A series of losses at the ballot box and on Capitol Hill have put the limits of the progressive and socialist wing of the Democratic Party on stark display, escalating an internal battle over the future of the struggling majority party.
India Walton, a socialist who shocked the political world by winning the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo in June, lost by a landslide Tuesday night to the incumbent, mainstream Democratic mayor, who mounted a write-in campaign.
A progressive-backed referendum in Minneapolis to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety – a measure cast as a “defund the police” effort – was defeated by a 12-percentage point margin.
New York City elected as its new mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who defeated progressive and socialist candidates in the primary. The same was true in Ohio, where Democrat Shontel Brown won a special election for a congressional seat after defeating democratic socialist Nina Turner, in the August primary. Turner had been a chief surrogate in 2020 for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his unsuccessful presidential bid.
“The notion that the Democratic Party had swung to the left at some point in the past year was always overstated. There really isn’t any data to back it up,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of centrist think tank NDN. “It was always wishful thinking by some in our family, and we’re seeing the (results) of it right now.”
Progressives are a powerful force on Capitol Hill, where they have been fierce negotiators on the still-stalled Build Back Better plan, a package funding “human infrastructure” such as child care, universal pre-K and other social programs. That wing of the party – which is not the majority of Democrats but arguably where much of the energy of the party is right now – has watched the bill get trimmed down and scaled back to appeal to more mainstream and conservative Democrats.
In the aftermath of a devastating loss for Democrats in Virginia on Tuesday, when Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor, the party was in finger-pointing mode. Mainstream Democrats complained that the failure of their majority party to get the infrastructure and Build Back Better plans passed contributed to an image of the Democrats as feckless and ineffectual, contributing to Democratic losses in statewide races in Virginia.
Progressives, meanwhile, said the problem was that the party had not gone far enough left.
“The DC establishment consolidated support behind their one-time rainmaker and in doing so sidelined two potentially history-making Black women running for the same office,” a coalition of progressive groups said in a statement Wednesday on the Virginia results.
“There should be no questions or scapegoats about why specific demographics didn’t turn out. Terry McAuliffe offered an uninspired return to yesterday, while voters were focused on what must come next,” said the statement by the groups Battle Born Collective, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and United We Dream Action.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, rejected that notion, saying the string of election losses shows that both primary and general election voters aren’t embracing the Democratic socialist approach.
“It was the reason Joe Biden cleaned Bernie Sanders’ clock,” Bennett says. “The far left’s claim” that Democrats would be more successful if they nominated “more radical” candidates “is laughable,” Bennett says. “They lost.”
In Buffalo, socialist India Walton’s upset defeat of incumbent Democratic Mayor Byron Brown in the primary in June was cast by progressives as a sign of a leftist insurgency in the party. The reality was more nuanced – Brown had barely campaigned, refused to debate Walton and angered local voters with a traffic light camera program – but Walton’s win was surely shocking.
Her overwhelming loss Tuesday night was also about much more than her socialist status, says Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo. Walton was inexperienced, made some amateur campaign mistakes and foolishly delivered a political threat to establishment Democrats.
“If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice. We are coming,” Walton said on the night she won her primary. That did not go over well with members of the City Council, who still have tremendous influence in their communities, Neiheisel says.
Democratic socialists’ strategy has been to identify a mainstream Democrat in a heavily Democratic area, then defeat that individual in a primary – virtually ensuring a general election win, Neiheisel says. That didn’t work in Buffalo, where Walton appealed to a loyal but smaller group of liberals. And Walton did not even win in working-class areas – the people she said she wanted to lift during her campaign.
“Unless you can expand your base, you’re not going to win a lot of elections,” Neiheisel says.
Walton had not conceded by Wednesday morning, but Brown, whose write-in votes were still being tallied, was ahead by 16 percentage points.
Despite progressives’ losses at the ballot box, Republicans continue to cast the Democratic Party as an institution controlled by socialists.
“Biden and McAuliffe are two peas in a pod. They’re both failed, swampy, career politicians that have now decided to let their socialist flags fly.” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted last week.
McDaniel also cast a GOP win in a special election for an Ohio congressional seat as a defeat for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her “socialist agenda,” although the district is heavily Republican and not competitive.
That tactic worked in 2020, when Republicans cast even centrist Democrats in swing districts as clones of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York, and successfully attached to them the phrase “defund the police” – even when the Democratic incumbents had clearly rejected the term.
“It was devastatingly effective, as we found out in 2020,” when Democrats lost 13 House seats, Bennett says. “They were lies – they did not want to defund the police – but they used the rhetoric of the far left against (mainstream Democrats) and it worked.”
Bennett says he expects Republicans to do the same in the 2022 midterms, though they are likely to shift from “defund the police” to education, as Youngkin did. The Virginia Republican said he would ban the teaching of “critical race theory,” the idea that race and racism is part of the history of a wide swath of American institutions – even though critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools in Virginia.
“If you can turn Terry McAuliffe into a radical, you can turn anybody into a radical,” Bennett says of the GOP strategy. Expect to see a lot more if it next year – when Democrats are in an uphill battle to hang onto their bare congressional majorities.
