Democrats wrongly blame progressives for a net five centrist candidate House losses despite Americans’ overwhelming support for progressive policies. All 112 co-sponsors of Medicare for All on the ballot won, and 97 out of 98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal on the ballot won. A recent Fox News exit poll further corroborated the fact that Americans support Medicare for All, amnesty for immigrants, and other left-leaning policies that have been vilified as extremist by corporatist party leaders. Blaming the grassroots ideology that energized voters to turn-out in record-breaking numbers while ignoring Americans’ true ideological support is a losing strategy that has already left the Democratic party with the thinnest majority in two decades.
Americans enacted their support for a progressive agenda in the 2020 election. Progressives passed a $15 minimum wage in Florida, legalized marijuana in Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, and New Jersey, got Colorado 12 weeks of paid family leave, increased taxes on the wealthy to fund education in Arizona. These policies are where the numbers, turnout, and support is. Democrats must restore the party of the New Deal instead of attacking progressives in-touch with the will of the people. Not a single progressive lost their seat during this election, the lost House seats are centrists.
A recent Fox News Exit Poll showed that 72% of Americans want government-run healthcare like Medicare for All among other left-leaning policies like stricter gun laws (55%). Fifty-eight percent of Americans support single-payer, 88% oppose cuts to Social Security, voters in red states want Medicaid expanded, 68% think the wealthy pay too little taxes, 64% support regulating greenhouse gas emissions,58% support breaking up big banks, 63% support raising the minimum wage to $15.00, 53% support labor union law, 64% think corporations don’t pay their fair share.
The Democratic party once cared about these working-class issues — John F. Kennedy once advocated for Medicare For All and Eisenhower’s top tax bracket was 90% when the middle-class was booming.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost seven incumbents and that number could rise to about twelve as votes are counted from New York, Utah, and California. These have all been center-leaning democrats. Not one single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district lost their seat. Even Mike Levin — an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal — kept his seat.
Yet losing candidates are blaming progressives and the Movement for Black Lives — all the base of their electorate which secured Joe Biden’s win. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a New York Times interview cites internal hostility to progressive causes, saying “It’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.”
Congresswomen like Spanberger blame talk of “socialism” and “defunding the police ” for her near-loss, stating that attack ads on those ideas almost cost her and other Democrats their races. In reality, that’s an indictment on the failure of Democrat’s digital messaging that leaves them vulnerable to false Republican attacks.
Rep. AOC accurately diagnosed this problem in The Times interview stating, that a lack of digital messaging during a pandemic that made Democratic candidates vulnerable to attacks like “sitting ducks.”
“If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.
Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the Year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.”
AOC expanded by remarking that the party is “hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents” and the “D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing,” because they were associated with progressives.
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
The progressive activists Democrats are disparaging are the ones that secured the White House. Joe Biden should not adopt a Republican view of the party if Democrats ever hope to win again. Or the immigrant activists that delivered AZ and NV and 94% of Detroit residents who went to Biden, and Black organizers that tripled turnout in Georgia, and organizers in Philadelphia will not turn out for them.
“It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.
If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasich’s won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
If Democrats are to prevent further future losses they should turn from their corporate donors and to the progressive will of the American people and restore the party of the New Deal that brought the middle-class, workers’ rights, and bent the moral arc of history towards progress.
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