Democrats in the Trump era are successfully avoiding the traps into which the GOP fell in the first years of the Obama administration. At least, that’s what we’ve been told. The Tea Party, its detractors claim, provided vital energy and fundraising to the moribund Republican Party in early 2009, but often at the expense of the GOP’s coherence and unity of purpose. Even as the movement achieved political power, it’s organizers became more convinced of their impotence. This condition radicalized GOP voters, leading them to back unelectable candidates and sacrifice winnable races, to say nothing of the party’s shared mission.
A similar dynamic is at work among Democrats in the Trump era, but the party’s uncompromising progressive wing, unlike Tea Party activists eight years ago, seems to be losing the fight. The Democratic Party’s establishment, as it were, advocates compromise, and it appear to be winning. For now.
Insurgents who channel the progressive id have so far been beaten back by the Democratic Party’s superego. As Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel observed, the 2018 primary process is producing Democratic general-election candidates who are running against Nancy Pelosi from her right and away from the promise of impeaching Donald Trump. “So far,” he noted, “in every swing seat race that pitted a more left-wing nominee against a party-favored center-left nominee, the left wing has lost.”’
Indeed, 2018 looks a lot like 2017, a year in which relatively unobjectionable Democrats who tailored their message to the voters in their districts dramatically improved on their party’s 2016 showing almost across the board. In some cases, they even won some surprising victories. This has led some observers to conclude that the Democratic Party is all but immune to the affliction that stole winnable races from the ascendant GOP. But beneath the surface, the progressive activist class is flexing its muscle.
Progressives in Minnesota, for example, are currently litigating one of the central questions facing the Democratic Party. That is, will the party work to peel off portions of an existing majority coalition of voters—Donald Trump’s coalition—or will it seek to forge a new majority around shared progressive principles. Democrats in the North Star State have chosen the latter course, even if that means throwing one of the Democratic Party’s erstwhile heroes overboard.
The late Paul Wellstone was once considered one of the most liberal Senate Democrats in Congress. His voting record on economic and national security issues was to the left of the party’s center of gravity. When he died in a plane crash in 2002, the Democratic Party held a televised memorial in his honor that was more than just a sordid get-out-the-vote effort. It was also a celebration of the kind of 20th-century progressivism to which the late senator was committed. Today, for the activists who call themselves the inheritors of his progressive legacy, Wellstone’s vision is apparently too accommodating.
Earlier this year, the directors of the influential Democratic group Wellstone Action voted to oust Paul Wellstone’s two sons, David and Mark, from the board. Their infraction was insufficient zealotry in the cause of anti-Trumpism. As Politico reported, people close to the late Senator Wellstone had already voiced objections to the group’s efforts to lean into the divisive identity politics that energize Democratic voters. This frustrated staffers who see “racial and gender justice” as an integral element of the progressive creed. The two scions of the house of Wellstone wanted the group to focus on their father’s priorities, most of which were primarily economic. That would have compelled the organization to reach out across party lines to Trump-backing swing voters or former Democrats. Such a prospect was disturbing enough to convince the board that Mark and David Wellstone had to go.
This is the central argument that has been roiling the Democratic Party just beneath the surface for over a year. It is not hard to find progressive tracts insisting that the only thing worse than being in the minority would be having a majority coalition that includes Trump voters. That discomfort was evident as early as last August when DCCC chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján ignited a furor among liberal activists—including NARAL President Ilyse Hogue and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean—when he flirted with the prospect of recruiting pro-life candidates to run in socially conservative districts. It’s why the DCCC has tried to derail progressive firebrands, and why prominent liberals have condemned the Democratic Party’s cronyism and elitism. It’s why the party has done everything within its power to avoid a public audit of the mistakes and faulty assumptions that led to the debacle in 2016.
Establishment Democrats have staved off the kind of open revolt that proved a double-edged sword for the GOP in the Obama years, but their reprieve may be a temporary one. As the New York Times reported, Democrats are sure to see eccentrically progressive activists win their respective primary races as the season advances. More ominously for Democrats, liberal activists are chafing at the party’s decision to avoid association with the party’s liberal wing. The Times speculated that anything shy of a landslide Democratic wave election could ensure that “a small cluster of stubborn centrists could wield enormous influence” in the next Congress, fueling a Democratic backlash. In fact, there is probably no margin of victory by which Democrats could triumph that would satisfy progressive activists.
Even in the best-case scenario, Democrats are unlikely to win the 60-plus seats in the House that the GOP took home in 2010 simply because Republicans are not as exposed as Democrats were eight years ago. What’s more, because the Senate majority is likely out of reach for Democrats this year—indeed, the Democratic minority includes several vulnerable members actively lobbying Trump voters for their support—cunning liberals are going to have every opportunity to pillory Democratic centrism. What’s more, that message is likely to resonate. Despite evidence that Democrats in the Trump era are punching above their weight, the party is still largely on defense. That will not be so in 2020, when Democrats will be energized by two years of intramural presidential primary politics and when the GOP will be defending 22 Senate seats to the Democratic Party’s 11. The kind of principled compromise that prevails among Democrats today will seem like an unnecessary concession when the party is on the offense in 2020.
The Democratic establishment would be foolish to take its party’s presumed discipline for granted, especially considering how unlikely it is to last. Progressive activists are quietly remaking the Democratic Party from the ground up, and they are spoiling for a real fight.
