races next year, you won’t hear many Democrats running on nationalizing health care and abolishing private insurance; giving affluent kids a free ride to college; shutting down oil and gas production ASAP; defunding the police, or decriminalizing illegal immigration.
It’s true that Democrats have become more liberal since 2000, especially on social issues and government spending. Even so, the party remains a heterogeneous coalition about evenly balanced between self-identified liberals on the one hand and moderates and conservatives on the other.
To understand where that coalition’s true center of gravity lies, however, you also have to take into account its generational and class cleavages.
The activist left is overwhelming white, college-educated and urban. Older and working-class Black voters are more religious and socially moderate. “The median Black voter is not AOC and is actually closer to Eric Adams,” says Stanford political scientist Hakeem Jefferson. The picture is similar for Hispanic voters, as Democrats learned to their chagrin last November when Trump made unexpected gains among blue-collar men.
In an analysis of Americans’ ideological composition in presidential years going back to 1980, Brookings scholars Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck note that one thing hasn’t changed: Self-identified liberals are still the smallest part of the U.S. electorate. They constituted 24% of the voters in 2020, compared to 38% each for conservatives and moderates. Nearly half of independent voters identify themselves as moderates.
Progressive pretensions to historic inevitability, based on America’s changing demographics, keep colliding with these electoral realities. The left has a choice to make: It can continue to hector Biden and the party to adopt purist positions that will make it difficult to win elections and govern. It can accept its role as an influential but not dominant part of a broad Democratic coalition that’s respected more for its passion and mobilizing energy than its often utopian ideas. Or it can turn Democratic Socialists of America into a real political party and try to win elections on its own.
For our country’s sake, let’s hope it’s option two. The Republicans, led by a vengeful sore loser, lacking any kind of unifying vision for the country, and stewing in paranoia and hatred of their political competitors, are incapable of governing the country.
It’s up to Democrats, working together, to right our ship of state.
Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
