Erin Scott/Pool via AP
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined on a video call by Rep. Cheri Bustos, talks to reporters about the results of this year’s House contests, November 3, 2020, in Washington.
Votes are still being tallied, but we already know for certain that election night was a disaster for House Democrats. As it stands, on a night where Democrats were forecast to pick up as many as 20 seats in the chamber, not a single GOP incumbent has been defeated. The only two Democratic pickups thus far can be chalked up to court-mandated changes to congressional district maps in North Carolina. While Democrats will likely keep the House majority, it’s possible they will lose between 7 and 12 seats in total, underperforming optimistic projections by 30 seats or more. The final count, whenever it comes in, will merely tell us how bad the bleeding is.
That result is stunning, after House leadership spent the summer all but assuring an expansion of the considerable mandate they won in 2018, when they flipped 40 seats in the House. Many of those freshmen who flipped those seats two years ago now find themselves on the ropes, struggling to hold on for the possibility of a second term. The vaunted rise of the suburbs, touted by moderate pundits as the surest path to Democratic victory, ran aground, as freshman Democrats like Kendra Horn in Oklahoma City and Joe Cunningham in Charleston, South Carolina, went down. Even Cheri Bustos, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is in charge of protecting vulnerable members and flipping red seats blue, barely eked out a tiny victory over her own Republican challenger in Illinois’s 17th District, and only after House Majority PAC, a group widely known to work in lockstep with the DCCC, and run by Robby Mook, a close ally of Nancy Pelosi who himself ran the DCCC in 2012, did an emergency million-dollar cash drop in the final week.
That nightmarish result has Democrats pointing fingers as to who shoulders the blame. According to Politico, in a bold show of personal responsibility, “[s]everal centrist Democrats blamed their more progressive colleagues, saying moderates in Trump-leaning districts couldn’t escape their ‘socialist’ shadow.” According to The Hill, centrists in the caucus are considering defecting from their support of Pelosi for another run as Speaker, and backing Pelosi acolyte Hakeem Jeffries instead.
Anxious Democrats are correct to think about leadership changes. But there are a number of reasons why the desperate attempt from moderates to blame progressives makes no sense at all (and, by extension, there is no plausible case to elevate Jeffries).
The failures of Democratic leadership have been profound, running what should have been a Democratic advantage into the ground. But the leadership class who came up with and pursued that strategy is made up entirely of centrists, who have spurned progressives at every turn, claiming to know better, forcing them to watch quietly as senior-ranking moderates managed nothing in terms of legislation over the past two years and orchestrated a disastrous campaign strategy. That should be evidence enough that Pelosi, Bustos, and her centrist acolytes who managed to survive election night should be relieved of their leadership positions. Progressives, meanwhile, didn’t lose any members from their ranks and now make up a larger percentage of the caucus than ever, have the only credible claim to leadership positions, and should do everything in their power to take them over ahead of what will be much more challenging terrain in 2022.
Let’s start with Pelosi. Since her elevation to the top of House Democratic leadership in 2003, Pelosi has put together a win/loss record that would generously be described as middling. Her first election cycle in 2004 ended with Democrats losing seats. She then went on to oversee significant wins in 2006 and 2008 (aided by the Iraq debacle and the financial crisis), before getting obliterated in disastrous fashion in 2010, and then again in 2014, offset by narrow victories in 2012 and 2016. The 2018 election was a wave election for Democrats, which resulted in Pelosi being reinstalled as Speaker of the House. Democrats promptly gave away some of those seats in 2020.
That gives Pelosi a 5-4 record all told, with recent years sporting more wipeout defeats than breakthrough wins. It’s certainly not the sort of résumé that would make her an untouchable campaign strategist. Add to that the fact that she spent the last two years as Speaker presiding over a doomed impeachment strategy, passing complex and compromised omnibus legislation that both died with Mitch McConnell and inspired next to no interest from the base, and conducting next to zero oversight of the extremely corrupt Trump administration—a major reason voters flocked to Democrats in 2018 in the first place. Then add in her refusal to make tactical maneuvers to prevent the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett or protect the Affordable Care Act, and her disastrous handling of stimulus negotiations, and you can understand why the American people might have issued a popular rebuke of House Dems.
The failures of Democratic leadership have been profound, running what should have been a Democratic advantage into the ground.
What Pelosi has proven adept at is bashing progressives, mocking extremely popular policy items, and openly antagonizing activists who likely saved Joe Biden’s skin in Michigan, Arizona, and Minnesota. She’s boxed them out of the legislative process and passed bills over their objections. That’s an impulse she has in common with Bustos, who kicked off the 2020 election cycle by blacklisting all political consultants, strategists, and vendors who worked with primary challengers within the Democratic Party. This was a preemptive strike at progressives, threatening to ice them out of lucrative DCCC contracts to disincentivize them from working for challengers (implicitly and exclusively challengers on the left, as was widely understood and has been extensively catalogued). That plan backfired spectacularly; 2020 proved to be the most successful election cycle yet for progressives in primaries, as they responded by building a stronger-than-ever campaign apparatus.
Bustos drew up the doomed election strategy that had Democrats reaching for seats in Republican territory that they had no real shot of winning while underemphasizing recently flipped seats in the suburbs that the GOP readily clawed back. In New Jersey, Democratic turncoat Jeff Van Drew won in a blue district after flipping parties to embrace Donald Trump. In places like South Florida, Democrats were wiped out, with close Pelosi ally and repeat ethics code violator Donna Shalala, whom the Speaker laughably appointed to a chair on the Congressional Oversight Commission of the CARES Act, going down, along with fellow centrist Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
The story was very much the same with Bustos’s own race, which she evidently didn’t realize was in jeopardy until days before the election. Without that late cash infusion, Bustos would likely have lost; she won by three points. Illinois’s 17th, part of the Quad Cities area, is considered to be purple-ish, but has been held by Bustos since she flipped it in 2012. Compare that to California Democrat Katie Porter, who flipped a red district blue in 2018 on an unapologetically progressive platform. Once in office, she conducted critical oversight to shame CEOs and actually change policy. Porter cruised to re-election on a night when Republicans did quite well in her part of Orange County, with no emergency cash drop required. Bustos’s campaign strategy, meanwhile, failed on a party-wide and a personal level.
Progressives had their own share of struggles Tuesday night. In a handful of seats in Texas and Nebraska, where they hoped to beat Republican incumbents, they came up short. But they resoundingly held their seats on a night when even that couldn’t be taken for granted; no progressive incumbent lost. Centrist incumbents make up the bulk of the Democratic carnage. Part of that is the nature of the political map, granted. But as Porter shows, much of it is also just the result of purposeful strategic decision-making.
A new crop of progressives will be joining the ranks of the incumbents, adding to a swelling caucus with more power than ever in terms of both head count and percentage of Democratic representation in the House. Pelosi, meanwhile, needs two-thirds support from Democrats to return as Speaker. With every passing hour, it seems less likely that she’ll get it—she is, after all, 80 years old, very much a part of the Democrats’ broader problems with gerontocracy at the top, and has already committed to step down after one more term. But if progressives don’t act fast, they’ll be relegated to the sidelines while someone like Jeffries, a Pelosi acolyte and anti-progressive antagonist, takes the mantle, and continues a leadership regime that has been a proven failure.
