When left-wing insurgents defeated a trio of progressive House members in New York, the House Democratic leadership suffered merely an embarrassment. Last night’s primary election in Michigan, by comparison, is an outright catastrophe for the party’s leaders. The Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated the four-term Representative Haley Stevens, has attacked the party as corrupt, offends some of its heretofore-cherished principles, and is currently trailing the Republican candidate in a race to hold a Democratic seat that ought to have been safe this year.
Parties generally follow bitter primaries with talk of coming together and moving forward. But the center-left liberals who have run the Democratic Party for decades need to be honest with themselves: They just suffered a crushing blow, and more will come unless they quickly absorb bracing lessons from this debacle.
Some of the fixes are obvious. AIPAC has become a poisoned brand among Democratic voters. Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless Democrats reject AIPAC’s endorsements and stop supporting unconditional aid for an Israel that no longer works toward a two-state solution. Democrats also have to stop passively allowing multiple candidates to split the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate, as occurred in Michigan’s Seventh District and the Wisconsin governor’s race.
But the greatest challenge for mainstream liberals is to find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left. This is inherently difficult, because within any political party, the extreme faction can appeal to ideological purity without concern for the opinions of voters outside the party. Democratic socialism, for instance, is unpopular with the American public as a whole, yet it wins the approval of three-quarters of Democrats. As a result, Democratic Party moderates who have good reason to oppose socialism have a hard time convincing partisans who show up to vote in primaries to feel the same way.
A similar dynamic has played out in Republican primaries for years on end. Conservatives have lost winnable Senate races because hard-right candidates such as Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Todd Akin won their primaries by emphasizing positions that appealed to most of their party’s voters but repelled a majority of the electorate. Political consultants use the term wedge issues for positions that separate a candidate’s views from those of a majority of voters. But in primaries, the wedge can work the opposite way: It can discredit a broadly popular stance in favor of a narrowly base-pleasing one. El-Sayed does not endorse socialism, but he does support abolishing ICE, providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, and making private health insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”
Policy is only part of the disagreement between the factions. Left-wing insurgents have won support less by appealing to ideological disagreements within their party and more by expressing a broad frustration with its failures.
The Democratic Party establishment lost credibility by standing behind a wan, ineffective president who failed in his fundamental goal of burying Trumpism. Democratic voters, writes the former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, “just don’t trust Democratic politicians to tell them who can really win. This is a very understandable impulse after 2024 and every Democratic leader backing Biden when he clearly shouldn’t have run.”
What makes the Democratic revolt so perverse, however, is that the party’s left provided Joe Biden with his longest-lasting and most enthusiastic base of support. Biden gave progressives a free hand to shape his domestic policies. Elizabeth Warren had more influence than anybody, perhaps even Biden himself, over the administration’s personnel. And even after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance laid bare his unfitness to run for a second term, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood behind his candidacy. It was the dread party establishment, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, that was trying to push Biden out of the race, while Ocasio-Cortez was attacking the efforts to replace Biden as a putsch by “a bunch of rich people.” Amazingly, however, the left has turned this history on its head. The establishment now bears the brunt of Biden’s failure, whereas the left positions itself as an untried alternative.
And the deeper you wade into the left’s view of the Democratic Party and its legacy, the more bizarre and counterfactual that belief system becomes. Left-wing activists and intellectuals have settled on a historical account that blames the Democratic Party for everything that has gone wrong in America, including Donald Trump’s rise. Under Jimmy Carter or perhaps Bill Clinton, the theory holds, Democrats adopted “neoliberalism”—a pro-capitalist ideology only marginally preferable to the Republican platform—and stubbornly adhered to it through the Obama era. In fact, the left rallied around Biden precisely because he adopted its theory that the key to restoring the trust of the working class is to reject neoliberalism.
El-Sayed, for instance, expressed this view to Hasan Piker in response to the left-wing streamer’s mockery of the former Clinton adviser James Carville. “You think about James Carville. I’m like, Bro, you architected the complete right-wing, like, ascent to neoliberalism in ’96,” he said. Piker, nodding along, replied, “This state is a swing state because of the machinations of the Clinton era of politics.”
These claims don’t stand up to casual scrutiny. Even if you hold Carville responsible for everything Clinton did, and hold Clinton responsible for everything that happened in Michigan over the past 30 years, the fact is that Clinton made the state more, not less, Democratic. Republicans won Michigan for five straight elections before Clinton ran in 1992. His campaign began a streak of six straight presidential-election victories in the state. Republicans haven’t won a Senate election in Michigan since 1994.
Ahistorical beliefs such as those held by El-Sayed and Piker have circulated in part because the left has relentlessly waged factional warfare against the leadership of the party. It is normal for political parties to experience a mix of winning and losing. The left has played down every success by the establishment while forcing it to own every failure, including those for which the left shares responsibility.
This dynamic points to a broader asymmetry between the two factions. The mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party have focused their energies on defeating Republicans. The left-wing faction has focused on defeating them.
[Jonathan Chait: Abdul El-Sayed fuses together two toxic ideologies]
El-Sayed has suggested that he will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, by seven points. Piker, during a rally he held for Francesca Hong, the socialist candidate who is leading in polls to be the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, repeated his claim that her state and Michigan had become swing states only because of the bungling of the party’s establishment. He promised that they would turn permanently Democratic under left-wing leadership. “We are going to bring back the working class to both Wisconsin and to Michigan,” he declared, without mentioning that El-Sayed and the Democratic Socialists of America have performed poorly among voters who lack a college degree. “A Republican will never be elected in this state ever again once our movement is done.”
Carville recently said that he would leave the party rather than share it with the likes of Piker. That is an understandable impulse, given Piker’s oft-expressed admiration for terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes (he has, for example, called Communist China the state he most wishes the United States would emulate). But it is also a prospect that fills Piker and other leftists with glee.
Piker appeared alongside El-Sayed on Monday at a pool party for content creators. “You got John Fetterman, James Carville fantasizing about leaving the party. I’m like, You’re sweetening the deal!” Piker gloated.
What left-wing insurgents such as El-Sayed and Piker want is to take over the Democratic Party, a goal that gets easier when traditional liberals flee it. Carville’s wing of the party is being out-strategized by an insurgent faction that has shrewdly exploited the weaknesses of the party’s leadership. The soundest course of action for mainstream liberals is to recognize how and why they have been losing, and learn how to fight smarter and harder.
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