Democrats are not in great shape
A fractious opposition is doing everything it can to spurn an open goal.
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A voter casting his ballot at City Hall in Henderson, Nevada, during primary elections on June 9.
PHOTO: ROGER KISBY/NYTIMES
Edward Luce
In FIFA terms, the Democratic Party stands before a wide-open goal. There is no daylight between an unpopular President Donald Trump and his reflexively loyalist Republicans. Instead of putting the ball into the back of the net, however, Democrats are squabbling in front of the goal. Trump’s single-mindedness is mirrored by a fractious opposition.
The odds are still that Democrats will regain the House of Representatives in November – midterms being essentially a plebiscite on the sitting president. Yet, Democrats are devising ways to push the Senate beyond their reach.
The party is split between a radicalised younger vote, which is increasingly MAGA-like in tactics and tone, and an ageing establishment that is short of ideas. The portents for the 2028 presidential primaries are not all good.
It is common at such moments for Democrats to tell themselves that someone will come along. There are as yet few clues as to who that might be. The likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, let alone Franklin D. Roosevelt, do not grow on trees.
The self-soothing fallback is that, regardless of who Democrats choose in 2028, Republicans will face a bigger handicap. Trump cannot run again and the battle for his mantle will be divisive.
Yet, prospects for a replay of 2020 are real. It is easy to forget how badly Joe Biden was faring in the Democratic primaries until the party abruptly coalesced on his nomination. Until then, Biden had been drowned out by a crowded stage of candidates vying over who could be the most progressive. Open borders and infinite genders were the mood of the day.
It is also easy to forget how fortunate Biden was to defeat Trump later that year. Not only had Trump squandered public confidence in his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing allowed Biden to avoid the demands of the campaign trail. Had he been subjected to a normal schedule, his frailty might have been exposed.
Either way, the terms of Biden’s nomination made him the centrist figurehead of a progressive agenda. The surge in undocumented immigration under Biden’s US-Mexico border policy helped seed Trump’s 2024 revenge.
The party’s current infighting over various Senate nominations reveals a similar split to 2020. Of these, the most toxic is in Maine, where progressives had handpicked Graham Platner, a bad candidate whom they had not properly vetted.
Platner was not the blue-collar candidate of their advertisements – he came from a wealthy background. In addition to a chequered record with women, he had an SS-associated tattoo emblazoned on his chest.
You might think that a Nazi tattoo would be a red flag but progressives convinced themselves it was a sign of Platner’s authenticity. Only highly educated people could be this dumb. Platner’s two chief campaign consultants, Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, are both scions of great generational wealth. They are also closely associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is making inroads into nominations across urban America.
Trump is making hay with their selections. Since late June, when DSA candidates pulled off upset victories in New York and elsewhere, Trump has invoked “communism” 94 times, according to Time.
The term carries few negative connotations to anyone under 50. Nor does Bolshevism describe the DSA’s social democratic-type economics. Were the DSA simply advocating public healthcare and fair taxation of the AI oligarchs, Trump would not get much traction. Both are popular with median Americans.
But the DSA also comes across as anti-American, which does not play well in the heartland. It is also hard to figure out which they disdain more, Trump or the Democratic Party. In the storied tradition of left sectarianism, the suspicion is that Trump is the lesser of the two evils.
On foreign policy, the DSA is critical of Israel, which captures the public’s mood, but at best, ambivalent on Ukraine, which does not. At home, they have not met a border or a police department of which they approve. In short, they channel the Berkeley campus, not America’s suburbs.
More’s the pity because much of their critique of a timid and conformist Democratic establishment is merited. That Kamala Harris is readying herself for another run at the presidency is bad enough. That an official inquest into the party’s 2024 defeat could not bring itself to criticise Harris directly is worse.
Eighteen months into Trump’s assault on the US Constitution, the party is languishing at roughly the same high-30s approval rating as the Republicans. Thereby hangs a warning sign. FINANCIAL TIMES
