Progressive Democratic candidates have one thing to say to their establishment amid a wave of primary victories poised to dramatically alter the ideological makeup of their party: Enough with the old posts.
Attacks that dredge up calls to defund the police, full-throated embraces of identity politics and more, born from the leftward lurch Democrats took during President Donald Trump’s first term, won’t be what voters are thinking about come November, they say.
Rather, candidates say a populist economic message that addresses affordability concerns will buoy them to victory.
“You can talk about my tweets if you want to, but you can’t afford your health care, you can’t afford your groceries, you can’t afford your housing,” Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed said in an interview. “And it’s because of Donald Trump’s absurd policies.”
The defensive tactic popular among progressive candidates represents a new path being forged by Democrats still haunted by a disastrous presidential election, which some blame on the party’s unwillingness to distance itself from progressive positions on trans rights, policing and other issues that alienated moderate voters.
They’ve largely leaned into their outspokenness, past and present, in the hopes that voters will appreciate their authenticity. But their moderate opponents are less convinced, fearing potential losses if primary voters give Republicans a candidate with obvious weaknesses.
The border between which past comments must be acknowledged — or fully apologized for — and which can be cleanly pivoted away from remains fuzzy. Broadly, however, progressive candidates are dismissing attacks on their past.
“I’ve been to 400-plus public events, and nobody’s ever asked me about my tweets,” El-Sayed said.
However, Roxie Richner, spokesperson for the campaign, said El-Sayed deleted all posts older than July of 2023 “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context” and that the deletion did not target any specific topic.
Which former comments must be atoned for differs by primary. Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, for one, has walked back some of his most outspoken comments calling God nonbinary and lamenting the privilege his whiteness affords him, admitting in interviews that those comments were “cringey.”
But in a Democratic stronghold in New York City, Darializa Avila Chevalier was able to pivot around attacks on her calls to abolish prisons on the way to ousting longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.).
She did, however, express regret for some old posts, including ones in which she wrote “fuck Kamala Harris” and called Joe Biden a “rapist.”
Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic strategist at the progressive consulting firm Middle Seat, said that while it’s not like “there’s never room to apologize,” a candidate refusing to entertain attacks on their progressive past can work remarkably well among voters itching for an outsider candidate.
“Whenever I see an incumbent focusing on tweets and not about the economy, I feel like my campaign is in the place where I want it to be,” said Neidhardt, whose firm has worked for progressives including Avila Chevalier, El-Sayed and Melat Kiros — a democratic socialist who recently toppled 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado.
El-Sayed, for one, has repeatedly emphasized that he isn’t interested in litigating the past — which opponents have sought to do over his since-deleted 2020 posts lamenting that police departments are overfunded relative to other social services and referring to them as “standing armies.”
He told POLITICO that “the idea that you stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”
But El-Sayed’s shifting recollection of the past has put him in bind. After telling the Detroit News that he “actually never, never called for defunding,” CNN reported that he said “we do need to defund the police” in a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio. In that interview, the former health official said that he considered defunding to mean reducing funding for prisons and police while investing more in “the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”
El-Sayed has characterized such reporting as superfluous to the actual issues present in the campaign.
In an interview with CNN, El-Sayed was skeptical of the newsworthiness of the coverage: “I think this debate about 2020 and the ways that tweets are going to play are really nice on CNN if you want to get clicks.” And after CNN reported that he did in fact say “defund the police,” a campaign spokesperson told the outlet that El-Sayed’s “perspective has become more nuanced” since 2020.
When opponents and media dig up past comments, Neidhardt says he tells his candidates to keep their eyes on the ball, “and the ball is pocketbook politics, it’s not whoever is looking most proper for the Washington set.”
“They care about whether someone’s gonna fight for them,” Neidhardt said of voters.
That’s a philosophy mirrored in another progressive upstart in Wisconsin: gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — a democratic socialist state representative that has faced similar critiques over a slew of social media posts calling to abolish the police. She is leading in most recent primary polls.
Alison Geyer, a spokesperson for Hong’s campaign, characterized the attention her posts have received as distractions from her otherwise popular slate of policies while acknowledging the blowback certain slogans can inspire without additional context.
Geyer said Hong “does not regret speaking out” amid a nationwide reckoning over police violence and racial injustice but acknowledged how slogans are “imperfect tools” that can’t always capture the full nuance of policy positions.
Still, problematic social media posts have bogged down some candidates — particularly when they go beyond far-left policy proposals to more personal controversies. Since-deleted posts authored by Maine Democrat Graham Platner, in which he said victims of sexual assault should “take some responsibility” and that many white rural Americans “actually are” racist and unintelligent, provide a picture of which past comments can severely hurt a political campaign.
Repeated scandals about Platner’s posts, in addition to the Nazi-aligned Totenkopf emblem tattooed to his chest — which he denied knowing the symbolism of — and reports of concerning behavior with former partners, now appear to some Democrats as a warning sign the party should have heeded before Maine’s June primary. Platner ended his campaign this week following POLITICO’s reporting that an ex-girlfriend said he sexually assaulted her.
Platner has called that allegation false.
Still, progressives’ primary opponents — let alone the Republicans they hope to face in November — believe their outwardly nonchalant attitudes toward their past posts will haunt them. Spokespeople for three of Hong’s opponents in Wisconsin panned her posts, with opponent Joel Brennan saying “I don’t think there are three words that have done more damage to Democrats in the last decade than ‘defund the police.’”
“If we spend this fall defending those words, I’m afraid we lose,” continued the statement from Brennan, who trails Hong and other frontrunners in the polls.
Michigan Republicans, meanwhile, are salivating at the opportunity to run against El-Sayed. Presumptive Republican Senate nominee and former Rep. Mike Rogers said in a statement that “hide and deflect all he wants, Michiganders see Abdul and the Democrats for how out-of-touch they really are.”
And Arik Wolk, spokesperson for primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), said that Republicans know El-Sayed “has real liabilities as a candidate” and accused Republicans of “spending money to ‘boost’ his campaign.”
El-Sayed has gotten a taste of what Republican opposition may look like if he wins the primary. In late June, the National Republican Senatorial Committee unveiled a new attack ad calling El-Sayed “too radical for Michigan.” El-Sayed has coyly responded to such charges that, in his telling, explain exactly why people should vote for him.
But taking that line of defense when it comes to attacks surrounding a candidate’s supposed extremeness can potentially backfire, said Kate deGruyter, the spokesperson for the center-left Third Way.
“Republicans are going to try to weaponize any evidence they have to paint a Democrat as a radical, and it sure helps them out when our candidates are confidently saying those things out loud on camera,” deGruyter said.
