The Myth of the "True Progressive"

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

Politics is one of those things that, like football when your state's team is winning or the Oscars the week before the ceremony, suddenly everyone is an expert upon.  There's some credence to the idea that everyone should have an opinion on politics-if you're someone who is voting, researching your candidates and making the best decision for you and your circumstances is what a responsible citizen does.  But that doesn't make you an expert, even when people say cliched things or spout off things that might make them sound smart, but are absolute nonsense if you look at the evidence, and one of those things I want to discuss today, the fallacy that "nominating a true progress/conservative" is the magical button to nearly unlimited buckets of voters coming out and winning you an election.

This is something that's particularly stated in the Democratic Primaries right now.  As we are just 62 days until the Iowa caucuses, people who are passionate about specific candidates in the Democratic Primaries are getting antsy, trying to throw opponents to their candidates under-the-bus and doing pretty much anything that they can to make the argument that their candidate is the most electable/best one.  I have seen this particularly in the past couple of weeks with the surge of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and the softening of support for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  On the surface, Buttigieg and Warren are very different politically-Buttigieg is carving out a more moderate approach, appealing to older, whiter voters, while Warren is making a play for younger voters with discussions of student loan reform and more aggressive tax policy.  But it's clear that Buttigieg's rise in the polls has not come at the expense of a more moderate candidate like Biden, but rather at Warren's expense, proving either that people vote with their guts rather than more methodically, or that Warren's base of support wasn't particularly strong, and people were more "curious" about her candidacy than they were 100% committed to it.

Either of these people is still in the running to be the nominee, but what I want to talk about is the assertion by Warren supporters that "nominating a true progressive" will unlock bases of support that weren't open to Democrats before, that she will be the magical key to getting young people or lay people into the election.  This argument is probably warranted from their side, because the biggest deficit against Warren is around arguments of "electability."  There's two sides to this attack on the senator-the first is irrefutably sexist when it relates to the person being "nice" or "likable" enough to win (it's very rare, if not basically unprecedented, for a straight white man to get tagged with "electability" issues of this nature even when there clearly are some).  The other side of the attack, though, is that she's too liberal to win the general election, and while I don't think that Warren would be unelectable (I think ultimately this election will come down to whether the American people want four more years of Trump, and the Democrats can only sway that thinking so far), it's worth considering that yes, there's such a thing as too liberal for a general election.

State Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC)

This is because history has shown us time-and-again that nominating a "true progressive" in an electorate that isn't accustomed or asking for a "true progressive" is a strategy with more loss than success, and it's surely not foolproof.  Deborah Ross made the news yesterday by announcing a run for the US House from North Carolina, but Ross is best known for her run for the Senate in 2016.  Ross is one of the best recent case studies of a "true progressive" being nominated in a race that was winnable.  A former state legislator, Ross's positions on issues like gay rights, gun control, and abortion were to the left of the North Carolina electorate, and quite frankly to the left of most statewide Democrats when they ran in North Carolina.  However, Ross was a good fundraiser, and was not a "progressive the party didn't support."  She had help from the DSCC, had enough money to run a competitive race, and her polling numbers indicated a contest that was close.  After a bitter presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Ross was a candidate that had made it through to the general election and had huge support from the Sanders camp, to the point where he had publicly endorsed her and raised huge sums of money for her.  Ross was about as good of an argument as you could make for a "true progressive" coming forward, exciting the base, and getting the resources needed to win in a tossup race (something Sanders supporters would argue he would have brought to the contest against Trump had he been the nominee).  If the argument was that "true progressives" will come out if you put money, time, and support into a "true progressive," she was the answer to that argument.

But Deborah Ross lost that race.  Not only did she lose that race, she lost the race by a larger margin that Hillary Clinton, someone whom progressives had claimed wasn't a "true progressive" did.  North Carolina in 2016 was one of the rare states to elect both Democrats and Republicans statewide-while Donald Trump and Richard Burr (Ross's opponent) both won, Democrats took the Governor, Auditor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General offices that year by slim margins (three of those they won by less than 1-point).  But Ross lost, and certainly by the biggest margin of any of the races that were assumed to be "winnable."  If a secret cavalcade of progressives are sitting around waiting for a candidate who will cater specifically to them, they certainly didn't exist in North Carolina in 2016.

They also didn't exist in Florida in 2018 with Andrew Gillum.  Or in Wisconsin in 2016 with Russ Feingold.  Or in Iowa in 2014 with Bruce Braley.  This list could go on-and-on, and there are occasionally places that show that you can elect someone far to the left of the electorate (Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin comes to mind, Sherrod Brown in Ohio is another).  The point is-if it can consistently be disproven, it's a bad argument.  Elizabeth Warren may well be the next nominee or president, but please stop arguing with people who claim that she may struggle because of her left-leaning politics, because that's an actual thing.  Electorates do not simply change because you want them to, and there is not a some magical candidate who can turn out progressives enough to compensate for potentially migrating moderates.  Elections are complicated, and simplifying them in such a way to make a specious argument is dangerous.  Stop repeating a fallacy just because it is cold comfort to you.  Whomever the Democrats nominate in 2020 will win in large part because of the economy and the American people's attitude toward Donald Trump; it will have nothing to do with whether or not we nominate a "true progressive."