A couple of years I wrote an article
arguing two questions that various identity groups always bring up and how it
bothers me when it comes to politics. They are: "Are you electable?",
followed quickly by: "Would you ask a white man that same question?"
At this point I've thought of a glib
but telling response to anyone who in the future puts these two questions
together. "Why don't you put that on a bumper sticker: 'You're A Racist If
You Don't Vote for Me'." Now I do
realize this is stated so bluntly by members of the Squad that I'm kind of
shocked it has yet to appear in the Justice Democrat platform. And it would
shock me if in a future Presidential campaign AOC actually puts it on a button.
I look forward to her trying to win over New Hampshire voters with it; it's
certainly got as good a chance as winning as her policies.
And more directly the race card falls
apart when you realize that these people are only asking it in regards to Democrats
running for the Presidency. I don't remember any of the same people who
said asking Jesse Jackson of his electability was racism saying the same thing
for either Allan Keyes or Herman Cain when they ran for President and all the
people who used sexism as code for Hilary or Elizabeth Warren didn't use it for
Michelle Bachman or Carly Fiorina. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz's runs for the
Presidency in 2016 were historic and yet I don't remember seeing any members of
the LatinX community being particularly willing to credit them for it. It's
even clear in runs for the Senate in the same state; Jamie Harrison was the
epitome of black excellence when he challenged Lindsay Graham in 2020 but no
one seemed interested in Tim Scott in that same state.
That is one of my problems with
identity politics: it only seems to count if Democrats do it far more
than Republicans do. But since I've written about that part before, it's time
to get to the first question. The one of electability.
A huge part of the reason I take the
far left in American politics far less seriously then everybody in the media
and both parties do is because the last decade has done much to convince me
that to them the one issue that is the only one that counts to both parties –
can they win? – is at the bottom of priorities for the overwhelming
majority of left-wing voters. Given their attitude has always been that once
you become part of 'the establishment' you have sold out and that they view
both parties as equally corrupt then you constantly get the feeling that for
most of the candidates who've been running under this banner since the 2016
election that policy and governing really don't interest them and most of the
time get in the way. To them being an elected representative is a hobby and
running for office is a temp job, something they do between posts on social
media make their issues and giving loud speeches to the faithful.
This has been borne out by everything
I've seen Sanders do in the last decade and the Squad since they took office in
2018. To them governing interests them less then performing before the
faithful. The work of making policy interests them far less than making a
speech at a college campus where they speak for an hour telling how corrupt the
establishment that they are now a part of truly is. It really begs the question
as to why they ran for public office since they have little interest in serving
the public or their party.
This attitude makes them popular with
the young, college educated voters which are, as they've always been, the
biggest supporters of progressives. This group think that all problems are a
moral issue and can be solve if everyone just does the right thing. What's
troubling is that these elected officials have served in Congress or the Senate
for years and should at least in theory know that the world is more complicated
than it is in a stump speech – and yet they've done nothing to enlighten their
supporters on this fact during the last decade.
They've managed to escape scrutiny from it
most of the time because the Democrats were using them against a common enemy.
What the Democrats forgot is that most of the people who have been Bernie Bros
and love the Squad prefer the kind of chaos Trump has been more than willing to
provide. Governing and policy bores them because it's more complicate then
their binary world view allows them to see things.
The left has always believed far more
in principles as a litmus test for candidates then electability. There's a joke
in there about because they've never managed to have any real political power,
the principles are all they have. The bigger issue – and the one that over the
last year is increasingly becoming clear – is that their increasingly forcing
this point of view on an electorate at large who has made it just as clear that
they have no use for the left's principles. This would bother me less if they
weren't holding the Democrats hostage and more importantly, potentially costing us seats that are tough
enough to win with moderates and impossible to win with the kinds of doctrine
the left has been demanding their candidates follow.
This can be problematic when they run
under their own field for Congress. But when you're trying to run for statewide
office, particularly in territory that on multiple occasions has proven it
doesn't want the left is selling; it's almost certainly going to lead you to an
electoral defeat. And as someone who realized pretty much when it was grade
school you can only put your principles into law if you're elected I
find it horrifying that so many supposedly intelligent candidates for office on
the Democratic side are, at best, indifferent to the idea this might be a
problem.
That was the biggest flaw of the
campaign that led to Graham Platner being tapped to run for the Senate in
Maine. It was clear after the 2024
election that the Democratic Party needs to win white working class voters. The
far left doesn't like working class voters, in large part because it's
overwhelmingly made up college educated white people who by their nature look
down on the working class. And the people behind the Platner campaign weren't
really trying to run a working class platform or candidate.
In a view of the electorate so cynical
the Heritage Foundation would reject it the plan was to basically put working
class lipstick on a progressive candidate and call him working class. At no
point did anyone even consider the possibility of putting in issues that would
appeal to working class voters in Maine, only to come up with someone who could
pass for working class in the eyes of the public well enough so that no one
would notice his stump speech was almost word for word out of the Squad's
playbook. Obviously they did it a horrible job vetting Platner but it's not
clear that they were that picky – one of their earliest choices was Troy
Jackson, who is now the nominee for Senate after Platner spectacularly
imploded.
The sole evidence that Platner was
going to be a man of the people was based entirely on crowds at his appearances
and how well he was doing in the polls against Janet Mills. No one even seems
to have considered at any point during the months leading up to Mills' dropping
out that the polls might be painting a picture that was different from reality;
as the scandals mounted against Platner, no one connected with his campaign
seemed to even consider the possibility they could be a problem in the general election.
And no one even seems to have considered that all Platner was really doing was
giving the exact kind of stump speech that so many progressive candidates had
given before to voters who were going to vote in the Democratic primary.
The fatal flaw in the Platner campaign
– and one that I'd argue Jackson is now facing - is that it's still being taking as a given
that voters fundamentally want what progressive candidates are offering; it's
just the messenger that's the problem.
Jackson is essentially making the same sales pitch to rural Maine voters
that has been made by left-wing Democratic candidates for years and which
they've made very clear across the country they don't want. And because the progressive refuses to accept
the problem is not politically sound Jackson will face the same brick wall that
every progressive running for statewide office keeps hitting. These views are
popular with the far-left primary voters but not the electorate at large.
But say what you will about Jackson or
even Platner at least they had a basic understanding of the office they were
running for. I'm not sure the same can be said for Abdul Al-Sayid, who on
Tuesday became the Democratic nominee for Senate for Michigan and faces a whole
different sort of problems.
El-Sayed's first problem is that he is
a one-issue candidate and that issue is Gaza. To the average progressive this
is the most important issue facing America, if not the world today, if not in
all of human history and they can't seem to understand why the average American
doesn't feel as strongly as they do about a conflict have a world a way where
America doesn't have troops on the ground.
I'm not trying to negate the level of
feeling this conflict has inspired in a certain amount of the population but
the reality is Gaza is not in America; therefore the average voter doesn't care
about it with the intensity that those who feel strongest about it do. Indeed
in a poll run by a Michigan pollster it was made clear that Gaza was not in the
top ten of issues facing the voters sampled.
But for El-Sayed, this is the only
issue that he cares about, regardless of whether he can do anything about it if
he is the Senator of Michigan. Which brings me to his next problem: to El-Sayed,
winning election to the Senate is simply a means to an end. He has been very
clear that his main priority for winning is so that he can have influence over
who becomes the Democratic nominee for President in 2028 as the Michigan
primary is scheduled to be early in the calendar. In other words his run for
the Senate is basically a shadow campaign to get inside the corridors of the
Democratic power structure and the interests of the people of Michigan are
secondary, if that.
To the average progressive, perhaps
even more strongly in Michigan, this is all they care about which if nothing
else shows that they don't even care about the electorate at large at all. And
outside of Gaza, El-Sayed has had great difficulty giving a message that
connect to any other part of the electorate, even the progressive stump speech.
When asked to explain how his campaign would help the working class he
answered: "I think a custodian who makes $14,000 a year is sick and tired
of his tax dollars going to Israel."
It's one thing not to be able to
connect with a working class voter; it's another to not even be able to parrot
back one of the key points of the progressive stump speech since at least 2016.
He couldn't even be bothered to say: 'eat the rich' or "the top 1
percent."
This actually leads in to the next
issue: in the final weeks of the campaign multiple polls showed El-Sayed
winning by anywhere from 10 to 15 points against Haley Stevens. Instead, he
barely managed to eke out a victory with 48.5 percent to Stevens' 47.5 percent.
This argues that so much of the support that was for Al-Sayid was soft to begin
with and that the primary was divided.
All of this is difficult enough before
you consider that El-Sayed is running in a state that went for Trump twice. Michigan
is not a hotbed of progressivism; it's a swing state that has been more red
than blue recently. And Mike Rogers, El-Sayed's Republican opponent, is no fresh-faced rookie.
Two years ago he barely lost to Elissa Slotkin by little more than 3 tenths of
a percent out of over 5 million cast.
Rogers carried all but 10 of Michigan's districts and it took two days
to call the election. Slotkin was a far more moderate candidate than El-Sayed
is.
And in all the polls that were run in
the months leading up to the primary not one showed Al-Sayid ahead of Rogers
while multiple polls showed Stevens with a slight lead over him. Indeed on
the eve of the election a poll that showed El-Sayed with a sixteen percent lead
over Stevens in the primary saw him trailing Rogers by ten points going into
the general.
None of this seems to have troubled
any of the people who voted for El-Sayed on August 4th. For all I know it doesn't seem to have
trouble the candidate. But it's now not just his problems but the Democratic
Party's who will have to spend a lot of time and money propping up a defense of
a seat when they're trying to take back the Senate. That they now have to do so
while trying to fight a damaged campaign against Susan Collins in Maine –
another problem the far left has saddled them with – is an issue that they will
spend the next three months struggling with and Rogers and the GOP will spend
every minute making sure they have to.
I'm deeply skeptical that El-Sayed
will be of much help in this regard. If he wants to win the election – which
I'm not convinced he cares much about – he will now have to spend the next
three months convincing the 47.5 percent of the Stevens voters that he doesn't
hold her or the people who voted for her in the visceral contempt he made
little attempt to hide when he was running in the primary. The only way he can
do this is to move to the center, which the left has defined as moving to the
right and they have always lambasted Democrats for doing when they won elected
office. They will consider any movement
he does as remotely conciliatory as an unforgivable sin and consider it
tantamount to treason.
And there is a halfway decent chance that many
Stevens voters will either stay at home or when they go to vote choose to vote
the Democratic ticket but leave El-Sayid's name off the ballot. One saw this playout in the Maine primary
when Platner received fewer votes than the Democratic candidates for governor
so its easy to see it happening on a larger scale here. Considering that
El-Sayid did best with young college educated voters but struggled with rural
voters and African-Americans in the primary that is a double burden as he will
need both on his side if he hopes to win.
If any of this was a factor in the
minds of the nearly 1.2 million Michigan voters when they voted for a candidate
who as of now stands an average of 4.4 percent behind Mike Rogers and who
overnight shifted Michigan by ten percent to the GOP it doesn't seem to have
bothered them. It pales compared to what nearly happened in the Wisconsin
governor's race this year.
Now to be fair while what is happening
in Maine and Michigan is completely the left-wing of the party's fault the same
can't be said in Wisconsin which has been a clusterfuck ever since the
incumbent Tony Evers chose not to run for a third term. The primary race has
been a mess for almost the entire cycle with candidates getting in, then
getting out, then getting back in again.
This speaks to the larger
disorganization of Democrats in Wisconsin overall. Wisconsin is very much a
swing state at Michigan is and the Republican presence in the 21st
century has been bigger than in Michigan with Ron Johnson and Scott Walker
winning Senate and Governor's races, respectively in 2010. The Democrats have been unable to unseat
Johnson in two reelection attempts and while Evers won the governor's race in
2018 and then was reelected, as with Michigan, the state went for Trump two
years ago.
The governorship reflected the
unsteady nature of knowing who the nominee was, while it leaned Democrat it was
always closer to toss-up. Then just to put the cherry on the crap sundae two
weeks ago Mandela Barnes the lieutenant governor during Evers' first term and
the prohibitive front runner, dropped out of the race when allegations of his
treatment of young women came to light.
Barnes had been the only Democrat
option with a lead in the general over Tom Tiffany, who has represented the 7th
district since 2020 and serves in the Freedom Caucus. His withdrawal was just
the latest in an endless series of problems. Sara Rodriguez, the current Lt.
Governor, dropped out in July because of inaccuracies in the campaign's
financial reporting. This led to
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowledy, who dropped out of the race a few
days earlier to reenter the race.
This led to the rise of Francesca Hong
has been part of the Wisconsin State Assembly since 2021. She's a Democratic
Socialist but Wisconsin has always been more willing to accept this then other
places. Hong is running on the same kind of media strategy and messaging as
Mamdani did running for Mayor of New York City. But there's a difference
between running for mayor of one of the most Democratic cities in the country
and governor of a swing state that just went for Trump. It's one thing to argue
Thanksgiving is a 'colonizer holiday' and defund the police as a socialist in a
deep blue district; another to do so when you're running for governor in a
state that is more conservative then it looks on the outside.
Were the Democrats in Wisconsin less
chaotic Hong would not have been in a position to be a nominee at all and
that's not really her fault. Her bigger problem is one I noted in an earlier
article. Hong, like most socialists, has a huge approval with young voters in
Wisconsin To them the biggest issues are
health care, affordability, social issues and ICE. There are thirteen issues
that impacted their vote. Hong led on 12 of them, most notably AI data centers
and affordability. There's only one she didn't lead in: electability.
To her credit Hong seems to have
realized that while this might not bother her strongest supporters the rest of
the electorate in her state probably will have a problem with it. She's spent
the last week backing away from some of her most controversial social media
posts in the kind of backpedaling that would do a generation of conservatives
proud. On Monday she said her positions have evolved but Thanksgiving is a time
that's 'incredibly painful for many people in our communities." Two days
later she told Politico Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday.
She's also distanced herself from much
of the DSA platform, saying in the only televised primary debate, she doesn't
support defunding the police, abolishing prisons or the Senate. Many people
believe that some voters won't like Hong's past rhetoric and it's clear that
the DSA is already pissed that she's not fully endorsing it. Critically AOC and
Sanders who were upfront of their support of Platner and Al-Sayid refused to endorse Hong. Interestingly AOC
herself seems to have moderated her point of view on defunding the police in a
recent interview, which means I expect her to be primaried in 2028 rather than
trying to run for higher office.
Once again polling vastly
overestimated the appeal of the left-wing candidate in a Midwest state. The
overwhelming majority of polls showed Hong with a huge lead over David Crowley,
with anywhere from a 19 to 22 percent margin. And just as in Michigan the
results vastly overestimated the support for Hong with her not even able to get
40 percent of the vote. And unlike in Michigan this time it made a difference
as Crowley managed a remarkable upset to win the nomination.
That actually leads to the major issue
I have with so many left-wing candidates running for office this cycle, whether
it is in ads they've run in primaries in my home state of New York or whether
in primarying incumbents at large, whether it be the Connecticut governor's
race or running for the Senate in Minnesota. It’s a talking point they've been
using for a decade: that they will 'stand up against Trump'.
The thing is while I know all too well
what this looks like for an activist or a celebrity I still have no idea what
it would mean for an elected official, particularly a Senator or
representative. No one has ever explained how one Democrat, alone, in either
house of Congress can do something more than any current representative against
an incumbent President.
The best case scenario is that this is
just done to rouse the base during primary or general elections. They were
still using during Biden's term so I could see that. But the worst case is more
troubling because it mirrors so much of Trump itself. Essentially so many of
these candidates are using one of his classic arguments: Washington is broken
and I alone can fix it. That argument makes a certain sense if you're running
for President; if you running for a House Seat in New York or Senate in Maine
or Michigan, it's a delusion of grandeur and I find it beyond troubling that so
many of Platner and El-Sayid's supporters seem to believe it.
What's more after the last decade
we've seen countless examples of the fallacy in that statement in the
Republican Party. This election cycle alone, with Trump's popularity at its
nadir, we have seen in primary after primary how much the base thinks of
Republican officials who stand up to Trump. In the Indiana statehouse election,
with Thomas Massie in Congress and Bill Cassidy in the Senate, it is very clear
that standing up against Trump costs you votes, not the other way around. I've
made this argument how helping Trump's agenda hasn't cost the Republicans who
stood with him and how standing against him has hurt incumbent Democratic
senators. It's always been true about the Republicans who were against him
since he took office; it's just as true now.
And even that argument has an
expiration date: its November of 2028. Whatever (very) limited success far left
candidates have had in the last decade has been entirely based on Trump being
the opposition that has managed to unify the Democratic Party. In the majority
of the Senate and Congressional primaries that have taken place this cycle the
electorate has by and large embraced centrist candidates in deep red states to
win in the Senate and gubernatorial races and in swing districts. They'll unify
against Trump and MAGA in the general, of course, but that's because he's still
President and that will be the main argument for them going into 2028. Once he's gone from power, the main reason
for keeping the progressive wing of the party with relative kid gloves will be
gone forever and the Democrats will have to look at their track record – which must
be measured by how many general
elections they've won during that period and how many elections they've cost
the party over that same period. That will lead to a reckoning with the
left and I'd argue it has to start after the midterms.
For candidates like Jackson and El-Sayid
for Senate, these elections will play a far bigger part in that accounting then
their earlier primary wins. The question "Are you electable?" has
never been rhetorical ; the voters always make it very clear what they
think and there is only a yes or no answer to that question. That their
strongest supporters consider this is a non-issue but it’s a very real one for
the Democrats and perhaps America at large. And in this case I hope that the
Democrats will in the aftermath take no for an answer - and mean it.
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