On June 26, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off an upset victory against Incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, a senior Democrat who had been floated as a replacement for Nancy Pelosi. Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist who ran on a platform that involved abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, doing a one-time cancellation student loan debt, and other goodies.
The superficial comparison here was obvious: In 2014, Dave Brat primaried then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor from the right, both demonstrating GOP antipathy towards the party establishment and the power immigration would have as an issue in the 2016 presidential primary. But the more interesting question is how Ocasio-Cortez and the rise of Democratic-Socialists in the party compares with the Tea Party movement in 2010.
Obviously it’s too early to know for sure. It took the Tea Party two election cycles to fully assert themselves within the GOP, and even then, their success was less in the number of Tea Party candidates elected than it was in forcing the Republican establishment to co-opt them. But it’s not too early to gauge the Left’s record against incumbents so far and to figure out where a Left-y Revolution (it would be nice for someone to coin a shorthand term for this) might show up.
The Far Left Isn’t Hitting Many Incumbents Hard Yet
So far, the Democratic establishment seems to be in decent shape.
The raw numbers suggest that Democratic incumbents have generally been fared better against their insurgency than establishment Republicans did in 2010 and 2012.
I put together this scorecard partially using my own data and partially using data that was generously provided by Clark University Professor Robert Boatright.
The first two rows show how Democratic House incumbents have fared in 2018 compared to how sitting House Republicans fared in the same states in the 2010 and 2012 cycles. It’s tough to do an apples to apples comparison across parties (since they have different levels of strength in different states). But theses metrics help give us a good bird’s eye view of how well incumbents are doing. As Boatright has noted, the 60 and 75 percent thresholds pick up challengers who post a respectable showing yet still lose while ignoring the Vermin Supremes of the world.
So far, Democratic incumbents haven’t had the same number of stiff challengers as Republicans had during the Tea Party years. The same story shows up when you look at the House win/loss record. In 2010 and 2012, Republican House incumbents lost very few seats. And incumbent Democrats will probably only lose a few seats by the end of this cycle.
On the Senate side, things looked a little bit different. In 2010, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her primary to Republican Joe Miller and Utah Sen. Bob Bennett failed to advance beyond the convention in Utah (Mike Lee eventually won that seat).
Now-Sen. Pat Toomey doesn’t show up in the table (Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties shortly after Toomey officially announced his challenge, depriving Toomey of an official win), but Toomey basically counts as a 2010 Republican who managed to primary a sitting Senator. And in Indiana, Richard Mourdock defeated Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, but went on to say that pregnancy due to rape was “something God intended” and lost the general election.
So far, Democratic senate primaries have been a bit quieter. No sitting Democrats have been unseated, despite some of them (e.g. Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly) running to the right of the national party. Dianne Feinstein, Joe Manchin and Bob Menendez (who seems to have some ethical issues) have faced notable primary challenges, but none of the races were particularly close.
These comparisons suggest that the Democratic far Left isn’t packing the same punch that the 2010-era Tea Party did within the GOP.
But maybe this is an apples to oranges (elephants to donkeys?) comparison, and we should compare the 2018 Democrats to the 2016, 2014, 2012, etc. Democrats to get a sense of the strength of the 2018 insurgency.
So I used Boatright’s data to chart out how successful incumbents have been in past years in both parties in the states that have voted so far.
These graphics don’t show a surge in anti-incumbent sentiment on the left in 2018. According to this measure, Democratic House primaries are about as competitive as they usually are.
This data suggests that the Democratic insurgency of 2018 isn’t quite as strong as the Tea Party of 2010 or 2012. So maybe The Left is weaker than people are assuming, and we shouldn’t expect a wave of candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to oust incumbents and take over the Democratic party.
But then again, maybe looking for the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the wrong way to detect change within the Democratic party.
Looking for The Left in All The Wrong Places
It’s easy to focus on surprise wins such as Ocasio-Cortez’s or Dave Brat’s, but that ignores two other potential sources of ideological change—replacement and movement.
The basic idea behind replacement is simple—Tea Party candidates didn’t just win by beating incumbents. They also filled empty seats with more conservative politicians. Ted Cruz didn’t become a senator by beating an incumbent—he won the primary for the open seat vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison. And, according to DW-NOMINATE, Hutchison was near the center of the GOP while Cruz was on the far right. Similarly, Marco Rubio replaced Mel Martinez (with George LeMieux as the interim senator between them); Rubio was another move to the right.
Not every open seat Tea Party candidate performed as well as Rubio and Cruz. In 2010, Christine O’Donnell basically threw a Delaware Senate race that former GOP Gov. and Rep. Mike Castle might have had a chance to win. And in 2012, Todd Akin (who said women’s bodies had ways of ending pregnancies due to “legitimate rape”) allowed Claire McCaskill to waltz to re-election.
So some Tea Party candidates were duds, but the movement also ended up nominating some effective, conservative politicians who went on to win and move the GOP towards the Tea Party.
It’s not impossible to imagine this happening on the left at some point. Democrats are running an incumbent or appointee in all their Senate seats this November, but the next wave of retirements could provide openings for progressives. There are also almost 20 Democrats leaving the lower chamber. That’s not the biggest opening for progressives (and they’ve already lost some House primaries). But it’s possible to imagine progressives replacing some outgoing members, beating some Republican incumbents in competitive races (like Tea Party backed Republican Ron Johnson did in 2010) and gaining strength over the next couple of cycles.
Maybe most obviously, it’s possible that currently elected Democrats will shift their positions in real time. Changing your position is a time-honored bipartisan political tradition in America. And if progressives end up gaining power within their party, they’ll probably do so most effectively by getting sitting Democratic politicians to move toward them. The exact menu of issues is always changing in American politics, but at this point I would recommend watching how Democratic politicians do (or don’t) change on healthcare (e.g. if they advocate for single payer), immigration (e.g. abolishing ICE), and the idea of free college between now and 2020.
One final note—nowhere in this piece did I predict whether or how much the Democratic party might move left between now and 2020. Prediction is hard, and the Democratic party is structured differently than the GOP. Maybe the #Resistance will follow the path of the Tea Party. But maybe the strong, varied interest groups within the Democratic party will mean that the Democrat’s path will be completely different. And maybe the changes within the Democratic party won’t be as cleanly defined by ideology as the changes were within the GOP.
