Johnathan Chait on the party’s ‘No Compromise with the Electorate’ wing
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Jonathan Chait. Taken as a forewarning. He was a supporter of a Trump presidency in 2016, after all. That's just about all anyone needs to know. Still, it's good to get various points of view.
But the subtitle starts out with a banger:
The party’s progressives seem to think the problem is not with their platform but with voters.
I believe the party's progressives think the problem is the old guard Democratic leadership.
His opinion piece manifests a them (progressives) vs. us(centrists) mindset between factions of the democratic party. Not a very useful approach. Demonizing the progressives, or vice versa, is a recipe for fracture.
After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain.
That's a joke, right?
Kamala Harris’s promise to the ACLU that she would support taxpayer-financed gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants received little attention—it was just one more edgy, leftist policy commitment in a campaign that consisted of little else, and her floundering candidacy soon dropped out of sight.
Just plain gratuitous, inflammatory rhetoric that is not based on the facts. "Fact-checkers, including PolitiFact and ABC News, confirmed that while Harris did express support for such care in 2019, federal law and court rulings already require medically necessary care for inmates, and the number of these surgeries is very low."
Her defeat forced moderate Democrats to reckon with the ways progressive activists had not just driven the entire field leftward but also pressured Harris to adopt a position so toxic that it inspired the Trump campaign’s most effective ad.
I call BS. It should have forced moderate Democrats to wake up to Biden's lies, to its dead leadership, and its unwillingness or inability to fight against the rightwing propaganda machine.
What unifies these various outfits is that they all blame progressive interest groups for relentlessly pushing Democrats to adopt positions well to the left of what the general public wants.
More BS. Major progressive policies are supported by a majority of Americans. But it's not across the board. It's complex. I wager what motives the groups he's referring to (Searchlight Institute, etc.) is more likely, money.
First, they deny that polls showing any left-wing positions as unpopular convey meaningful information.
Polls don't show that.
There's a lot of misinformation in Chait's piece.
The old guard in the Democratic party are failing big time. They are failing to speak out against the lies perpetrated not only by MAGA, but by centrists in the Democratic party. Progressives are tired of being pushed to the sidelines and told to shut up. We need voices that will bring the factions together, not this mish-mash of us vs. them.
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Yes very few people knew that what Harris was espousing was federal policy at the time, they just knew they were against it and she was enthusiastically for it. Chait’s point about the political efficacy of that ad is quite true and was quite relevant to the result.
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Most "centrist" Democrats have been punching down at liberals (such is their disposition no matter what liberals do or don't) and look at the fresh hell we face now.
They didn't govern with worthwhile principles and were as imperious as the opposition party could have hoped to be.
They might win the Senate but couldn't govern effectively when they had both houses of Congress and the presidency.
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Continuing the discussion... (emphasis mine)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/09/democrats-rust-belt-economy
We found a consistent pattern we call the “Democratic penalty”. In a randomized, controlled trial, respondents were shown hypothetical candidates with identical economic populist platforms. The only difference was that some were labeled Democrats, while others were labeled independents. Across the four states, the Democratic candidates fared eight points worse.
What’s at the root of the mistrust? After the 2024 election, many commentators pointed to “wokeness” as the culprit. But our research tells a different story. When we asked voters to write a sentence about what first came to mind when they thought of Democrats, 70% offered negative views. Yet only a small minority mentioned “wokeness” or ideological extremism – 3% of Democrats, 11% of independents, 19% of Republicans. The dominant complaints weren’t about social liberalism but about competence, honesty and connection. Democrats were seen as out of touch, corrupt or simply ineffective: “falling behind on what’s important” and having not “represented their constituents in a long time”. While some of these critiques bled into broader claims that Democrats are focused on the wrong priorities, the responses suggest cultural issues are not voters’ dominant concern.
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That’s wishful thinking. I would argue it contains no information unless they elaborate.
The party can be ‘out of touch’ because they spend too much time focused on how to make it legal to build housing in blue cities, or they can be ‘out of touch’ because they’re busy punishing high school girls for complaining when a bloke wins their sporting event. Or they can be ‘out of touch’ for keeping the southern border open. Or they can be ‘out of touch’ because they think inflation is solved when it drops back down below 2% forgetting that the when the average person thinks inflation he is really thinking about the price level. Etcetera.
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I would argue it contains more real politik than what Chait has to offer. There is an 81 page report of the study propping up the article (granted, I have not read it yet).
I disagree with your fear-mongering statement about high school girls being punished. There is very, very little trans participation in high school sports, and those trans that do participate are usually at a disadvantage, not an advantage. It's a sad day when Democrats buy in to the right's misinformation campaigns.
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There is very, very little trans participation in high school sports
Then we can at least agree it’s not worth losing elections over, right?
It seems to me there is no other way back to being a national party. We need to publicly recognize that there are instances where trans women’s desires conflict with biological women’s rights and the latter must prevail. Or at least be considered in a democratic process.
Gavin Newsom, for all my complaints about him, has figured this much out.
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There is very, very little trans participation in high school sports
Then we can at least agree it’s not worth losing elections over, right?
It seems to me there is no other way back to being a national party. We need to publicly recognize that there are instances where trans women’s desires conflict with biological women’s rights and the latter must prevail. Or at least be considered in a democratic process.
Gavin Newsom, for all my complaints about him, has figured this much out.
@jon-nyc The nice thing is we don't have to lose elections over it. We didn't lose 2024 over trans rights. We lost it over the economy--as always. Biden and his team, and many economists, spent his term proclaiming loudly and repeatedly how great the economy was doing, while not addressing the real day-to-day experiences of far too many voters, especially in rural America. That was a major disconnect. I remember cringing every time Biden said 'we're the greatest nation on earth.' No! We're not. Americans are being short-changed by modern-day robber barons and the Democrats have spent way too much time kneeling to monied interests. Too many of life's essentials are now controlled by a handful of corporations. The Democratic party needs to be hammering on that constantly. And they need to put energy into rebutting and fighting the despicable anti-trans rhetoric (which is all it is) from the right, instead of wilting in a puddle of helplessness and adopting the right's talking points. Because otherwise they will lose.
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More studies showing the problem is not a single social issue or "woke". The problem is the party's image of being weak. Some interesting tidbits in this Rolling Stone article from Apri.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/why-2020-biden-voters-sat-out-2024-1235318121/ -
Weak, yes. But, also, Clinton stabbed the working class in the back, and Democrats, at this late date, suck at representing the poor, the working class, and the middle class (on economic and labor issues if I'm not being clear). They are good at bending the knee to almost everyone else.