LEFT IN THE LURCH — The left has been gushing all week after progressive candidates defeated more moderate Democrats — and a crush of super PAC money — in several Senate and House primaries on Tuesday. “The rebellion succeeds,” is how Jeff Weaver, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former presidential campaign manager, put it to Nightly in an interview. For the moment, at least, he was right. It’s still early in the primary calendar. The civil war between the Democratic Party’s left and center is only now about to fully re-erupt. There’s a primary runoff in Texas next week, where Jessica Cisneros, a progressive, is vying to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar, the only anti-abortion rights Democrat in the House. After that, there are competitive, intra-party House races in Illinois and Michigan, among other places. In Michigan, it’s two sitting House members running against each other because of redistricting: Rep. Andy Levin, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus against Rep. Haley Stevens, a beneficiary of more moderate support. Yet Weaver is right that the progressives have already won a big chunk of the war. Given their victories in Pennsylvania and Oregon on Tuesday, it almost doesn’t matter how well progressives do from here on out. They will likely expand their influence in the party in November, due to the likelihood that Democrats will lose the House, shrinking the party’s ranks. Those general election losses will have to come from somewhere, and it’s the moderate Democrats representing swing districts — not the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes and Rashida Tlaibs of the party — who are most at risk. That’s partly why moderate Democrats justify intervening in this cycle’s primaries in even the most safely Democratic — and progressive — districts. They say they want to guard against Republicans weaponizing what lawmakers in those districts say and do to paint the Democratic Party more broadly as out of the mainstream. This intra-party conflict, said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way, is likely to become “a little more sharp in its relief as we move toward November, because the theory of the case is really different.” Bennett went on: “Their theory that there’s a magic potion to mobilize low-propensity voters is, well, let’s just say unproven, insofar as it has never worked, and their notion that all of their ideas will appeal to low-propensity voters, particularly voters of color, is also not at all clear that it’s true,” he said. “Our view is that you’ve got to be mainstream, you can’t look like a radical.” To progressives — especially to progressives this year — that sounds like what Weaver called “a fascinating and disgusting … double cross.” It was about two years ago that Sanders withdrew from the presidential primary. Since then, the progressive wing of the party has been almost historically well-behaved. It lined up behind Joe Biden in 2020 and supported his legislative agenda once he took office. In return, progressives are getting hit with millions of dollars in outside spending. Theleadership-aligned House Majority PAC went in for the moderate Democrat in Oregon, who was defeated by progressive Andrea Salinas on Tuesday. A super PAC called Mainstream Democrats is helping Cuellar ahead of his runoff next week. The repercussions are likely to be long-lasting, both in November and in the next presidential race, in 2024. “Temperatures [could] be cooled substantially” between the center and the left, Weaver said, “by the corporatist wing standing down, and understanding if they want to win the White House again for Democrats, they can’t go spending untold millions against loyal progressive Democrats.” But if not, he said, progressives have other options. One possibility, Weaver said, is that the left will become “much less thoughtful in the future about which incumbents get challenged.” Or in some places, progressives could even forgo primaries, altogether, running general-election candidates as independents in swing districts. They might not win, but they could split the vote just enough to prevent a centrist Democrat from coming out ahead of the Republican. “Can they get 5 to 10 percent of the vote in some swing districts?” Weaver asked. “I think they can … That is certainly an option.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com, or on Twitter at @davidsiders.
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