One annoying thing about seeing the Democrats lose an election is how the “librul meedeeuh” sees every occurrence of this as a new Reagan revolution even though the Republicans haven’t won the presidency by more than a little since 1988. In the time I’ve been following politics, this pattern of overhyping Republican victories held through the first three election cycles of the 2000’s, Barack Obama’s midterm elections, and Donald Trump’s victories.
But the rule does not hold for when the Democrats win. True, the overreaction does happen sometimes. Both of Obama’s victories had “Change or die” demands made of the right by most pundits. But many treated the bad polling of 2020 as an excuse to treat a Democratic trifecta as a moral Republican victory. And check out how the media largely treated the midterm blue waves of 1982, 2006, and 2018.
This is not to say I was happy with the recent election results. And I suppose MAGAs are entitled to a little chest pounding. Only a little. Despite the best efforts to spin the election into a landslide, Trump appears to have about a 2-point win in both the popular vote and critical swing states after they had three disappointing cycles in a row.
But this isn’t about them. It’s how political moderates have piled on. I knew The Liberal Patriot, a moderate Democratic Substack that preaches centrism as the only way Democrats can avoid endless defeat would have a field day. Less hostile moderate Dem voices like Jonathan Chait and Thomas Edsall have been equally predictable in their insistence that moderation guarantees a grand Democratic comeback.
There is only one little dent in this theory: moderates just don’t have the success at the ballot box to back this up that they used to. Not now. Not for a long time. To prove this, I consulted Americans for Democratic Action. It was once among the biggest political organizations. But it hasn’t maintained the status it once enjoyed, and I think Our Revolution is now the biggest that the left has (correct me if I’m wrong on this). But its venerable congressional ratings continue to be published. In 1995 it rated 27 members of the House and 10 of the Senate between 25 and 75 out of a hundred. In 2023, a nearly negligible dozen representatives met this standard of moderation. 8 senators did. Admittedly, not a big drop. Except that one of them died, another lost, and a couple more retired in the face of polling inconsistent with any outcome for them but defeat by double digits. Nor do I see much chance for reinforcements to the center among new senators
Not that I would ask you to go by only one source, but others like National Journal and the American Conservative Union tell us the same story: since 2008, it has never been a question of will but hard a hit moderates on Capitol Hill will take. The lone exception was the moderate rural Democrats elected in 2018. And if they need a wave to leave a cycle with more representation than when they entered it, they doth protest too much. Progressives may have had a terrible election this time, but it’s practically every election that is the same thing for moderates.
Let me put it another way. As recently as 10 years ago when Jeb Bush appeared to have a real chance of winning the Republican nomination, getting a fellow traveler in the White House was the bar for centrists. Now it’s getting someone they don’t dislike too much (although given Kamala Harris’ almost unconditional support for Israel, I guess progressives shared that problem with them this year as well). In other words, they seem to have bigger problems than we do. Because not a single seat by 2030 is an increasingly realistic future for centrists.
Judging from their web sites and articles, moderates seem to want to believe that the first, last, and only reason that they have become unelectable is because progressive and conservative activists and/or party establishments have unfairly shut them out because they would rather lose than compromise. First, the Bernie/AOC thing was against the wishes of the Democratic leadership and Donald Trump wasn’t supported by his own party establishment in 2016 and 2020 before the general election. Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis were.
Second, I guess partisan activists have targeted centrists in primaries, but the majority of their seats that seem to have been lost forever were in general elections, not primaries. The waves of 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2014 played an outsized role in this. Unlike their predecessors, these butt-kickings disproportionately hurt moderates. When the victims of waves bounced back, either progressives or conservatives flourished, but those in the middle have never shown any signs of recovery.
Let there be no misinterpretation of the facts. The decline of centrists has everything to do with what the American people want. It’s the story of moderate Republicans being rejected by cities and moderate Democrats being rejected by rural areas.
An example I do see a few of them citing is Rep. Marie Perez. As she won re-election by a few points in a Trump district, this moderate Democrat supposedly represents what should be the future. But that was also once said by centrists of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mike Ross, Even Bayh, Joe Donnely, and now Joe Manchin. All either eventually lost or retired with everything pointing to their abject hopelessness. What magnificent profiles in courage the examples of the latter turned out to be, by the way! The point is that history suggests that Perez won’t last.
And as far as attempting to say that Kamala Harris’ shift to the center doesn’t count because of what she was saying in 2019 goes, let’s not forget that the pre-Obama version of Donald Trump was only slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders. Since no one cared how much he flip-flopped, don’t assume it was any different for Harris just because that don’t want her far from radical campaign to be held accountable for the first Republican victory in the popular vote in 20 years.
Sometimes when I’ve brought up the failures of moderate Dems in social media discussions, I’ve been hit by a reminder that moderate Democrats tend to run in red areas. Which might sound persuasive, but I thought their whole case was that they have a great appeal to rural and working class voters that progressives can’t hope to match? But in blaming red America, aren’t they admitting in no uncertain terms that they’re talking trash they can’t cash anymore?
One argument that is made that may at first look pretty solid is Democrats’ losses among voters of color (they don’t mention that the Republicans’ non-rural white support has seen better days in return). Not that I’d give up on these people, but maybe this is just the next stage in polarization. During the generation in which no California Republican but Arnold Schwarzenegger has had a chance, conservative ballot measure victories on issues like gay marriage (2008), whether to legalize marijuana (2010) and affirmative action (2020) have occurred. That tells me that there have always been culturally conservative voters of color. Like white cosmopolitans, the inconsistency of their ideology and party appears to be changing. Looking at it this way, it may not be so freakish after all. And as explained above, moderates show no signs of having any ability to change this.
The last point I will make is base turnout. This is something centrists have always pushed back against, insisting in no uncertain terms that we have no other place to go. But Bill Clinton’s strong re-election quietly had one of the lowest presidential turnouts of any ever. He just dominated the nonpartisan vote so much you can’t tell.
But what happens when moderation loses its ability to turn those with a soft inclination to vote for the other side, shifting the balance? Since Kamala Harris appears to have been particularly beaten on base mobilization, we have our answer?
I know there are a handful of anti-Trump centrists reading this site. They can view all this as bad if they want. I know that the reason it had been so long since anyone with as little respect for democracy as Trump came to power was precisely because political affiliation used to not be so cut-and-dried. But you have to deal with the electorate you have, not the one you wish you had. And the electorate we have is polarized and with fewer swing voters than in the past.
That’s their problem, fellow Kossacks. And it’s been decades since there has been anything to suggest that they can help us solve ours.
