Democrats Built a Big Tent; Can They Keep It?
Yes, from the WSJ, but Jerry Seib is a well thinking individual who do not spout RW rhetoric and, based on recent threads here, he has a point.
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What’s more striking, though, is the breadth of the coalition that drove Democrats. Crucially, the party avoided being torn between traditional Democratic moderates and a newly assertive progressive wing. Progressives provided a lot of energy, and some of the party’s new stars, but moderates won a lot of races. Third Way, an organization that promotes centrist Democrats, says moderates were responsible for flipping 23 of the Democrats’ new House seats.
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All this has potentially giant implications for the 2020 presidential campaign. A broad Democratic coalition that remains strong in the party’s current home turf on the coasts but also rebounds in its onetime strongholds in the industrial Midwest stands a pretty good chance of blocking President Trump’s re-election. IF. If, that is, Democrats can avoid plunging into a civil war between their insurgent progressive wing on the left and those moderates in the center who performed well last week.
Democratic on the left think—with some justification—that the real energy in the party, in 2016 and since, has been provided by the progressive supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Certainly progressive activists tend to provide the energy and money in the early stages of the presidential primaries. The danger is that by moving hard to the left in 2020, Democrats could lose their grip on those centrist and moderate voters who came their way this year. Democrats are renting those voters for now; as they learned in 2016, they don’t own them.
That means some big debates lie just ahead for Democrats. Everybody agrees health care was the most powerful issue the party had this year. Moving toward 2020, does the party embrace a dramatic move to a Medicare-for-all, government-dominated health system, or go the more incremental route of improving Obamacare? Does freeing up money for education and infrastructure mean ditching all the Republican tax cuts or just trimming them? Do Democrats really want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-built-a-big-tent-can-they-keep-it-1542037487 (paid subscription)
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Yawn..
