If the Dems are in disarray, the Republican Party must be utter pandemonium
by digby
I wrote about the New York Times’ first entry into the “Democrats in disarray” narrative for 2016 in Salon today. The author takes a look at the Maryland Senate primary which (so far) features two candidates, Chris Van Hollan and Donna Edwards, and betrays almost no understanding of the dynamics at play among the liberals in that race. (Read my piece to see why that is.)
Anyway:
After allegedly establishing Maryland as the perfect illustration of the Democratic crackup, Draper goes on to make this larger case:
The problem is that neither wing [of the Democratic Party] can muster an entirely airtight case that theirs is the road map to electoral success. Sroka, of Democracy for America, says that last November’s election “was a good night for progressives,” pointing to the successful re-election campaigns waged by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who each employed anti-Wall Street rhetoric. But in purple states, House Democrats like Alan Grayson of Florida, Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and Tom Perriello of Virginia all ran on Obama’s progressive achievements in 2010 and lost, as did Shea-Porter again in 2014.
Moderate Democrats cite the Senate victories of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in 2012 as models for how Democrats can expand the map in their favor by proffering candidates who are not to the left of their electorate. On the other hand, Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and popular centrist, was nearly defeated in 2014 by failing to motivate the Democratic base. And the moderate Senate Democrats Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana did all they could to distance themselves from Obama’s Affordable Care Act and were still routed. The election results are a jumble of counterindicators, from which anything and nothing can be concluded, allowing each side to blame the other after a loss.
I hate to point out the obvious but, first of all, Alan Grayson won back his seat in 2012 and is still in Congress after the bloodbath of 2014. Just saying. And mixing up the races of 2010, 2012 and 2014 like that is a very big mistake. Why? Because in presidential years the Democrats do a lot better and in midterms the Republicans do a lot better. Who survives in those circumstances has a lot less to do with ideology and a lot more to do with the makeup of the electorate.
Ed Kilgore, who literally wrote the book about why Republicans swept the 2014 midterms (“without once considering the argument that Democrats lost because they were in the grip of mad lefty hippies, or because they had sold their souls to Wall Street,” as he himself describes it), actually consulted the experts and looked at the numbers and discovered that such things as “turnout patterns, the economy, the electoral landscape, and the long history of second-term midterm disasters for the party controlling the White House” were more salient than this stale narrative about Democrats searching aimlessly for their misbegotten souls.
Yes, there are tensions within the party. It’s a very big party. But there have always been tensions within both of the parties. Why would anyone expect something different when there are only two of them in a country of more than 300 million people? And as polling has shown, that big country has become more polarized between the two main parties, which makes these internecine battles even more energized as the most active members of both seek to push their parties to represent their interests. The political establishment calls this “disarray” and characterizes it as some kind of tearing at the fabric of our civic life. In reality, it’s just democracy.
And I point out that so far the Democratic race is unfolding as a rather stately campaign of ideas while the Republicans are staging a chaotic three ring circus. Believe me, if there was serious disarray in the Democratic party they’d be giving the GOP a run for its money — they have plenty of practice. As it happens the Democrats are more progressive, more populist and more cohesive than they’ve been in many years. That doesn’t mean everyone’s singing kumbaaya. It means that everyone sees a role in the Party and are taking those roles seriously trying to effect positive change. It’s not that they’re satisfied by any means. It’s just that they’re organized. That’s the opposite of “disarray.”
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