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Just days after dancing the streets and opening bottles of champagne to celebrate their White House victory, Democrats are in a state of funk – stewing over unexpected losses for Congress and state legislatures as they are thinking about where to go from here.
Within a year Democrats hoped to capture the Senate and strengthen their majority in the House, the loss of so much ground in Congress sparked an intense volley of finger points, insults and plots from every warring faction. to prevent the other from accessing party leadership positions. . The familiar ideological divide between left and center-left intensifies after an election in which the message sent by voters was so confused: to embrace Joe Biden while rejecting so many lower ballot Democrats.
An intra-party clash after Republicans exploited left-wing slogans and Democrats’ alleged empathy for socialism is compounded by divisions over structural issues in a party still led by an aging old guard that campaigns in a way that s has proven ineffective in key races.
“The system is down,” said Chuck Rocha, a progressive strategist frustrated by what he sees as his party’s lack of sophistication in speaking to non-white voters. “This election has revealed how we are running all these campaigns the same way, from the same place.”
However, the moderates who lost their seats or narrowly escaped defeat have shifted their blame elsewhere – to the progressives. Rep. Conor Lamb, from a suburb of Pittsburgh, said voters in his district are uncomfortable with all the discussions within the party over ideas like police postponement or a Green New Deal. On a post-mortem conference call from House Democrats, other Democrats in the Swing District echoed the complaint.
“The evidence is overwhelming that the Democratic brand is so damaged by the far left and their ideas that it’s very difficult to get over if you’re in a very red place, or sometimes even a light red to dark purple place,” he said. said Jon Cowan, chairman of Third Way, a center-left advocacy group trying to push the party back to the middle. “The far-left backlash dragged a few members below.
Progressives, however, say it is absurd that moderate candidates who ran on cautious platforms blame the left for their woes. They say progressives’ calls to action on racial justice, economic fairness and the fight against climate change galvanized voters who were essential in pushing Biden to the top.
“There’s no polite way to put it,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which has mobilized black support for Democrats in more than a dozen states. “That’s silly. He says because of what a progressive Democrat in another state does or says he allowed Republicans to define their candidate. It means you’re so undefined and you had a relationship so cowardly and so weak with your constituents that you couldn’t defend yourself.
Idiot or not, the argument has value in the party.
Grievance against the left was amplified by Rep. James E. Clyburn, the Democrat of South Carolina who, as the majority House whip, is the highest-ranking American black in the House and a close confidant by Biden. Clyburn said that the slogans of the progressives, in particular “defund the police”, injured the candidates in his condition, although they tried to escape the mantras.
A wave of progressive frustration followed. “The reality is that the Black Lives Matter movement has led to record turnouts in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta,” said Silicon Valley Representative Ro Khanna. “We should thank the activists and the organizers for our victory…. We cannot censor or write the language of activism. “
Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota summed it up succinctly on Twitter: “Stop erasing black women’s work.”
The tensions underscore the fragility of the coalition that propelled Biden’s victory, and which must hold up if Democrats are to overcome the odds of winning Georgia’s Jan.5 special election for its two Senate seats. The Georgia races are Democrats’ last chance to take control of the Senate.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the leading voices among progressives in Congress, rejects the idea that “Medicare for All” alienated voters. She noted that all swing-district Democrats on track to winning co-sponsored re-election legislation claiming it. “Each. Single. One,” she wrote in a tweet punctuated with emojis and enjoyed by 390,000 people.
But several of those Democrats, Third Way countered, have taken steps during their campaigns to move away from the idea, saying they will fight efforts to replace private insurance with a government-run system. .
Left shows California Rep Katie Porter of Irvine as an example of a shameless progressive successful in a swing neighborhood. But moderate skeptics argue that it is an outlier.
They cite that Biden’s vote in Minnesota’s Liberal Omar District exceeded Omar’s by more than 70,000 and that Biden led a congressional district in Nebraska where a more liberal Democrat House candidate lost .
But the extent to which voters’ decisions were driven by the narrow ideological struggles that dominate Washington is a matter of intense disagreement. Some say broader trends were at play this year.
“People were more than willing to get rid of Donald Trump. But they just didn’t want to give Joe Biden nothing, ”said Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant in California and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which worked to defeat Trump. Indeed, he said, people voted to limit his party’s influence in Congress.
Project Lincoln itself is now the target of ideological wars, with Ocasio-Cortez wondering whether the tens of millions of dollars he raised for clever ads to turn moderates against Trump would have been more effectively spent by progressives. Madrid said such attacks were irrelevant: it took a comprehensive strategy and diverse messages to build Biden’s winning coalition.
He agreed with Ocasio-Cortez that Medicare for All did not sink moderate Democrats in competitive House races. “I don’t think Medicare for All played a role in that,” he said.
Such has been the experience of Democrats trying to cling to a swing neighborhood in California’s Central Valley, where incumbent TJ Cox loses to Republican he ousted two years ago, David Valadao. Allies of the centrist Cox said it wasn’t noise about Medicare for All or the cutting of police funding that was hurting him – it was that his campaign lacked solid outreach among Latinos working in the meat-packing plants and farms in the area.
The party’s regional director in that Central Valley district, Humberto Gomez Jr., said discussions of such progressive political ideas “had nothing to do with” Cox’s demonstration. “Direct mail, TV ads and radio ads are not reaching this neighborhood. It’s the good old days knocking on doors.
It was a trend in almost every district lost to Democrats, Rocha said. Rotating neighborhoods are increasingly diverse, but Democrats have relied too much on a model of voter targeting that dates back to when these places were much whiter, and when social media wasn’t a thing and the television dominated.
“This formula doesn’t work with black and brown and Asian voters who don’t consume information like the upper middle-class whites it was built around,” Rocha said.
Texan Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who led a popular participation effort for Democrats, came to much the same conclusion in a note to supporters: “The central message that many Democratic candidates have come to felt compelled to adopt (because they believe funding and support from other Democratic organizations depended on it) is not working.
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