A Tale of Two Senators And A Warning to The Left Heading to the 2026 Elections And Beyond

 

In 1944 Wayne Morse was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican representing the state of Oregon. Morse had represented himself as more right-wing as he was in order to win over the conservative wing of Oregon Republicans and would later admit he had voted for FDR over the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey that year.

Morse spent much of his early career in the Senate arguing for the election of Liberal Republicans to counter the conservative wing of the party led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft. He supported the policy of Truman, voting for the Marshall Plan the U.S joining NATO and endorsed Truman in foreign policy. He famously supported Margaret Chase Smith's Declaration of Conscience in 1950 and was an early critic of Joseph McCarthy. When Eisenhower chose Nixon as his running mate in 1952, Morse left the Republican Party that year, initially serving as an Independent. In 1953 he engaged in a 22 hour filibuster protesting the Submerged Land Act, then the longer filibuster in U.S History. He officially switched to the Democratic Party in 1955.

Claire Boothe Luce, a former Republican Congresswoman, gave Morse a backhanded compliment in his decision. "When any Republican becomes a Democrat, it increases the intelligence of both parties."

Two years later first term Senator Strom Thurmond broke Morse's record for the filibuster when he spoke against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The two men would be linked again seven years later.

That year, as many left-wing and Democratic websites will tell you in protest of LBJ's signing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 Thurmond switched from Democrat to Republican and would campaign for Barry Goldwater for President against LBJ. Goldwater had been one of seven Republicans to vote against passage of the Civil Rights Act, against the protests of his colleagues in the Senate including majority leader Everett Dirksen. They were afraid that this position would permanently damage any chance the Republican Party had of winning the African-American vote in future elections. This had been a reality under Eisenhower who had managed to win between 35 and 40 percent of the African-American votes in both his runs for President while Nixon had won just under a third.

But Goldwater was more interesting in the possibilities of winning votes in the South, particularly the segregationists who had been loyally Democrat for years but were also virulently opposed to civil rights. As he famously put it: "Let's go hunting where the ducks are." Thurmond, who was able to read the political winds and who had campaigned for Eisenhower and Nixon in the last two elections, could see where it was going as well.

The left will excoriate Thurmond and the Republicans for what they did saying that it appealed to the worst impulses of humanity, particularly in the South. Left out of the conversation, of course, is how effective a tactic it has been for the GOP ever since. I'll get to that in a minute but I'd like to go to the other major political event in 1964: the Gulf of Tonkin.

I won't relitigate the deception LBJ engaged in that gave him carte blanche to start the Vietnam War: what I want to discuss is the actual vote on the resolution. In both houses of Congress, there were only two negative votes and one of them was Wayne Morse. The other was Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

As we all know Thurmond would be reelected to the Senate six more times and would serve until he was over 100. Morse, however, would lose reelection to the Senate the next time he came up for reelection in 1968. By that point, everyone knew how horrible the war was going but it didn't help Morse one bit with Oregon's voters who replaced him with Bob Packwood that year. Gruening would lose his primary in 1968 to Mike Gravel and when he tried to run as an Independent that same year, he lost as well.

 

Ever since the Vietnam War began in earnest the far left has basically rejected both political parties for the crime of being insufficiently left. This has hurt the Democrats far more than it has the Republicans ever since the election of Richard Nixon and it's hard to argue that the repercussion have hurt the vision of America that the left has spent so much of that time since believing in.

But they remain convinced that the future of America is to the left. Indeed they believe that anyone who moves to the center in a political campaign or when elected, is in fact going to the right. Leaving aside that this seems to make them unable to under stand how directions work, it seems to acknowledge that this is where the voters are – but then argues that the voters are wrong for thinking that. In other words, progressives think the voters have to move to the left to increase their own intelligence.

They ignore a fact about Morse at their peril: ever since he switched to the Democratic party in 1955, only one Senator has switched from Republican to Democrat ever since. (I'll get to him believe me). By contrast many Democrats have moved to the right either to the GOP (such as Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell in 1994) or becoming independent (in 1970 Harry Byrd, another segregationist, shifted from Democratic to Independent while no longer caucusing with Democrats) In the last few years we've seen Democrats such as Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin move from Democrat to Independent after years of being excoriated by the left as being Democrat in name only.

Let's look at Manchin in particular. Manchin is from West Virginia, always a conservative state which nevertheless had remained loyally Democrat during the 20^th century and in both seats of the Senate throughout the 2010s. Manchin was elected to fill the seat of Robert Byrd when he died in 2009.

Manchin had been a Democrat for twenty years before that. In 2004 he had won the gubernatorial election of that sate by a large margin and reelection by a larger margin in 2008. In 2012, he was elected to a full term with nearly 61 percent of the vote. In all the elections he ran in, he would drastically outperform Democratic Presidential nominees in the state, from Obama to Hilary Clinton.

But the crime he committed, starting in 2020, was that he was not sufficiently progressive. That he represented the most Republican leaning constituency of any Democrat or independent in either house of Congress didn't matter to the left. It certainly didn't matter to Paula Jean Swearengin.

Swearengin, as I've written in other articles, was one of the first Justice Democrats to run for office in 2018. She was one of four women to run for the Senate in a Democratic primary. She declared in May of 2017. She supported a progressive platform of Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, spoke out against the pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis and legalization of marijuana in any form. In the primary she barley got thirty percent of the vote. Manchin narrowly won reelection.

Undaunted by this failure, one year later Swearengin ran in the Democratic primary for the other Senate seat in West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito. She narrowly managed to win the primary and faced off against Capiton in November. This time she got only 27 percent of the vote as Capito romped to reelection.

Most people would realize that at the very least, the brand of progressivism Swearengin preached wasn't going to sell in West Virginia and that it might be a good approach to moderate going forward. Instead one year later Capito resigned from the Democratic Party altogether saying: "I can't support racism or them ignoring Appalachian children dying & suffering." In other words, you can't fire me, I quit.

Swearingin would later join the Movement for a People's Party that year and left it in 2022. Manchin, of course, stepped down from reelection last year and also left the Democratic Party albeit. Manchin thinks the party is now too far to the left. Swearingin argues it isn't far left enough. Manchin was a Democrat for forty years and won elected office every time he ran from 1982 to 2018. Swearingin lost one Democratic primary, another general election and one primary. Manchin got 290,510 votes in the last general election he ran in and won. Swearingin got 210,309 votes and lost. I don't know what most people's standard is for being a Democrat but the only one that matters to me is winning elections. By that standard Manchin is definitely a DINO.

The Justice Democrats as I've mentioned was founded by veterans of Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Sanders, as I repeatedly mentioned, is a Socialist who caucuses with the Democrats but is not a Democrat. He got his seat, I should mention from Jim Jeffords.

Jeffords was always a moderate-to-liberal Republican for his entire career in the Senate. He'd voted for the Brady Bill, an end to the ban on gays in the military and was the only prominent Republican to support Clinton's attempt to establish a national health care plan. However even after his shift he remained fundamentally in line with the GOP on economic matters and continued to vote with them on many issues, often going against moderate members of his party included McCain.

When the 2000 elections left the Senate in a 50-50 tie, the Democrats had sought out a Republican to defect from the Republican caucus to give the Democrats control of the Senate. Democrat whip Harry Reid would court Lincoln Chaffee, John McCain and Jeffords. Jeffords agreed to do so after being promised chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Bernie Sanders won reelection to the Senate in 2018. So did Jim Scott, the Republican governor. Despite the fact that Vermont has gone Democrat in every Presidential elections since 1988, it has been purple in the state and federal offices it has elected during that period.

The same, I should add, is true for much of New England where so many progressive politicians seem to have lived. Massachusetts has been going steadily Democratic on the Presidential map but Republicans have won in the governor's race repeatedly. Charlie Baker was elected governor in 2018 the same year Elizabeth Warren won reelection. Kelly Ayotte is the Republican governor of New Hampshire. Before that she served in the Senate where she was narrowly beaten by Maggie Hassan, the current Democratic incumbent. Sounds like New England is more purple then today's progressives want to admit.

This is key because one of the key targets in the upcoming midterms is Susan Collins, a bete noire of the left for over a decade. They think because this is a reliably blue state that they can take her out this time. But the last Democrat to be elected Senator in Maine was George Mitchell in 1994. Angus King, who was elected in 2012, is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. And Jared Golden is a  Democrat who's won twice in a district Trump carried. Sara Gideon who ran against her was one of the most progressive candidates and was highly favored – but she lost by nearly nine points to Collins. The Democrats went hard to the left to go against a very vulnerable senator – and were trounced. There's no evidence that this method will work again.

If I haven't made my point clear yet, remember that one Senator I mentioned who switched from Republican to Democrat since Wayne Morse?

 Arlen Specter, who had been a Republican for nearly half a century, chose to change parties in 2009 but he had always been a centrist. Nevertheless progressive Joe Sestak chose to run against Specter in the Democratic primary. His major argument: not sufficiently progressive.

 Sestak was opposed by almost the entire Democratic establishment and chose to run against him. Sestak managed to destroy Specter's reputation when he argued that the move was made of 'self-interest'. The fact that Specter had managed to defeat the likely Republican candidate Pat Toomey in 2004 in the primary and would likely do so in the general was irrelevant as was Specter's long history in Congress. Sestak defeated Specter and then narrowly lost to Toomey in the general. That seat has been Republican ever since.

The left's failing as a political force – on the rare occasions they deem to run for political office rather than vaguely insisting no one's sufficiently progressive – is that they seem unwilling to accept certain realities of political parties. Politics has always been about going where the ducks are and the left refuses to do so. And as for trying to reach the voters by moderating their votes, screw that. In their minds, they're good enough, they're smart enough and if the voters don't like that, they brought it on themselves.

They are convinced that progressive policies are universally popular, no matter how many candidates lose trying to win with them as their platform. They point to the most progressive politicians as their icons, ignoring that they live in states that are always purple. And they denounce the ones who try to win voters by going to the center as DINOs even though in most cases they've won more elections then they ever have.

The division in the Democratic Party right now is between the establishment who at least comprehends that they have to have a big tent and the left wing of the party who is convinced that if the tent is moved more to the left, the voters will just show up. That there is recently and historically no evidence of that fact – that on the contrary the historical record shows the opposite is true – is unlikely to change their minds.

While I'm not sure what the Democrats will do I know what I wish they would do. If the left thinks that voters are out there waiting for them and they threaten to leave if they're not listened to…let them.

If they're so sure of themselves and millions of progressives are out there, let them form their own party made up entirely of sufficiently leftist politicians. I'm serious.. They say both parties are the same. Then let them put their money where their very big mouths are and form their own. Let them form their own organization, get their own candidates and most importantly fund them without any help from a Super Pac or campaign.

I mean, if the masses of progressive voters are out there throughout the country as they say they are, well, they shouldn't need such things as a campaign structure or a vetting process or even mass amounts of money. If the ideas are as overwhelmingly popular as they say, let them stand on their own two feet and I'm sure they will be swept into power.

Meanwhile the corrupt and overburdened Democrats can concentrate on those that are too far to the right – you know the ones in the center that are too good for progressives. Make an agenda appropriate for every state you campaign in. Free from the leftist standard you might be able to find voters in West Virginia and South Carolina that the progressives haven't so far. Hell, maybe Joe Manchin and Krystin Sinema will come back.

And don't worry about the progressives. Remember what Claire Boothe Luce said. It will increase the intelligence of both parties and it definitely will do it for the Democrats.