Bryan Woolston/AP Photo
Amy McGrath, right, at a campaign event in Kentucky in October 2018
Just one Tuesday ago, New York’s progressives romped. In multiple House races, in the state legislature, and elsewhere, left-wing candidates triumphed over incumbents or lapped the field in open races. “A dominant showing for progressives,” was how I characterized it. Many other media outlets, local and national, said the same.
Yesterday brought a different story entirely. First, the long-anticipated outcome of Kentucky’s Democratic Senate primary, between Chuck Schumer–selected super-candidate Amy McGrath and Charles Booker was announced. McGrath squeaked out a 3 percent victory, despite early indications looking like Booker would prevail. Then, in the evening, Colorado’s Democratic Senate primary was called, with another Schumer pick and longtime friend of fracking John Hickenlooper beating progressive Andrew Romanoff.
Those results may read as triumphs of the party’s moderate flank, or a clipping of the wings of the party’s ascendant progressives. But McGrath and Hickenlooper both enjoyed the significant institutional support of Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s endorsement, along with the financial windfall that that seal of approval brings. When the DSCC interferes in a primary, it doesn’t tend to lose; its endorsees haven’t lost a primary race in over a decade.
Those endorsements count, but money counts more, and McGrath and Hickenlooper both enjoyed quite a lot of it. McGrath, in particular, was a fundraising behemoth. She racked up an astonishing $41 million, at least, going into last week’s Election Day, while Booker, her opponent, hadn’t even cracked seven digits by early June. McGrath’s pitch, refined over the course of a year-plus, was that she would bend over backwards to work with Trump, beginning with a refusal to support his impeachment. That didn’t prove particularly motivating for Democratic voters; her campaign stumbled to the finish line, while Booker came out of nowhere in just a matter of weeks to turn the race into a nail-biter. His campaign will serve as a blueprint for progressives going forward.
Not only did McGrath outraise Booker 50 to 1, she outspent him by that clip as well. In fact, she dropped at least $21 million to keep Booker’s insurgency at bay; if not for banking early votes cast by mail, it’s likely that still wouldn’t have been enough. Needless to say, her chances against Mitch McConnell, come November, don’t look especially rosy.
In Colorado, John Hickenlooper, who confessed during an extremely abortive presidential run that he didn’t think he would be a good senator, was drafted by Schumer to run against Republican incumbent Cory Gardner in what’s likely the nation’s most flippable Senate seat. Hickenlooper’s competitive advantage was a sizable war chest and ample name recognition after two terms as the state’s governor. He expected to cruise through a cluttered primary field of progressives that eventually gave way to Green New Dealer Andrew Romanoff.
But Hickenlooper, like McGrath, stumbled through a campaign cycle known only for its buffoonery. He squandered a nearly 50-point advantage from October, staggering from one scandal to another: multiple ethics violations, a handful of awkward and offensive comments on race, and a track record on policing and environmental issues that made him a questionable fit for the very liberal Democratic electorate.
The difference, again, was money, which likely saved Hickenlooper’s skin. He outraised Romanoff by at least a seven-to-one margin, and still needed a late seven-figure cash infusion from Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC after polling showed him fading badly.
It’s common knowledge that money is extremely influential in the outcome of elections. That correlation is not absolute. Jamaal Bowman triumphed over Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th Congressional District last week despite a fundraising deficit, albeit a modest one. Joe Biden himself triumphed over the rest of the Democratic field despite far less money than his closest rival, Bernie Sanders. But when the margin between candidates explodes—say, to seven times, or 50 times more than the other—the likelihood of springing such an upset trends toward zero.
Just a few months ago, campaign finance was a top-line concern for aspiring Democratic candidates for president, repeatedly emerging on the debate stage as a widely embraced priority. Almost the entire field swore off super PAC money and refused donations from the fossil fuel industry; Elizabeth Warren gave up high-dollar fundraisers; Bernie Sanders ran on publicly funded elections.
But the first candidate to renege on those commitments was Joe Biden, who went on to win the race outright. And as the party’s presidential candidate goes, so goes the party. Even the progressive flank has leaned into the structures of big money, with Justice Democrats, one of the last remaining holdouts, forming a super PAC in May that helped boost Bowman (though it does not run primarily on corporate money like Schumer’s version).
When the DSCC interferes in a primary, it doesn’t tend to lose; its endorsees haven’t lost a primary race in over a decade.
The expected triumph of moderate Senate candidates in Kentucky and Colorado won’t change the course for progressives who expect to compete in a handful of forthcoming House primaries in Massachusetts and New Jersey. But there, too, they will have to overcome fundraising disadvantages to spring upsets. There’s a reason they’re called upsets, after all.
Across the aisle, meanwhile, the most intriguing result came in Colorado’s Third Congressional District, where Lauren Boebert triumphed over incumbent Scott Tipton by roughly 9 percent. Tipton marks the latest Trump-endorsed incumbent to get knocked out. But Tipton wasn’t felled by a moderate; he was taken down by a QAnon enthusiast who runs a burger joint called Shooters Grill in the town of Rifle, Colorado, where, according to the restaurant’s own promotional material, all the waitresses wear loaded firearms at all times (“and they know how to use ’em”). None of this is a joke.
Boebert made headlines when she contravened the state’s coronavirus shutdown orders, strapped up her loaded weapons, and reopened the restaurant for indoor service in early May, a flagrant violation of state and county public-health orders. That resulted in a temporary restraining order and food service license suspension from the city of Rifle, and a subsequent protest from Shooters supporters in front of the county health department. CO-3 is not some deep-red district; it only leans Republican by six points according to the Cook Partisan Voter Index, which means that seat could conceivably now be in play for Democrats come November.
Boebert, by the way, was out-fundraised by Tipton by a ten-to-one margin, proving that the Republican Party, as we saw in 2016, is often more amenable to small-dollar upsets and voter rebellion than its Democratic counterpart. If Democrats lose to Boebert’s low-money insurgency, the quickly growing ranks of the QAnon caucus will have themselves another member. And the theory that Donald Trump is an aberration that will dissipate with his removal from the political scene will wither further.
Elsewhere in Republican country, voters in Oklahoma narrowly approved the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which was staunchly opposed by the state’s Republican leadership. The state becomes the fifth in the country to expand Medicaid by ballot measure, proving that publicly provided health care is favorable even in places where Democrats aren’t competitive. At least 200,000 low-income adults in the state will now get free, government-funded health care. Oklahoma has the nation’s second-worst uninsured rate at more than 14 percent. Democratic policies remain far more popular than Democratic politicians.
So, the final Election Day of June comes to a close with moderates triumphing in the Democratic Party while extremists beyond parody win in the GOP. That formula worked well for Republicans four years ago, as their seemingly parodic nomination of Donald Trump ended in victory. Now, the possibility that Trump gets wiped out in November, while the party tacks even further to the right, is an outcome that has to be considered. Four more months to go!
