‘Moderate’ Democrats Are Anything But

Politicians genuinely aiming to represent the center of American politics would not block policies that poll over 90 percent approval, as today’s ‘moderates’ have done.

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Self-described moderate Democrats have a problem, according to Jason Zengerle in The New York Times Magazine: They could win if only the party’s left wing would just shut up. “Their positions are popular. So why are they going extinct?” reads the article subtitle. After interviewing several such Democrats, like Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Stephanie Murphy of Florida, Zengerle suggests that the answer is poor positioning in the culture wars. On “social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party’s base cheer but the rest of the electorate does not.” That puts the party’s precious moderates in jeopardy, they say.

Democrats do indeed face a tough election this year. But the article’s presentation of people like Gottheimer and Murphy is a crock. On many central issues in American politics, it’s these people who are the far-out ideologues, or simply corrupt. It is they who are wildly out of step with public opinion and commonsense politics.

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To begin, Zengerle is strangely muted about the substance of this crowd’s favorite ideas. He doesn’t mention that Murphy, for instance, bitterly opposed a reform to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices that was supposed to be in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan. This might be the most popular idea in American history—it polls at between 80 percent and over 90 percent approval, depending on wording. Moreover, while Zengerle does mention Murphy’s pivotal role in severing BBB from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, thus dooming it to be killed by Joe Manchin, he doesn’t mention that her action thereby doomed a whole bunch of policies that poll in the 60+ percent approval range.

Similarly, Zengerle does mention that Gottheimer has long been demanding a repeal of the state and local tax deduction cap that was part of the Trump tax cuts, but omits how incredibly unfair it would be. The top 1 percent of households would reap 56 percent of the benefit, while the bottom four-fifths of Americans would get just 4 percent. Gottheimer’s position on this issue underscores what a bizarre choice he is to illustrate Zengerle’s thesis that Democrats have struggles with downscale voters, as his district is one of the wealthiest and best educated in the country.

Let’s not be complete idiots about this. Murphy and Gottheimer are not canvassing the non-college-educated voters in their districts when they pull this nonsense. They are doing what their big donors and future providers of cushy lobbying jobs tell them to do, explicitly or implicitly. Indeed, Murphy, having protected Big Pharma’s stream of Medicare ripoff profits, has already announced she isn’t running for re-election. Pretty easy to declare winning is impossible if you don’t even try!

Moreover, Zengerle doesn’t even have much evidence that mainstream Democratic positions on identity issues are all that unpopular. Allowing trans children access to gender-affirming health care, for instance, is above water by about 15 points. It is particularly jarring to accuse Democrats of being out of step on abortion mere days after the right-wing Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had 64 percent support. By way of comparison, the Speaker of the Mississippi state House recently argued that 12-year-old incest victims should be forced to carry their father’s rape baby to term—a position that polls at about 13 percent.

On many central issues in American politics, it’s these people who are the far-out ideologues, or simply corrupt.

It is exceptionally strange for a faction of people supposedly concerned with the Democrats’ popularity to be constantly dishing to the national media about how their party has been taken over by extremists—like, apparently, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. One is compelled to conclude that they are really invoking dubious notions about electability to bludgeon their internal opponents.

More broadly, Zengerle’s theory of political causality runs afoul of actual political history. His thesis is that conservative Democrats’ struggles stem from recent left activist stands on police, race, and so on. But by far the biggest wipeout that the self-proclaimed moderate wing of the party has suffered happened in 2010. That year, the Blue Dog caucus in the House (which Murphy now co-chairs) lost 33 seats—or 56 percent of its membership.

For which the very same Blue Dogs deserve a share of the blame. When the Obama administration was designing a stimulus package in response to the financial crisis, administration economists and political hacks simply guessed what they could get past the deficit-phobic conservative Democrats, and settled on about $700–$800 billion. It turned out that this number was less than half the size necessary to restore full employment. As a result, unemployment was 10 percent on Election Day in 2010—the kiss of death for any incumbent party—and the Blue Dogs got whipped. Physician, heal thyself!

At any rate, Zengerle’s article opens with Gottheimer wistfully watching old Bill Clinton campaign ads on his phone and telling Nancy Pelosi “this is how we win again.” Setting aside the childish notion that a New Jersey pol and big-donor pal can somehow will the return of the 1990s, Gottheimer’s fantasy actually calls up memories of the gruesome basis of Clintonite politics. The slogans in the ads like “WELFARE REFORM, WORK REQUIREMENTS” and “DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG KINGPINS” refer to the 1996 welfare reform that increased deep poverty among single mothers and brutal war-on-crime policies that locked up Black people by the millions.

Once in office, Clinton sold out his own constituencies, the working class first and foremost, while pandering to new ones like Wall Street and big business with trade agreements that gutted American manufacturing and financial deregulation that melted down the economy and blighted the lives of entire generations. Through such policies, Democrats forfeited their claim on much of the electorate that had long been theirs, leaving it ripe for the picking by Donald Trump. Pretending that did not happen, so that the remains of the party’s base can be sold out again, is not going to work.

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