By John Fund
Sunday, August 13, 2017
While left-wing activists were brawling with white
supremacists in Charlottesville this weekend, another political battle was
taking place in Atlanta. At Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of the
nation’s progressive leaders, some Democratic lawmakers declared war against
their own party’s centrists.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a likely Democratic candidate
for president in 2020, proclaimed that Democrats would not be “going back to
the days of welfare reform and the crime bill.” She sneered that Democrats used
to tell party members to “give up, keep your heads down, be realistic, act like
a grown-up, keep doing the same old same old.” But in the wake of Donald
Trump’s victory, the party’s left wing has won control, she said, and is now of
the soul of the modern Democratic party. “We don’t have to tip-toe anymore. We
don’t have to hedge our bets.”
She then proceeded to reel off a host of issues around
which she sees Democrats uniting: support for “undocumented” immigrants,
single-payer government health care for all, debt-free college, federally
funded pre-kindergarten, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
This kind of left-wing chest thumping stirs rueful
memories for many centrist Democrats. It was precisely their party’s excessive
attachment to special-interest groups that made Democrats lose three straight
presidential elections in the 1980s, leading to the rise of Bill Clinton’s “New
Democrats.” Clinton won back-to-back victories as president, in part because he
moved to the center and pursued successful strategies such as welfare reform
and tax cuts for businesses.
Centrist Democrats say their current political plight
requires a similar move toward the middle, not the left. A few days before
Netroots Nation, a number of prominent party elders including Colorado governor
John Hickenlooper and New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu announced they were
forming a group called New Democracy to promote their ideas. Former Kentucky
governor Steve Beshear told the Associated Press that Democrats “cannot be a
successful national policy by winning races only on our two coasts.” They have
“to get back to the basics and appeal to folks all over our country.”
Independent observers echo Beshear’s analysis. Yesterday,
Dan Balz, the chief political writer for the Washington Post, wrote:
Democrats can win the popular vote
for president by rolling up huge margins in California and New York and big
cities elsewhere, as they did in 2016. They can’t win the House and
particularly the Senate that way. They need a message that appeals beyond their
base, and they need more candidates who can compete effectively in less
friendly territory.
That grim reality was spelled out by David Wasserman, a
writer for the Cook Political Report,
who wrote this week that geography and the clustering of Democrats in urban
areas have given Republicans an edge in trying to keep control of both the
House and Senate:
Even if Democrats were to win every
single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary
Clinton won or that Trump won by less than three percentage points — a pretty
good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House
majority and lose five Senate seats. . . . They’re starting from a truly
historic geographic disadvantage, even with the political wind at their back.
In a subsequent tweet, Wasserman warned that Democrats
are deluding themselves if they think the current political map favors them:
“If more than 50% of your ’16 voters lived in just 9 states & 94 of
America’s 3,141 counties . . . you’re probably not a healthy national party.
The signs of rot have been apparent for years. Barack
Obama did win two terms as president, but under his watch, Democrats lost more
than 1,000 seats in state legislatures, 63 House seats, 12 Senators, and 15
governorships.
If Donald Trump were to spectacularly belly-flop as
president, the political calculus could change. But Democrats are delusional if
they now think that moving to the left will improve their prospects. It’s their
left-wing tilt that voters revolted against throughout the Obama years. Putting
all their bets on a Trump tailspin is precisely the kind of wishful wager that
an old casino operator like Trump was always glad to see foolish gamblers make
at his tables.
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