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- The Moderate/"Leftist" Divide Doesn't Have to be Nasty
I’m sitting here in a forest service campground at 9,500 feet somewhere in Wyoming and I’m glad that Joe isn’t the only one who’s Wypoxic. I hope I’m altitude acclimated, but this piece from Brian Beutler seems to get a lot right. Here are the nut graphs:
[…] To me, big tent politics entail making more people feel like they want to squeeze in, using ideological diversity as a major draw. But that would require taking real pride in the diversity, wielding it in explicit contrast to Republicans: their viciousness, their bad faith, and their expectation of total fealty to Donald Trump.
You’d want people across the party to brag about the good faith disagreements they have with their colleagues: We all think health care should be a right in America, we have some disagreements about what that looks like in practice, but if you want health care to be a privilege, the GOP might be for you. We all agree that every person should be treated with dignity, we have some disagreements about how to adjudicate disputes when rights come into conflict, but if you want to be abusive to trans people, or slap chains onto grandmothers and drag them to El Salvador, you should check out the Republican party. We are all serious about making everyone in America safe from crime, we have different ideas about which approaches maximize justice for all, but if you want police in your community to be more violent and less accountable, that’s the other party’s thing. We all feel free to disagree with our leaders, but if you want to stop thinking for yourself, you know where to find Donald Trump.
Beutler’s piece begins by noting that Barack Obama likes Mamdani and called to congratulate him on his win. Then he transitions to a discussion of two pollsters’ view of WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which those pollsters call WARP (Wins Above Replacement Probability). WARP differs from WAR by looking at winning rather than margin of win.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the top WARP Democrats are folks like Golden in Maine, Glusenkamp Perez in Washington and Marci Kaptur in Kay’s part of Ohio.
The point of WARP is to correct the notion that ideological moderation is the be-all and end-all of winning. Taken as a whole (not just focusing on the unicorns like Golden and MGP), WARP shows that moderation doesn’t really yield a lot more wins for Democrats. In Beutler’s view, this is the ugly truth:
“You can campaign comfortably along almost any part of the Democratic ideological spectrum, while developing a moderate image, by, e.g.:
Describing your agenda as “common sense” rather than revolutionary;
Being white and/or male rather than black and/or female;
Being “folksy”;
Having good propaganda, and good responses to oppositional propaganda;
And, yes, emphasizing heterodoxy on an issue or a small number of issues.
Voters perceived Joe Biden to be more moderate than Donald Trump, whom they perceived to be more moderate than Hillary Clinton, even though Biden ran to Clinton’s left, and Trump is a fascist […]”
I think Tim Walz is an example of the kind of candidate Beutler is envisioning.
Anyway, I’m not in love with the white / male vs black / female part of this, but the point is that ideology means less than candidate quality. I think that’s a basic truth in politics, and the freakout over ideology is driven by donors who don’t want more liberal policies, not by the base.
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