Over at the Atlantic (click on article below or find it archived here), staff writer Jonathan Chait, a self-described mainstream liberal, gives the rest of us mainstream liberals a boost with his latest article. It resemble Jesse Singal’s article that I mentioned yesterday by saying that woke policies—and by that I mean policies that are are designed to flaunt virtue but will be unworkable or un-passable as bills—is not going to help Democrats. Chait cites data showing that moving towards a more centrist position generally helps candidates, and that the midterms gives evidence for that.
It’s way early to predict what’s going to happen in two years, but since the race for President is starting now, it’s not too early to suggest what Democrats might do, and if there’s evidence that “progressivism” (e.g., Democratic Socialism and the like) are harmful to candidates, then candidates should take that on board.
Chait also argues that the left-wing media, exemplified by the increasingly dubious and biased New York Times, has been promoting the opposite view—that Democrats’ moves towards extremes helps them get elected. This, he argues, is unsupported by evidence.
I’ll give a few quotes:
A few introductory remarks by Chait:
Bernie Sanders and his acolytes have spent the past decade insisting that Democrats would command national majorities if only they embraced his left-wing policies. After last week’s election, the movement claimed vindication. The results proved that “we can win over millions of Republicans and independents who are struggling economically if we focus on the issues that are important,” Sanders told Politico.
In reality, the results point in the opposite direction. Almost every Democratic Senate nominee gained a higher vote share in their state than Kamala Harris did two years earlier, but the five left-wing candidates backed by Sanders accounted for the four smallest swings in contested races. The one candidate who underperformed Harris, Troy Jackson in Maine, was a Sanders-backed progressive. By the same measure, moderate Democrats in the House also outperformed progressives.
Newcomers such as incoming Senators Josh Turek of Iowa and Annie Andrews of South Carolina came out against gender-affirming surgery for minors and allowing transgender female athletes to compete in girls’ sports—positions that did grave damage to Harris. Both of them, along with James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, rejected Medicare for All. Ballot referenda in multiple states—banning the government from giving preferential treatment on the basis of race and other factors, rejecting a wealth tax—confirmed that the public’s rejection of the GOP did not entail a full embrace of the Democratic Party’s left wing.
The party’s most impressive victories, compared with the recent election outcomes in historically purple states, came from mainstream or moderate candidates: Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia (who won by 18 points), Senator-Elect Roy Cooper of North Carolina (19.6), and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (21.5 points). Although every contest has unique circumstances, and no single result can be reduced to a simple test of ideology, the overall pattern is unmistakable.
Because the whole party blew the doors out, many of its left-wing candidates won anyway. But not all of them. In Maine, the moderate Representative Jared Golden retired in the face of a progressive primary challenger. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the dreaded party establishment—had hoped to retain the seat by nominating a mainstream Democrat. Instead, Matt Dunlap, a progressive supporter of Medicare for All backed by Sanders’s organization Our Revolution, won the nomination. The left-wing American Prospect, in an article headlined “The New Majority Makers,” praised Dunlap as “a working-class northern Mainer” who is “committed to economic populism.” Dunlap lost, turning what had been the reddest district held by a Democrat into the bluest district held by a Republican.
If the election was a test of whether Americans like Sanders’s message more or less than the standard Democratic message, the answer was clear: They like it less.
At this point in the article I asked myself, “Well, where are the data? All I see are cherry-picked anecdotes.” But then Chait proffers the data (or rather links to them), which I haven’t thoroughly checked:
The question of whether individual candidates are helped or harmed by moving toward the center has been studied extensively and has a firm answer.
The data measuring the effect of moderation on winning elections, somewhat like the data confirming anthropogenic global warming, can be noisy and messy but, in the general sweep of things, generally point in one direction: All things being equal, congressional candidates who advocate more ideologically extreme positions tend to do worse. As voters have polarized, penalties for extremism seem to have shrunk, but they haven’t disappeared. Newer models confirm that moderate candidates tend to overperform the partisan composition of their district, but extreme candidates underperform it.
Both parties have a contingent of vocal activists who deny that any such penalty for extremism exists. The arguments used by progressive activists roughly mirror those used by conservative activists: The voters in their hearts agree with our values, and the key to winning is to mobilize this hidden majority by ignoring the elitists in our party who, for their own selfish reasons, are intent on foisting wishy-washy centrists upon the electorate.
Now both references above use data at least fifteen years old, but (at least in the second paper) go in the direction Chait says. He quotes progressives who maintain otherwise, but invariably they’re making the argument not that more extreme movement to the left confers more advantages than staying moderate, but that extremism carries less penalty than it used to. There’s still a penalty compared to moving in the other direction. Thus, so long as there’s any penalty, such moves are dangerous. Now of course candidates shouldn’t espouse policies that they don’t believe, but these are politicians, and you simply can’t believe many of them when they suddenly change their public stands (as has AOC) to make themselves more electable. The only way we know what a candidate really believes is what he or she actually does once they get in power.
Chait chastises the media, especially the NYT, for trumpeting the benefits of extremism and “progressivism”:
rogressives have more or less succeeded in shaping news coverage of this debate. The morning after the election, Politico ran one story headlined “Progressive Victories Are Now Too Loud to Dismiss,” followed by another the next day, headlined: “Bernie Sanders Lost the Fight in 2016. A Decade Later, He Won the War.”
The New York Times followed up with an article covering the debate in studiously neutral terms: “For centrists, the results demonstrate that the best way to flip conservative strongholds where their party has long struggled is through embracing moderate candidates and positions that appeal to a broader array of voters. Progressives argue that the victories in Maine and Michigan show that left-wing populists can energize the party’s liberal base and win back some of the working-class voters who had flocked to President Trump.” A reader would not have guessed that the empirical debate is over how much of an advantage moderates have in winning elections, not which posture is more advantageous.
Another Times news story on the subject gives the left-wing interpretation even more credulous treatment. In the article, the arguments put forward by the left provide a revealing specimen of its inability to accept evidence that its ideas can hurt candidates who endorse them.
The story conveys a progressive complaint that “centrists said they would lose in the fall and cost the party control of Congress,” only to move the goalposts. The story does not cite a single example of a centrist having done this. In fact, before the election, moderate Democratic groups such as Third Way were projecting that the entire party would do well, that moderates would overperform baseline partisanship, and that progressive candidates would underperform. That is precisely what happened.
The article asserts that Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing senator-elect in Michigan, “underperformed Jocelyn Benson, now the Democratic governor-elect in Michigan, by only a small margin.” Oddly, the article omits the gap between Benson’s margin and El-Sayed’s: 3.9 percentage points, which, in a normal election year in a state like Michigan, could easily make the difference between winning and losing.
Most amazing, the story excuses Jackson’s narrow victory by noting that he “was facing Senator Susan Collins, perhaps the most formidable Republican incumbent anywhere on the map.” Of course Collins is the most formidable Republican. The reason is that she has built a reputation as a moderate, the value of which is the entire issue of contention. Defeating a moderate like Susan Collins is hard is a bizarre way to dispute the notion that moderation confers a political advantage.
There is more, but you can read the story for free. All we can conclude at this point is that past data suggests the benefits for a Democrat of moving towards a moderate position outweighs the benefits of moving farther left. Sure, we can point to El-Sayed and Mamdani as winners who were “progressives” (though I’d hardly call antisemitism a “progressive” position), but if you’re throwing anecdotes around, Chait has plenty of counterexamples.
And we have a new anecdote-to-be: a DSA candidate challenging controversial Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania:
Less than a week after Democrats retook the Senate majority, a challenger has thrown his hat in the ring to oust one of the party’s most controversial members.
Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American writer and businessperson, announced a bid to unseat Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Monday, marking the first challenge to Fetterman as questions swirl around his allegiance to the Democratic Party.
A Gaza-born Philadelphia resident and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Moor put forth a progressive agenda as he kicked off his campaign for Senate.
“I’m running to end the war in Iran and to promote the dignity agenda: free healthcare, free childcare, and affordable housing,” Moor wrote on the social platform X. “I’m calling for accountability for genocide, for ICE and for corruption. And finally, for the protection of our civil liberties in America.”
Moor is running to the left of Fetterman, who has been more moderate since taking office, often publicly breaking with his party and drawing the ire of some Democrats. While he has said he won’t become a Republican, the Senator has warned he may leave the party if Democrats officially become anti-Israel. A poll in August showed he was more popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than Democrats.
. . .“A few years ago my birthplace was turned to rubble in a genocide funded by our tax dollars, with the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle who can’t find money for transit or removing asbestos from our schools,” Moor wrote on his website.
“It’s clear the United States funds wars based on corruption and lies and has turned its back on its own people. We must make sure this never happens again. That’s why I’m running for U.S. Senate,” he added.
But it gets worse. Noor has also said this:
In a 2009 article published by Electronic Intifada, he asserted that “‘Zionist Israel’ does not have the right to exist,” describing Zionism as racism and accusing Zionists of holding racist views.
He’s also made the case for a one-state solution to the Israel/Palestine question. Here’s one article, and here’s another. Everything we know about Noor is that he wants the state of Israel to disappear and advocates the phony “one-state solution” that will lead to the extirpation of both Israel and its Jews. I know I digress here, but Fetterman is surely better than someone whose politics will promote terrorism, and I think Fetterman’s been unduly demonized just because he occasionally votes with Republicans.
