The People’s Party [won] the U.S. presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress in 2020.
—Robert Reich, Op-ed, March 25, 2016
The blue wave flipped 43 House seats from red to blue. The moderate “New Dem Coalition” had endorsed 33 of those candidates and gained 42 members. That coalition showed how we can win and what we must keep doing to win in 2020.
During the first two years of the Trump presidency, Democrats were desperate. They had zero influence in the executive branch, almost none in Congress and were rapidly losing liberal judges. That’s how the 2018 Congressional midterm elections became the most heavily contested since the first-time voters got to elect Senators back in 1914. And even that election didn’t get many more people out to vote than voted in 2018.
There were 82 “battleground” House races (as identified by Ballotpedia) that could flip a seat from red to blue or blue to red, and 73 of these started out Republican, giving the Democrats a lot of room for improvement. The New Democrats took advantage.
How Did the New Dems Do It?
There are many pieces to this story. For example, women played an outsized role and ended up gaining 21 Democratic seats in the house. But one of the most talked-about battles was the fight over healthcare. That was particularly important to those over 50, who cast more than half the votes in 2018. And like the nation as a whole, that group shifted 6% toward the Democrats between their presidential vote in 2016 and their House vote in 2018.
In the four elections before 2018, less than 10% of the Democrats’ political ads mentioned healthcare. But then in 2018, over half of them did. The Republicans, however, had been attacking Obamacare less each year as Obamacare got more popular. Then, in 2018, they abruptly shifted course and stopped attacking Obamacare. Here’s the reason.
During the House primaries, radicals hounded Democratic candidates to endorse Medicare-for-all, and a fair number did. However, by the general election, most of them had wisely backed off. Of the 967 ads that Democrats ran in competitive House districts after Labor Day, only two candidates mentioned either Medicare-for-all or single-payer. They both lost in November.
Obamacare had finally become so popular that in 2018 the Democrats went on the attack, defending it against Trump and the Republicans. The Republicans, on the other hand, stopped attacking Obamacare and started attacking Democrats for backing Medicare-for-all. They even made up stories that some Democrats backed it who didn’t. But they lost the Obamacare debate. And they lost the House. Thank you, President Obama.
The Berniecrat Contribution to 2018
Radicals are terribly pessimistic about the present, but as to the future, the sky’s the limit. You know their pessimism about the present, but have you noticed their extreme optimism about the future?
Robert Reich, Sanders’ most illustrious surrogate, imagined in his March 2016 op-ed that “[m]illions who called themselves conservatives and Tea Partiers joined with millions who called themselves liberals and progressives” to form the People’s Party. Yes, he thought the Tea Party would join the progressives!
Next, he imagined they would capture “the U.S. presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress in 2020.” And then I suppose they would all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” as was done back in Reich’s college days.
Despite missing the mark on the 2019 People’s Party, in his new book, The System (March 2020), Reich is still optimistic about winning over the Tea Party. Talk about optimistic! And he’s still saying, “a new party could unite the disaffected and anti-establishment elements of both major parties and give voice to the 90% of Americans who have been losing ground.” A radical party that can win a 90% victory! You must admit that’s as optimistic as you can get.
A Pack of PACs. A month after Reich’s wildly optimistic 2016 op-ed, 20 volunteers from Sanders’ campaign, led by top campaign staffer Zack Exley, formed the “Brand New Congress.” The Huffington Post explained at the time that they were “looking ahead to the 2018 midterm elections to replace Congress all at once” with lawmakers who agreed with Sanders.
As Exley explained, “We want a supermajority in Congress … and I think we get it by running Dems in blue areas and Republicans in deep-red areas.” You read that right — they intended to run Republicans who would openly commit to Sanders and win House and Senate seats in “deep-red areas.” Has any top lieutenant of a presidential candidate ever been more out of touch with political reality?
[Brand New Congress Image]
The DNC was their enemy, not the GOP
Their first step? They would recruit 400 Congressional candidates by July 2017. I don’t think they ever made it to 30.
PAC #2: “Our Revolution.” Just after finally endorsing Hillary Clinton in July 2016, Sanders announced his plan to form his own super PAC, “Our Revolution,” to promote his run for president in 2020. In early August, he began raising money for it, and soon held a launch party. (This was how he was making sure Trump would be defeated in 2016?)
PAC #3: “Justice Democrats.” In January 2017, Exley joined Saikat Chakrabarti, another top staffer from Sanders’ campaign, to form a third pro-Sanders PAC. The Justice Democrats recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and two years later she was in Congress with Chakrabarti as her chief of staff.
Sanders’ three PACs fielded many candidates and eventually, among the three of them, made 117 endorsements. Only 38 of these were for battleground seats. Surprisingly, the three PACs agreed on only two of these candidates. (Radical factionalism is legendary.)
So how many of their endorsed candidates were among the 43 who flipped blue seats to red and gave us back the House? As you know from Chapter 1, the shocking answer is none. So much for taking a supermajority of Congress all at once. Bernie’s minions could not take back even a single seat from the Republicans.
The point here is not so much that they showed no ability to beat Republicans in battleground states, which is a pretty daunting task. The point is that the Berniecrats were completely out of touch with the reality of electoral politics — imagining a sweeping victory and then winning nothing.
The Big Win — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “primaried” Joseph Crowley, a 10-term incumbent backed by the very-progressive Working Families Party. She won her primary by 4,018 votes with 7.2% of registered Democrats voting for her while Crowley got only 5.5%.
Her largest margins of support came from neighborhoods in western Queens with lower Latino populations and higher White populations. She did poorly in the Black neighborhoods.
The entire radical “Squad” of four comes from dark-blue districts where Clinton beat Trump by margins of 55% to 71%. (Yes, a 71% margin means 85% for Clinton and 14% for Trump!) They are in no way representative of the Democratic Party, and their inflammatory rhetoric only makes it harder for Democrats to win in the rest of the country.
Conclusion
Sanders’ PACs focused on fighting Democrats, and they lost when they did fight Republicans. Has this changed? On June 7, a Politico post revealed that “progressives have also come up short against many of the incumbent House Democrats they’ve targeted.” So once again they are spending their energy targeting sitting Democrats.
Every non-Berniecrat Democrat is focused on fighting Trump or Republicans, and they’re doing a damn good job of it. That’s how to win, and it’s how to make progressive change. FDR and LBJ didn’t need radicals to make change; they just needed broad popular support.
Ripped Apart
