The Left’s Election Denial
· The Atlantic
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.
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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.
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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.
Unfortunately, true believers deny this reality. When Democrats are enjoying tidal waves of public support, like they did in last week’s election, the cost of this denial is small. Under more regular political circumstances, such as the closely balanced elections that have typically occurred this century, finding an acceptable way to compromise with public opinion is often the difference between winning and losing elections.
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.
The progressive movement has a small array of academic and quasi-academic experts who bolster the arguments used by their activists. Yet if you pay careful attention to the claims made by the wonks, they do not line up with the arguments put forward by the activists.
The progressive wonks tend to make relatively modest claims. “A growing body of research now demonstrates that the moderation advantage has largely disappeared,” the political scientists Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach wrote in Boston Review in February. In an essay last year, G. Elliott Morris, a statistician and Substack writer popular with the left, wrote, “While there used to be a large premium for ideological moderation, it has decreased markedly over the last 25 years.”
They are not saying that left-wing candidates enjoy advantages, or even that the electoral benefits of moderation are zero—only that they are smaller than they used to be. Morris, for example, estimates that strategic moderation in 2024 would have increased any given House candidate’s margin by two to three points, a smaller effect than some other recent studies have found. Morris titled his essay “Moderation Is Not a Silver Bullet.” This is technically accurate—moderation would not solve every problem the Democratic Party has—but a two-and-a-half-point swing is larger than the margin that decided five of the past seven presidential elections.
By contrast, the activists who dispute the electoral benefit to moderation seem drawn to sweeping assertions that extreme ideology is no burden whatsoever. “The results show that there is no electoral penalty for being a progressive,” Representative Ro Khanna of California told The New York Times after last week’s election. “The stale talking points of the establishment, which lost twice to Trump, about who they deem electable or not electable is totally out the window.” Others go even further, insisting that advocating left-wing politics confers an insurmountable advantage. “Bernie would have won in a landslide,” Shawn Fain, head of the United Automobile Workers union, told the columnist Michelle Goldberg in August, repeating an oft-made progressive assertion about the 2016 election.
Morris relentlessly trolls advocates of moderation on social media as untrustworthy ideologues. Grumbach has repeatedly argued that the correct conclusion is to “reject the false aura of scientific certainty” around the benefits of moderation. The message, like that of climate-science skeptics, is that the data are hopelessly muddled and no firm conclusions can be drawn. This allows their allies to simultaneously argue that Sanders-style populism is the one true path to political success and, when faced with the mountain of data refuting this, that there’s no way to tell.
Progressives 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.
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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.
That such incoherent reasoning now appears unrebutted in the paper of record is a disturbing indicator of its influence on mainstream thinking. After the 2018 elections led to a handful of left-wing Democrats winning in deep-blue districts, the progressive narrative swept through the news media. Nearly the entire Democratic presidential field except Joe Biden raced leftward on policy. If Democrats enjoy another wave election in 2028, that might not hurt them. If conditions normalize, however, an inability to acknowledge the trade-off between left-wing purity and electoral success could bring a painful price.
This does not mean that progressives cannot win elections—with favorable enough circumstances, many of them obviously can. And it certainly doesn’t mean that Democrats always have to nominate the most electable moderates over left-wingers who have a higher risk of losing. Political parties often have to weigh popularity against commitment to their policy goals.
It does mean, however, that Democrats should recognize that the easy solutions the progressive insurgency has proposed over the past decade—that left-wing economic policy is so popular that the party does not need to compromise on any social policies—remains a fantasy.