On the menu today: The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.
Democrats Lack a Sense of Urgency
“Wake Up, Democrats!” cries the cover of the most recent issue of The Economist.
They won’t, at least not before the midterm elections.
The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:
Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom. If the Democrats are defined by their most extreme and least popular ideas, they will be handing a winning agenda of culture-war grievance to an opposition party that has yet to purge itself of the poison that makes Mr Trump unfit for office.
The Democrats have begun to put this right, but they lack urgency. That may be because some of them blame their problems on others — as when the White House points to “Putin’s price hike” or the negativity of Republican politicians and the conservative media. Although there is something to this, the party also needs to ditch cherished myths that empower its idealists.
Hey, I’d love to see an American political culture characterized by sane centrist Democrats arguing with a sane conservative Republican Party, moving the country in a gradual, steady, center-right direction. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.
Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.
The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”
Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?
We can debate whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders actually have a lot of influence over what passes in Congress, but they still get covered as if they do. There are still members of Congress who embrace “defund the police”; unsurprisingly, they spend a lot on personal private security. The Biden White House keeps using the term “Latinx.” The assistant secretary of HHS just went on MSNBC to argue that there should be no limits on teenagers’ ability to obtain “gender-affirmation treatment.” And Democrats and their allies continue to attack minority Republican candidates in repugnantly hateful and alienating ways: NBC News reports that, “A Texas blogger paid by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s campaign is attacking Republican opponent Rep. Mayra Flores as ‘Miss Frijoles.’”
Does that seem like a more moderate and sensible centrist path?
After a midterm-election blowout in November, maybe Democratic Party leaders and their centrist will have the stomach to confront their left wing. But the old saying, “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan” is about people’s willingness to take credit or avoid blame, not about who actually is responsible for victory or defeat; Defeat usually has about a hundred fathers, too. Progressives will point the finger at other factions of their party, and just as a broken clock can be right twice a day, they will have a valid point or two.
Progressives will try to blame Joe Biden, and he’ll deserve some of the blame. Biden is old, tired, and likely not up to the job anymore. He tends to wildly overpromise — remember his promise that, if he was elected, his administration could cure cancer? — and dramatically underdeliver. On issue after issue, he denies problems until they’re too glaring to ignore, then offers excuses and whines that everyone is so unfair to him. He’s an absolute deadweight for his party heading into this midterm, and the surviving Democratic officeholders will eagerly blame him after the fact if the expected red tsunami materializes.
(Kevin Williamson thinks progressives are fooling themselves if they think their real problem is Biden, not their agenda, and he’s right. But we’re talking about people who always find new ways to believe that “true socialism has never been tried.”)
Beyond Biden, there’s no denying that today’s Democratic Party has doddering, uninspiring, geriatric leadership. House speaker Nancy Pelosi is 82, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 83, and Majority Whip James Clyburn is 81. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is the baby of the group at 71; Senate majority whip Dick Durbin is 81. If they were airline pilots, Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn, and Durbin would have been forced to retire around the start of George W. Bush’s second term. Democrats have every reason to clean house and start fresh with a new slate of congressional leaders.
But I suspect that if the 2022 midterms are an epic wipeout, many Democrats will choose the most self-serving explanation: They lost because they were “too nice,” or because the electorate couldn’t grasp the nuances of their message. There is always an audience eager for the message that the reason you haven’t achieved what you want in life is because you’re so virtuous and noble, and the reason other people succeed is because they’re unethical.
People, and parties, don’t always learn the right lessons from defeats. Heck, sometimes even after a defeat a party clings — bitterly, Barack Obama might say — to its old bad habits.
In 2016, Gabriel Debenedetti of Politico laid out how the Hillary Clinton campaign “always wanted Trump” as its general-election opponent. “Clinton’s team in Brooklyn was delightedly puzzled by Trump’s shift into the pole position that July. . . . [Campaign manager Robby] Mook took him so seriously that his team’s internal, if informal, guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary and resist the urge to distribute any of the opposition research the Democrats were scrambling to amass against him. That hoarding plan remained in place deep into 2016 as some senior aides stayed convinced that a race against Trump would be a dream for Clinton.” When Trump was nominated, the Democratic Party’s top operatives, strategists, and activists boasted, “In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election.”
The 2016 election was about as shocking and painful a defeat for Democrats as any U.S. political party has suffered in the past generation.
You would think that Democrats would have learned from the 2016 results to never assume that someone is unelectable and to never play with fire by boosting a radical fringe candidate in a GOP primary. But that idea assumes that Democrats are capable of learning from their mistakes.
Fast forward to this year, when Pennsylvania Democrats spent time, energy, and resources making sure that Doug Mastriano won the Republican gubernatorial primary. Our Charlie Cooke pointed out that this completely undermines the Democratic argument that Mastriano is a dangerous extremist who will destabilize American democracy:
This being so, I do not want to hear a single thing from the Democratic Party about the “threat” that Doug Mastriano presents to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, or to the republic in general. I am, from this moment on, not remotely interested in that case. Why not? Because the Democratic Party clearly doesn’t believe a word of it. When one truly believes that a given candidate is a threat, one doesn’t “send out mailers boosting him,” or spend $840,000 on television advertisements designed to improve his standing.
And now, a few months later . . . surprise! Suddenly Doug Mastriano isn’t as unelectable as Democrats thought he was.
As the political environment has worsened for Democrats across the country, the gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected. Polls show Mastriano behind Shapiro by only three to four percentage points, which is within the margin of error. Though many still have doubts about Mastriano’s ability to run a successful campaign, that has made Pennsylvania Republicans more optimistic — and served as a wake-up call for Democrats, particularly in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
Democrats are attempting the same maneuver in Arizona and Maryland. Because there’s no way a Republican could ever win a gubernatorial election in Arizona or Maryland in a political environment like this, right? Biden’s job approval in Arizona is at 26 percent, and in Maryland it’s at 38 percent.
To sum up, some Democrats are really stupid.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the Biden administration is dropping the ball on immigration enforcement again; Beto O’Rourke’s big outburst didn’t have much of an impact on the Texas governor’s race; remembering Biden’s pledge to continue to support the Afghan people; and the Iowa poll points to a Democratic bloodbath in November.