One important takeaway from Democrats’ widely panned government shutdown is how the party continues to struggle balancing the #Resistance with the Rust Belt constituency they lost so catastrophically in 2016. Democrats can’t risk further inflaming their progressive base, but also can’t risk further alienating voters in the Rust Belt, who look skeptically on the party’s leftward drift.
Are the two groups mutually exclusive, or mutually beneficial? In other words, would a resurgence of bold progressive candidates with populist pitches on policies, like trade and healthcare, actually boost the party’s appeal?
Earlier this week, I reflected on Jason Kander’s speech at Netroots Nation, in which he proposed that Democrats could win in red states by going bolder and unapologetically embracing authentic progressivism. “Voters will forgive you for believing something that they don’t believe so long as they know that you truly believe it,” the failed Missouri Senate candidate contended.
Kander noted that he secured more than 220,000 votes from people who also voted for President Trump in 2016.
“I did not do that by pretending to be a conservative Democrat,” he insisted.
Indeed, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., defeated Hillary Clinton in several key Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses last cycle, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota.
But even if we were simply to assume there’s an appetite for economic progressivism in the Rust Belt (which is not clear at all), to many voters, the Resistance’s cultural progressivism could easily drown out or fully disqualify their populist ideas on trade, the minimum wage, and healthcare.
For instance, if a 2020 candidate rolls into the Rust Belt with a populist pitch on income inequality or trade, but also needs to satisfy the base’s demands they address transgenderism and intersectionality, people may just tune out, even if “they know that the candidate truly believes it,” as Kander would say.
I’m open to the idea that authentic and unapologetic economic populism could find an attentive audience in the Rust Belt. I’m not so sure the Democratic Party — moored to a base increasingly fixated on cultural progressivism — is capable of delivering it in a persuasive way.
