Democrats Pull Back From the Edge of Disaster. Again.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
"Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer.
My candidate for the most unexpected but also most important word of this summer of Democratic dissonance comes from an unlikely source.
When a New York Times reporter asked Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrats’ left-wing Senate nominee in Michigan, to describe Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, in one or two words, he said “pragmatic.” This is the same Dr. El-Sayed who had said earlier this summer, “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.”
It seems that two can work the pragmatic side of the street. For Democrats who hope for a truce in the factional warfare that has engulfed the party since the June victories of democratic socialists in primaries in New York and Colorado, Dr. El-Sayed’s single conciliatory word had the ring of high poetry.
Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin proved themselves to be pragmatic, too. On Tuesday David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive supported by the outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, narrowly defeated Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had enjoyed a large polling lead. Mr. Crowley profited from fears of the state’s Democratic rank-and-file that Ms. Hong would allow Republicans back into the governor’s mansion — worries aggravated by Ms. Hong’s past social media activity. The grabber: In 2020, she said that Thanksgiving should be canceled and called it a “colonizer holiday.”
In Minnesota’s Democratic primary, the progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan comfortably defeated the moderate Representative Angie Craig. Like Dr. El-Sayed, Ms. Flanagan ran as a foe of corporate power — she cast the choice as “the many versus the money.” But she also had a long history with the state’s Democratic voters and enjoyed the support of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (both of whom did not endorse Ms. Hong) as well as Tina Smith, the senator she is bidding to replace.
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The ideologically split Midwest verdict may have the salutary effect of pushing back against the sometimes hysterical (and also inaccurate) commentary about a Democratic electorate in the thrall of a Bastille Day showdown. The shrewdest politicians on both sides of the left-versus-center (or, if you prefer, insurgent-versus-establishment) barricades understand that the only hope Republicans have of avoiding a devastating defeat this fall is to keep voters from focusing on President Trump and their complicity in his deeply unpopular failures. They want to make it instead about Democratic “radicalism” and — ah, that hallowed shibboleth — “disarray.”
But both sides of the fight will have to internalize this danger. In his excellent collection of essays “What Caused the Civil War?” the historian Edward L. Ayers summarizes a central lesson from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “All people,” Mr. Ayers writes, “are capable of both self-awareness and self-deception.” Factionalism encourages the latter and makes it hard for foes to concede even the valid parts of their rivals’ story lines.
For starters, the left and the center have to harmonize their differences in how they think about Mr. Trump. As the political writer Ron Brownstein observed recently, the left typically argues that while Mr. Trump is dangerous, he is more symptom than cause of the country’s problems. More centrist Democrats tend to insist that the Trump catastrophe is unique in our history and the crisis the country faces is primarily of Mr. Trump’s making.
The answer is obvious: Mr. Trump is indeed a symptom of something bigger, but he is also singularly corrupt, incompetent and dangerous to democracy.
The left is correct that Democrats need to offer voters far more than an end to Trumpism and a restoration of the earlier status quo. The campaigns of both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 counted too much on voters recognizing Mr. Trump’s awfulness and did not spend enough time addressing economic discontent. Whatever the centrists think of Dr. El-Sayed, his campaign mantra — “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket.” — brilliantly married disaffection from the political system with voters’ unhappiness over their financial circumstances. Ms. Flanagan’s campaign did the same.
But there can be no getting away from the fact that winning in 2026 depends above all on mobilizing the roughly 60 percent of Americans who are fed up with Mr. Trump. The fury among Democrats that their leaders failed twice to keep him out of the White House is understandable. But inwardly directed rage won’t drive Mr. Trump’s allies from office. It’s revealing that Wisconsin Democrats, who understood the costs of an eight-year Republican trifecta of power before Mr. Evers’s 2018 victory, opted for safety over adventure.
The other central difference between the center and the left is their theories of who wins elections. The left is adamant that progressive insurgents can win closely fought contests; the center thinks only moderates can.
Centrists are right that more moderate candidates tend to perform better in swing states and districts (although some political scientists have noticed a decline in the impact of ideology). But the left is right that to win, Democrats need a more populist approach rooted in progressive economics. Most moderate Democrats have heard the call. The Iowa Senate candidate Josh Turek prevailed in the Democratic primary against a candidate to his left, but he is running on what he calls “a prairie populist’s platform.”
Mr. Turek’s program embraces, among other things, “a federal ban on price gouging on food,” barring “Wall Street private equity firms from purchasing single-family homes and farmland,” promising to “take on Big Pharma,” and “cracking down on unfair wages” and monopolies. Opposing corporate power, unfair taxes and concentrated wealth is now mainstream.
The left, in turn, must confront the reality that many of its candidates have struggled to gain traction with the very working class for which they claim to speak. In Michigan, Dr. El-Sayed overwhelmed his opponent Representative Haley Stevens in university towns and among younger voters and highly educated liberals, while Ms. Stevens carried the Black vote in Detroit and performed well among older voters and in working-class communities.
Since championing workers goes to the moral and intellectual heart of the left’s project, well-educated lefties bridle at charges of elitism. But the voting patterns are what they are, and the most electorally successful politicians on the left have privileged egalitarian economic policies over cultural questions.
The two wings of the party actually agree on the need to focus on pocketbook issues while finding more politically sustainable ways of keeping faith with their commitments to marginalized groups.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York caused a stir on Sunday when she quoted a fellow politician who declared, “Woke 1 was crazy.” Often lost in the accounts is what she said next: That the Woke 1 discussions “were quite fruitful.” Her point was that the protests of 2020 unleashed a necessary reckoning with injustice, but that the “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” Progressives, she said, also want to bring crime down.
Call it, well, pragmatism, or just learning lessons the hard way. To use a phrase Ms. Ocasio-Cortez invoked, the success of a “big tent” party depends on welcoming people inside, not on finding ways of driving out everyone who falls short of one faction’s idea of perfection. Midwest Democrats seem to get that.
E.J. Dionne Jr., a Times contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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