Mainstream Democrats romped in the primaries. Republicans went full MAGA.
By Dana Milbank
The 2022 primary season has come to an end — and with it so should any claims that our politics is afflicted by “polarization.”
In both parties, ideological forces did indeed try to pull the center of gravity toward the extremes. But the results were sharply different. In the GOP, the hard right prevailed, very much confirming the impression of a MAGA takeover of the party. In the Democratic primaries, the hard left was a nonentity, and the mainstream triumphed overwhelmingly; for all the chatter about the Squad, socialists, “Defund the Police,” “Abolish ICE,” “Medicare-for-all” and the “Green New Deal,” candidates who self-identified with such views barely registered.
An exhaustive study of all primary contestants for the House and Senate, done by a team led by Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, categorized the 2,362 candidates (of whom 1,397 were Republican) by endorsements, self-proclaimed ideology and use of hot-button phrases. On the Democratic side, only 28 percent of candidates approvingly used left-wing phrases on their websites (Defund, Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, etc.) or received an endorsement from either Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Squad, or the left-wing groups Justice for All, Our Revolution or Indivisible. Of the nearly three-quarters of Democratic candidates who had none of the above, about half won their primaries. By contrast, 41 percent of Republican candidates approvingly mentioned former president Donald Trump, MAGA or “America First,” or had a Trump endorsement or a Trump photo on their websites. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans had none of those — but such candidates prevailed only 30 percent of the time.
The upshot, Kamarck tells me, is that the majority of Republican nominees on the November ballot are MAGA adherents, while the vast majority of Democratic nominees do not identify with left-wing figures or causes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/primary-results-polarization-far-right/
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TRAITORS, ALL OF THEM 
