The moderate-liberal faction of the Democratic Party just keeps getting bad news. Democratic leadership, in the persons of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), is temperamentally moderate, culturally progressive, and lukewarm at best on economic populism — which means they aren’t exactly loved by the left. And it turns out, that unique combination of beliefs is fairly unpopular with the Democratic Party’s base.
Don’t take my word for it: Even as mainstream a liberal as MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has noticed that socialist-friendly left progressives are routing the more moderate voices in the party — people like Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and of course, Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist sensation who easily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for New York City mayor. Scarborough stated the problem for moderates quite plainly on Morning Joe: “Why can’t moderate Democrats … make that same compelling message?”
It’s a very good question. I have an answer, although Morning Joe won’t like it: Increasingly, there’s less and less room in the Democratic Party for moderate voters.
Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is that the Democratic Party’s elite leadership has failed, catastrophically, time and time again, to deliver what its voters want. Say what you will about the Republican Party, but GOP leaders finally realized that the base loves Trump, and wants elected members of the party to fall in line with him — and now GOP leaders rarely try to thwart Trump directly. If they work against him, it’s always in secret. They know they can’t openly oppose Trump.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is extremely reluctant to embrace its most popular standard bearers. We can go all the way back to 2016, of course, when the party pulled out all the stops to coronate Hillary Clinton as the candidate, even when rival Bernie Sanders proved unexpectedly popular. You know how that turned out.
Then, this time around, Democratic leadership steadfastly maintained that no one should challenge, debate, or provide an opportunity to primary voters to select someone other than Joe Biden. After Biden’s infirmities were exposed, the party picked Kamala Harris … and she lost.
You see the problem? Democratic elites just don’t understand their voters. Now it’s true that not everyone who is part of the Democratic base wants economic populism, or socialism … but the share that wants neoliberalism paired with cultural progressivism seems to be shrinking every day.
If you want to beat a Sanders or a Mamdani, you have to do better than a Clinton or a Cuomo. And as far as the New York mayoral primary goes, this should have been obvious. Cuomo’s failures were even more apparent than Hilary Clinton’s or Kamala Harris’s. In recent memory, Cuomo resigned his office after a sexual misconduct scandal and a COVID deaths-related corruption scandal.
Democratic elites are probably right to be concerned about the general electability of candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, who have previously espoused views on crime and foreign policy and gender and all sorts of other issues that place them on the extreme left fringes, despite their relatively appealing personalities and policy platforms on other issues. But politics is about a lot more than policy.
The Democratic Party’s so-called moderates are failing a very basic likability test, and the ultimate beneficiary of their shortsightedness is the eventual 2028 Republican nominee — presumably Vice President JD Vance.
Robbie Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.
