Moderate Democrats have a choice to make
Do they want to help their party win, or do they want to whine about the left?
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By the middle of next week, insurgent progressive Democrats may have defeated establishment candidates in two vital primaries, for a Senate seat in Michigan and the governorship of Wisconsin.
If and when that happens, the elite news media will overflow with “Dems in Disarray!” stories, and the the centrist Democrats who have been issuing dark warnings about their party’s left turn will be in a full-blown panic.
Those centrists need to take a deep breath, settle down, and understand that they have an interest in seeing all Democrats succeed — even those who are too progressive for their taste. The primaries are almost over, and for the centrists’ own sake, they need a very different strategy than the one they’ve been employing so far.
Some Democrats have been watching the polls on those two races with horror.
In Michigan, where the primary is today, the national party’s choice, Rep. Haley Stevens, has been trailing Abdul El-Sayed by a growing margin. In Wisconsin, where the primary is next week, state legislator Francesca Hong seems to have run away with the race; her closest competitor, former Lieutenant Gov. Mandela Barnes, dropped out last week. Hong is a member of her local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. El-Sayed isn’t a DSA member and says he is not a socialist, but he shares many of the same goals, such as Medicare for all.
These would only be the latest in a string of primary victories for leftists. Though a number of party-approved candidates have won Senate primaries and are in good shape for the general election — Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Mary Peltola in Alaska — there is no question that the energy among the party’s grassroots leans toward candidates who talk about challenging the status quo, fighting the oligarchy, and pursuing ambitious policy goals. Much of the time, that means the more progressive of the choices on offer.
That has the establishment centrists feeling put-upon — and lashing out.
It started in late June when a trio of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won House primaries in New York, two of them unseating incumbent Democrats.
“If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” former DNC chair Jaime Harrison tweeted in response. James Carville, a pundit known for once working on a winning campaign in the early 1990s, said “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ And there’s just some shit I can’t be in the same tent with.”
It hasn’t stopped since. Centrist pundit Van Jones deployed the Republican strawman tactic of attacking an imaginary DSA candidate in a viral post on X, writing that “Supporting Hamas is not progressive. ‘No police, no prisons, no borders’ is not progressive.”
Which Democratic candidate for office supports Hamas or says they want to eradicate police, prisons, and borders? Jones didn’t say, because none of them do.
Likewise, Sen. John Fetterman said El-Sayed is “running to [be] head of our emerging pro-Hamas wing here in the party.”
What every Democrat should want
That kind of vulgar dishonesty is an exaggerated form of the argument moderate Democrats are making against progressive candidates in these races: Their ideas are too extreme, and they won’t be able to win in a general election.
That case isn’t necessarily crazy to make in a primary. But the primaries will be over soon, many of the progressives will have won, and the moderates will have to ask themselves: What should we do now?
To answer that question, they have to begin by realizing that the first thing they should want is for every Democrat to win their general election, wherever those candidates fall ideologically.
Democrats need every governorship and seat in state legislatures and Congress they can get to secure majorities that will allow them to win policy victories and stop the Republican assault on democracy. That ought to be obvious.
The next thing the moderates should want is for the image of the Democratic Party to improve. And much as they would like to believe that the party’s rock-bottom polling is a result of voters concluding that it’s too liberal, the evidence is quite clear that voters don’t think Democrats are too extreme. They think Democrats are weak.
Furthermore, if a bunch of democratic socialists will be carrying the Democratic banner into November, the best way for moderates to convince voters that the party has mainstream ideas is not to cry “half our candidates are crazy!” at every available opportunity. It’s to present those candidates as perfectly normal, or at least within the range of reasonable debate.
Moderates seem to live in constant terror that someone will associate them with ideas held by those to their left, as though they would be powerless in the face of such an assault. But the answer isn’t to reinforce the idea that some Democrats are crazy and threatening; it’s to defuse it.
No moderate Democrat is required to endorse anything the DSA or any particular candidate believes. But when asked “Do you agree with this tweet this other candidate sent five years ago?”, they can at least answer in a way that doesn’t echo Republican propaganda and make themselves look like sniveling cowards in the process.
They can say “our party’s a big tent; we don’t have to agree on everything. And frankly, I don’t care about somebody’s tweets. What I care about is, are they going to improve people’s lives in the next few years? Are they committed to solving the problems people face now? Are you actually asking me if I care about some old tweets? Give me a break.”
Finally, moderate Democrats should want those leftists who do get elected to govern well, because successful Democratic governance convinces voters that Democrats can deliver.
Francesca Hong, for instance, often talks about the “sewer socialism” tradition in Wisconsin of prioritizing the provision of basic services that affect people’s lives every day. Mamdani is doing the same thing in New York. Isn’t that something moderates should applaud? If they do it well, that helps all Democrats, whatever their ideology.
Leftists will be governing partners for moderates
The good news for moderates is that the vast majority of leftist Democrats actually want to govern. This is where the easy analogy many are making to the Tea Party breaks down.
The Tea Partiers who got elected after Barack Obama took office did attack their party’s establishment in the same way the leftists are now, but once in office, they just wanted to wreak havoc — grind Congress to a halt, shut down the government, throw sand in every gear they could find.
Leftists, on the other hand, want government to do things. They need it to work. And recent experience shows that when they take office, while they may not moderate their basic views, most of them display a great deal of pragmatism as they try to make change.
Consider Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
One of the first things AOC did after being elected in 2018 was join a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office to urge more action on climate change. But before long, she was earning a reputation for pragmatism, working closely with the Biden administration on its policy goals and finding ways to join with centrist Democrats and even the occasional Republican on legislation (to the chagrin of some on the left).
She wasn’t the only one.
“We have done a lot of backroom negotiating,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal told me in 2023 for an article I wrote on how Biden had approached the left through cooperation rather than confrontation.
Then chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jayapal argued that taking principled positions wasn’t enough. Progressives needed “a very coordinated and disciplined inside-outside strategy” — and they were happy to take partial victories when they could.
Jayapal’s history is much like that of many of today’s DSA candidates: She was a left-wing grassroots activist, won a seat in the Washington state senate, then ran for Congress two years later. While she represents a deep-blue Seattle district and her beliefs are to the left of the average swing-district Democrat, she’s also known as a serious legislator willing to compromise when necessary.
The same can be said of the dean of the American left (and self-described democratic socialist), Bernie Sanders. He has advocated the same four or five things for his entire decades-long career, but has never sought to sabotage the party when something meaningful was on the line, and consistently supports compromise legislation (in contrast to centrists like Joe Manchin). Supporting single-payer health care didn’t stop him from also supporting the Affordable Care Act, along with every attempt to expand it. Like most leftists, he’ll take half a loaf if it moves the country in the direction he wants it to go.
This is important to remember when leftists are described as people who just want to make a lot of noise but not get things done. The truth is that centrists are just as likely to be poseurs, if not more so; just look at the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of congressional moderates with an unbroken record of never solving any actual problems. On the other hand, even if progressives elect a bunch of new members to Congress this year, they’ll still be a minority of the party caucus — which means they’ll have to compromise.
With the primaries approaching their end, moderate Democrats have to decide which direction they want to go. They can spend the next three months reinforcing Republican messaging about their party, undermining Democratic nominees, and making it less likely that Democrats take power at the state and federal level. Or they can put the “battle for the soul of the party” off for a while and do what they can to help their party win. It shouldn’t be a difficult call.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Thank you for writing this article. Your perspective helped me frame my own. I was having trouble coming to terms with some of the past posts and positions of some of these progressive left wing candidates. I feel more focused now as a result of your article, and that focus will be as you suggest. “What I care about is, are they going to improve people’s lives in the next few years? Are they committed to solving the problems people face now?” And hopefully, we won’t be betrayed as we’ve been by the likes of Fetterman and several others.
Trump has shown us one thing. If we can afford the Big Beautiful Bill then we can afford to repeal it and provide Healthcare, Childcare and Education for all. Affordable housing is a need the market refuses to provide. Incentives to build the housing existed before Reagan overhauled the tax code in 1984. They were warned and they created a bandaid. Its not enough. We can afford to take care of everyone and the establishment Democratic Party just looks out of touch as do the Republicans. They have left no alternative to their demise.