Democratic euphoria over the party’s sweeping November 7 election triumph in Virginia lasted, undisturbed, for all of four days—until the airing of that week’s installment of Saturday Night Live jarringly altered the mood. SNL, which, in the Trump era, has seemed like the comedy auxiliary of the Democrats, brutally mocked the party’s national leaders as clueless geezers and their post-Virginia giddiness as delusional.
In a parody message from Democratic National Committee proclaiming “The Dems are back!” Alex Moffat as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer declared, “We haven’t felt this confident since the day before Trump won!” The ersatz Democrats promised “fresh new ideas, delivered by fresh new faces,” such as Nancy Pelosi (age 77) and Dianne Feinstein (who is 84). A Washington Post columnist called the performance a reminder that “the national Democratic Party is still a tomb of old ideas and older leaders.”
Dotage is hardly the Democrats’ only, or even their biggest, worry as the party tries to gain a majority in the House or, more improbably, the Senate in 2018, and to take the White House two years later. The party’s minority status extends beyond Washington to the state and local levels across the country. Lost in the buzz over Ralph Northam’s defeat of Republican Ed Gillespie in Virginia was the fact that Democrats right now hold fewer governorships (15) than they did a year ago—owing to a party switch by West Virginia’s Jim Justice, whose flip made him the GOP’s 34th governor. Of the 34 states in which one party controls all branches of government, 26 of them are held by Republicans and only 8 (all of them coastal) by Democrats. That’s a shallow recruiting pool.
Congressional redistricting has, as ever, strengthened incumbents, meaning relatively few House seats are truly in play—Republicans expect to have to defend 40 or so in 2018, and the Democrats need to flip 24 of them to win control. On the Senate side, Democrats will have to defend 10 seats in states that were won by Donald Trump.
But the biggest problem facing Democrats remains the conflict, bared in the 2016 primary, between the party’s establishment and its activist base. Resistance to Donald Trump created a temporary unity-of-convenience for Democrats, but the struggle over the party’s core identity persists, quickened by Donna Brazile’s recent confirmation that the game had been rigged against Bernie Sanders and his populist revolt.
“It’s disgusting,” says Alison Hartson, a California activist who volunteered for Sanders in 2016. “I am continually shocked by how blatant the establishment Democrats are in their anti-democracy campaign. They are authoritarian, they are totally anti-democratic. And I just can’t stomach it any more.”
On November 2, Hartson became the second Sandernista to announce plans to challenge Dianne Feinstein for the California Senate seat that Feinstein first claimed in 1992. On most subjects, Hartson sounds like the amiable former Orange County school teacher she is. But her piercing rhetoric on the topic of the Democratic establishment promises a lively 2018 primary season. And it foretells a progressive roadblock for any establishment Democrat considering a presidential run in 2020.
“We have decided,” Hartson says, “to take on these establishment puppets.”
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Of the Democrats currently in office, perhaps none more thoroughly embodies the Clintonian establishment than the seven-term congresswoman from South Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She was national co-chair of Hillary’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, and her preference for Clinton over Bernie Sanders, revealed in the WikiLeaks email download, precipitated her departure as head of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the 2016 convention. The ignominy of that humiliating exit followed her into the election and beyond.
“She gets heckled a lot wherever she goes, she gets jeered, she gets asked tough questions that she can’t really answer,” says Tim Canova, a Sanders supporter who mounted a failed primary challenge to Wasserman Schultz in 2016. Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, had never run for office, but an endorsement from Sanders brought instant credibility within the populist progressive movement. “The average congressional campaign probably gets 5,000 or 10,000 individual donors,” Canova says. “We got over 100,000 donors. We had 209,000 individual donations.”
Canova announced in June that he plans to take on Wasserman Schultz again next year. Florida’s 23rd District is solidly blue—redistricting works both ways—and its voters have been good to Wasserman Schultz (Canova was her first-ever primary challenger). She has a sizable war chest and is already hiring consultants. But Canova is counting on the discrediting of the Clinton establishment continuing and energy from the populist movement to even his odds. And there’s that list of donors. “I think when we get into 2018, that’s a big list to draw from,” he says. “That’s gonna worry her.”
Canova had been drawn to Sanders because of the Vermont senator’s economic populism—especially his attacks on Wall Street and call to “break up the big banks.” He is a true believer; Canova taught workshops on reforming the Federal Reserve at the Los Angeles encampment of the Occupy movement. He soured on Obama early, when he detected shades of Clintonism in the administration’s economic recovery program. Canova decided to run against Wasserman Schultz largely because she voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Obama’s signature trade proposal. “The corporate elites, the media elites don’t recognize it, but this has been like a depression for a decade now,” he says. “I think the people are ahead of the political establishment.”
Bill Clinton led the Democratic party out of its last sojourn in the wilderness with his “New Democrat” politics through which he oversaw a balanced budget, championed free trade, and cut regulations. A key calculation of Clintonism, and one with lasting political consequence, was a reorientation of the Democratic party toward Wall Street, where Clinton found his top economic adviser, Robert Rubin, and Rubin’s protégé Lawrence Summers—both of whom served Clinton as Treasury secretary.
The Street became an important source of money for Democrats, especially, of course, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the deregulation advocated by Rubin and Summers stoked the Clinton economic boom that Democrats ran on for years. After the bust of 2007-08, though, progressives began to blame that deregulation for the collapse of the financial sector, and the trademark Clinton brand of transactional politics became, to them, anathema.
By the time Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, she had abandoned most of her husband’s New Democrat politics in response to the firebrand populism of the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. Clinton came out against the TPP (which she’d once called “the gold standard” of trade deals) and mimed the populist attacks on the financial sector. The populist base, unconvinced, migrated to Sanders—their suspicions about Clinton confirmed by a WikiLeaks release of a closed-gathering Clinton speech in which she’d confided that she had a private position on issues as well as a position for public consumption, and the two didn’t always jibe. “That statement of hers that she has a private position for her donors and a public position for everyone else, that’s just a confirmation that [for her] this is politics,” says Canova. “It’s just the way politics works in our system, and that’s what’s so unfortunate.”
With the populist base migrating to Sanders, Clinton doubled down on the “rising American electorate” strategy. This is the demography-is-destiny calculation that as working-class whites shrink as a percentage of the population, so does their worth as a constituency meriting attention. This cohort, long the heart of the Democratic party, wasn’t just neglected, it was blithely written off by Clinton (“basket of deplorables”) and her allies. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” Chuck Schumer said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Clinton lost the white working class to Bernie Sanders, and then to Donald Trump, costing her the presidency. After the election, Clinton and her allies in the commentariat seemed determined to cement the estrangement of these voters by ascribing to them characteristics meant to disparage rather than persuade—sexism, racism, nativism, and the like.
Both Canova and Hartson believe that a progressive populist in the mold of Bernie Sanders can win them back from Trump. Indeed, both use language when speaking of their movement that could have come from Steve Bannon—references to “the revolution,” “corporate media elites,” and “the corrupt political establishment.”
“Bernie talked about how we’ve got to end this corrupting influence of money in politics, and Trump really talked about the same thing,” Hartson notes. “They both talked about populist messages, about protecting the middle class, about fighting for the middle class, and not letting these gigantic industries continue putting us on a track of turning us into a third-world country. They talked about these things in different ways, but they really were saying the same thing.”
Perhaps. But candidacies like Hartson’s and Canova’s seem likely to push the Democratic party further to the left, just as the party needs to find a way to speak to voters who went for Trump in 2016.
Canova says such reckoning is no longer relevant.
“The progressive populism on the left and right-wing populism have a lot in common,” he says. “We can talk about the differences, and they’re significant, of course. But there’s a lot of intersection there. The real divide is no longer right versus left; what does that even mean anymore, right versus left? There’s very little difference between them on bread and butter issues. The real divide is now inside versus outside.”
Peter J. Boyer is national correspondent at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
