Recent scholarship has argued that parties strategically support more moderate, and thus more electable, candidates. Using interviews with party elites and new data on the party support and the ideology of primary candidates for the US Senate, I show that parties do support moderate candidates. However, using evidence from districts with different levels of competitiveness and over time, I find that support of moderate candidates appears not to be strategic. Rather, party support of moderate candidates appears to be the result of the ideological preferences of party leadership rather a strategic effort to win elections.

Sanders, with one presidential run under his belt, was better than most at articulating a unified theory. He spoke of tuition-free public universities, ending institutional racism and the war on drugs, reforming criminal justice and immigration, and fighting climate change — “but there is one issue out there which is so significant and so pervasive that, unless we successfully confront it, it will be impossible for us to succeed on any other of these important issues.”

And that is inequality. “The oligarchy in this country, whose greed is insatiable, is destroying Lincoln’s view of America, our vision of America, and is leading us to a government of the few, by the few and for the few.”

This is a big idea. Maybe the big idea. Whoever can best make that case should lead the Democrats in 2020.

Eddie Devine voted for Trump, but worries he may go out of business if he is unable to continue hiring 20 foreign workers a season though the H-2B visa program.

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” Devine admitted. “I feel so stupid.”