One of the stories that I've heard so
many times this election cycle is the narrative that 'the radical left is
taking over the Democratic Party."
Fox News has been using it as a
talking point since it was founded of course but now more old school
conservatives such as George Will and Bret Stephens – who should know better – are echoing it in editorials. MSNOW
has modified the term radical at times but they'll trumpet it when they have
too. There are enough supposedly intelligent commentators on CNN that will say
so. And of course the left's spokespeople on social media will never hesitate
to trumpet it.
What this demonstrates to me is that a
full decade after Trump arrived on the scene, the media still can't find its collective
asses with both hands and a flashlight. Anyone who calmly, coolly and
objectively looks at the raw data and electoral results would find with a two
minute Google search that the left is no closer to taking over the Democratic
Party then it was ten years ago.
I'm not saying that those who aren't alarmed
by those loud, vociferous and frequently demagogue like rhetoric have no right
to be concerned by their mere presence. I am as well but in the sense that I would
be concerned of an itch on my hand. Compared to the many, many other problems
in American politics – and make no mistake they are still mostly coming from
the other side of the aisle – the left wing's attempts to take over the
Democratic Party barely rate the level of a hangnail or blister. It's a nuisance
but it can be easily taken care of with the proper treatment. It certainly
should be – and I'll actually discuss methods of that later – but its vitally
important to recognize the severity of the diagnosis rather then just go to the
worst case scenario.
I've actually reviewed in many other articles
the failures of the AOC-Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic multiple times in
my columns and in many comments on this blog. I have no doubt I'll have to keep
doing it because I know that the political audience and the left in general has
no interest in hearing a narrative that doesn't fit their own reality. (Again
they have so much in common with their right wing counterparts then they want
to believe.) So let's break down the narrative and the reality.
First the narrative which is now being
preached by AOC herself is that in 2018 she was almost singlehandedly
responsible for the blue wave that cycle. That is simply false and doesn't remotely
pass the stink test. As I've mentioned before the Justice Democrats ran in 79
primaries for the Senate, House, Governor and Lt. Governor that year and only
four of them managed to win both their primaries and the general: the Squad as
they dubbed themselves.
The Democratic Party, having come off
the upset of 2016, were still reeling and were no doubt looking for any cudgel
they could use to catch the breeze and beat Trump in two years' time. So they
decided to play off the fact that Fox News had chosen to weaponize their outrage
machine about the radical left on Ohmar, Taib, Presley and AOC to try and use
that to their advantage. In retrospect that was clearly a mistake but no one
ever accused the Democrats of having great judgment.
And its not like there weren't a lot
of other things to celebrate. The Party had won the popular vote by the highest
winning percentage on record and had picked up the largest gain of House Seats
since 1974. We should have focused on places that were more important to us as a
party such as wins in Kansas, Oklahoma
and Utah as well as swing districts like Pennsylvania and New York. All the Justice
Democrats had done was change the members of the Democratic Party. Kevin Yoder,
Kendra Horn and Ben McAdams helped us increase it.
Still considering we were going into
what was going to be a tough fight to take the Senate and the White House back
in 2020, it's understandable the Democratic Party chose not to make it focus
those seats. At this point any House Democrat was an ally in the fight against
MAGA. We had other priorities.
Its understandable given everything
that happened in the immediate aftermath of November 2020 but down the ballot
it was not a great election for the Democrats. Given Trump's massive
unpopularity most expected the Democrats to expand their majority by up to 55
seats. Instead not a single Republican
incumbent was defeated and thirteen incumbent Democrats were ousted. Considering that several successful Democrats
won their race by smaller margins then expected, we were actually lucky to hold
the House 222-213 . This was still by
far the smaller majority the Democrats had in the house since 1942.
Make no mistake: we took a pounding in
the House. And the Justice Democrats did zero to help. In fact they actually
hurt us. To be sure they did win advance Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Marie
Newman. But Georgette Gomez who was competing in the 53rd district
in California and Kara Eastman running in the second district in Nebraska both
lost their elections against incumbent Republicans. That was the first clear
sign that the Justice Democrats were a liability to the National Party.
We got many more signs during Biden's
first two years, the only two we controlled both Congress and the White House.
Biden's infrastructure bill was torpedoed in his earliest form because after it
passed in the Senate almost everyone in the Squad chose to vote against in its
current form. The major argument was that Biden had 'sold out' when he'd
compromised with Joe Manchin. At that point it was clear to the Democratic
leadership that the Squad was anti-leadership and it didn't matter which party
was in charge. Considering the Democrats had spent the last four years running
that they were the party of sanity compared to Trump, this made us look
incompetent in the eyes of many Americans. But again we basically chose to
ignore it because everyone expected there was going to be a red wave in 2022
and democracy would end sometime shortly thereafter.
Except, of course, that didn't happen.
The Democrats had their best midterms since 1962 gaining a seat in the Senate
and barely losing control of the House with the Republicans getting their
smallest majority since 2000. By that
point the Democrats had managed to win seats in Alaska for the first time in 50
years and had even gained seats in Montana and four in Florida.
The Justice Democrats by contrast had
more of the same. They endorsed six newcomers and only two of them Summer Lee
and Greg Casar managed to win. When Odessa Kelly ran with the party's blessing
in the Tennessee 7th and lost in a landslide, it marked the last
time the Justice Democrats even competed in a seat that was deep red. Combined
with the fact that the Democrats were managing to win in districts that Trump
has won with representatives like Jared Golden and Mary Peltola, it was now
becoming clear the lesson was to win back the center.
In the leadup to 2024 the Democratic
Party seemed to have realized that the Justice Democrats were not helping them do
what they hoped and win back control of Congress and the Senate consistently.
Considering that they were now openly becoming more disruptive then they were
helping the Democrat Party did something that it almost never did and openly primaried
two of them.
It is true that much of the reason
Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their primaries had to do with their positions
on Gaza and their anti-Israel rhetoric. But lost in that is the fact that both
of them had become by far the most openly activist members of the parties and
had gone out of their way to not even bother to make token appearance with the
Jewish members of their district. In Bowman's case in particular that was a
fatal decision considering that the Jewish vote was a critical part of the base
in the New York 16th and he had gone out of his way to isolate them,
not even bothering to make the kinds of outreaches he had years before. Bowman
had actually been primaried before in 2022 and he'd barely won it with just
over 54 percent of the vote so it would have more politically astute for him to
walk a middle path.
Instead like almost every other
Justice Democrat he chose to double down and George Latimer humiliated him with
Bowman getting just 41 percent of the vote.
In Bush's case a bigger problem was
her own personal corruption. Earlier that year she was under investigation by
Biden's Justice Department and FEC for alleged misuse of federal security
money. She'd also spent tens of thousands on personal security for herself while
also saying Democrats should defund the police. And she'd made no efforts
leading into the primary campaign to try and doing anything to shore up support,
saying that she never returned the calls of people who disagreed with her. In
both cases committees like AIPAC were a factor but if the Democrats had wanted
to keep them in the party someone in leadership or would have spoken up for
them: the fact that they remained silent made it clear they didn't want them
around.
It's worth noting even original Squad
member Ilhan Ohmar was not immune to these challenges. In 2022 Don Samuels
would launch an attempt to primary Ohmar by running to the right of
Samuels on crime as well as her support for defunding the police. Ohmar survived
by the skin of her teeth, winning by just 2.1 percent. The result was enough
for Ohmar to realize the danger and do sufficient spadework for her district so
that she could easily win during the cycle. But the fact of the narrowness of
her defeat was proof that even in districts as blue as hers, there was only so
far left you could go.
After their second straight devastating
and somehow still shocking loss to Trump in 2024 the party once again made
outreaches to the left, this time because of polls saying 66 percent of Democratic
voters said the party should not work with Trump. The party spent much of the
next year making efforts to indulge the left flank as much as possible and
getting burned whether they went along with them, as when they hired David Hogg
as DNC Vice Chair and he made vows to primary incumbent Democrats, when they
didn't, as when they voted to keep the government open rather then filibuster
Trump's budget bill or when they tried to meet them halfway such as the
government shutdown in September of 2025 and when they met damnation when they
reopened the government after the November elections.
But by that point the Democratic Party
realized that they in a few years' time Trump was going to be gone from the
world of politics. That meant trying to
figure out what the party was going to look like in that not-too-distant
future. And after the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, along
with all of the overperforming that year, it was very clear that they had to go
back to an old standard: the economy, stupid. They reframed as affordability
but it was an issue that had done them well in the past.
They also realized because they did
have eyes and ears – and more importantly could count votes – that the Justice
Democrats were not helping the party in all of its weak parts: white working
class voters, rural America, the South and the West. They had not won a single
statewide office in four election cycles; they'd stopped even trying to run for
those in 2020. And in four straight
election cycles they had not flipped a single Republican district. The only
people they could convince were the ones already inclined to agree with them
and after eight straight year it was clear to everyone but them, that it was
not enough to help their Party win an election.
If they needed any more convincing on
the subject the Justice Democrats proved it themselves. In the aftermath of the
2024 election they made a very public announcement that they were heading a
recruitment drive to have candidates to run in all 50 states. And by the time
2026 started they had exactly fourteen – one of whom was Cori Bush trying to
get her seat back. Meanwhile the DNC and the party was making a major effort to
recruit and win seats in all fifty states as both a national and local level,
something the Justice Democrats had never tried and they were doing a far
better job.
Now I can't speak for them but after
the 2024 elections the Justice Democrats had to know that their position in the
party was becoming tenuous. They had been tolerated as long as Trump was priority
number one and that period was coming to an end. Though they would never admit
it (and God knows the media will never call them out) they also knew that their
efforts to take over the Democratic Party from the left was running bone dry.
They had far too many failures after four election cycles, no policy
achievements to speak of in that period and a massive social media following
that never led to turnout at the polls. In addition their standard bearer
Bernie Sanders had announced this would be his final term and there was no
voice big enough on the left to take its place that had a position nearly as
big. Warren had failed in her 2020 Presidential run and had never proven as big
a draw as Bernie and for all the photogenic nature of the Squad, they had never
succeeded beyond the narrow scope of their rallies.
And none of them had endorsement power
to win outside their narrow circle. This had been proven when Sanders, Warren
and every left wing member of the Squad had joined the establishment to endorse
Sara Gideon in 2020 against Susan Collins. When Gideon lost by 8 points despite
the polls saying otherwise up until election day, it proved that they couldn't
convince voters in New England to come out for a like minded Democrat. What
hope did they with the party at large?
So much of 2026 has been spent with
the Justice Democrats increasingly sitting this election cycle out. AOC didn't
even endorse a single candidate during the primary season and its worth noting
Chevalier and Claire Valdez didn't need it to win their primaries. Outside of
New York City, its been decidedly hit or miss for the Justice Democrats in the
House and that includes those that Sanders or Warren endorse anywhere
else. They had no effect in the Maryland
primary to choose Steny Hoyer's replacement and Sanders efforts failed to stop
Ben McAdams to win the Democratic primary in Utah to get his old seat back.
It has been even worse throughout the attempts
to win Senate races. Jasmine Crockett was blown out of the water by James
Talarico in the Texas primary and Warren's endorsement of Zach Wahls resulted
in humiliation when Josh Turek beat him by nearly 25 points in Iowa primary.
Annie Andrews and Jamie Davis may have the hearts of every progressive
nationwide but in South Carolina and Louisiana respectively that counts for
almost nothing. (Lindsay Graham's sudden
passing might change the calculus in South Carolina but Andrews's odd of
winning that seat in a deep red state are very remote.)
For that reason the decision for almost
every major Congressional left wing figure, from Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders on
down, to stand by Graham Platner no matter how horrible each new revelation was
to both his candidacy and a smear on all Democrats makes a certain practical
sense. They might argue that it was important to defeat Susan Collins but that
was only a beard. The left-wing of the
party needed to prove to the Democratic establishment that they could
flip a statewide, red seat during the midterms. And because they don't like
fights they don't have a chance of winning they focused on a state that was
Democratic. Sanders and Warren should have known better more than anyone – they
had gone down this with Gideon six years earlier and Platner was infinitely less
problematic - but the left has always
been more inclined to say the ends justify the means.
It even explains why after the first
story of rape allegations came out a week before the primary Sanders, Warren et
all chose to stand by Platner when most organizations were getting as far away
as possible. They had christened this sinking ship; they had to stay on it even
as everyone else was running for the lifeboats. Which made things only worse
for them when the second allegation came out last week and the party
made it clear it was pulling its funding for Platner.
By that point, even as they withdrew
their endorsements and funding the damage had been done and it goes beyond whatever
happens in Maine this November. The faithful will almost certainly stand by
them but whatever chances they had for influence in this election cycle has
been damaged for this cycle and for the foreseeable future.
We may see it in the Michigan
primaries next month where last Sunday the withdrawal of Mallory McMorrow from
the Senate primary may shift the balance to Haley Stevens for the Senate
Primary. Abdul Al-Sayed was a narrow front-runner in that race though his loud
and often violent rhetoric shared much commonalities with Platner's and caused
many Democrats to fear a loss if he won the primary. With McMorrow gone and
with Al-Sayid being endorsed by many of the same progressive voices that openly
backed Platner, many voters are now presented with a choice they never got when
he was running. And it is worth noting that in every Democratic for a Senate
seat between a progressive and a moderate, the moderate has always won.
And its clear whatever relatively free
ride the most left wing candidates have gotten from the mainstream media
detonated with Platner's candidacy. Many publications and commentators on the
left have publicly admitted their failings when it came to Platner and while
that is hypocrisy if they mean it, they will have to ask the same hard questions
of left-wingers that they never did of Platner when he was a candidate. They
will do so many because their reputation has been torpedoed in the eyes of the
right-wing media more than out of a greater good but as long as they do it, I
don't mind the reasons and neither should anyone else.
Don't get me wrong: the left wing of
the party is going to be a problem after the elections for the Democrats going
forward. How big a problem depends on how big the majorities are in Congress
and which seats were won. Regardless the Democratic establishment can freely
take scalps for what losses take place this fall and the left-wing has much
less leverage in the party then it did even a month ago – and that was always
more based on perception then reality. Reality, as anyone knows, has never been
the left's friend.
I suspect very soon the only people
who will still be saying the radical left are taking over America are the same
people who always said it. The problem was that the radical left believed their
own blurbs on Fox News. And that never helped them win elections in the first
place.
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