Strategy Sessions: The Ideological Deathzone

Stop Running Candidates On The Soft Left

(Welcome to Strategy Sessions, a new recurring feature here where I opine specifically on political strategy for Democrats or UK Labour, with tips on how they should better prepare themselves to win elections.Today's topic? Ideology.)

I can't find a huge ideology penalty (or benefit) in which Democrats won or lost House seats in 2020. It's certainly not readily apparent in the Senate, where the 4 Democratic gains ranged from Hickenlooper and Kelly, neither of which came out for much progressive policy, and then Ossoff and Warnock, who talked fairly boldly about changing America, both in terms of civil rights and $2000 checks. In the House, some avowed moderates outperformed Biden in their districts while losing, and in others they wildly underperformed in Biden won districts. But it seems like the one group who consistently sucked was the pseudo-left.

Kamala Harris ran a Presidential campaign in this lane in 2019 - the more left than Clinton, not as left as Bernie, Medicare for All supporting (but not really), uses a lot of the buzzwords of progressives but isn't actually proposing a radical departure from the past. It's kind of hard to define, but you know it when you see it - and part of its hard to define nature is the fact that there is no coherent ideology to actually attach to it. It is an ideology defined by what it isn't - I'm not a moderate, but I'm not one of those scary socialists. And in some sense, I get the appeal.

I get the appeal of this, because if you can get those more attracted to the more left economics to rally to your cause without scaring upper middle class whites with socially liberal views, that coalition would be very potent. But, it's not really possible. In trying to be in opposition to everything, you end up repelling those voters that you need.

Take Kara Eastman in Nebraska 2nd, a candidate of avowed Sanders-ism in 2018 who was abandoned by the party and all financial backers for being too left wing for her district then. She still almost won that race, losing by 2 despite being abandoned. Her Omaha district voted for Trump by 2 and then swung heavily to Biden, and she got the nomination again this year. This time, she moderated her views a bit, got endorsements from Sanders, Warren, Kamala, and Biden, and tried to enter Congress. She lost by just under 5% this time.

Go down a few states, and you hit Southlake Texas, and Texas 24th. I know people thought highly of Candace Valenzuela, and many expected her to make a gain in her outer-DFW district. As did the entirety of the list of Texas challengers, she lost, but her 3% underperformance of Biden was one of the better results, at least compared to everyone else's even more dismal outcomes. But, where did she do substantially worse than her average underperformance? Southlake, where the average underperformance of Biden was 11.4%, and uniform across the five precincts - 3 precincts with 11% underperformances, 2 with a 12%. Why did she do so badly in Southlake, and across the whole district? Her campaign was too left wing for the well-off white social liberals who loved Mitt Romney less than a decade before, while not inspiring any love from Biden-sceptical working class voters, either white or Hispanic. She tried to run a campaign for everyone, and ended up running one for nobody. Hell, even look at the Ossoff campaign of 2017, when his triangulatory, useless campaign lost a seat that Lucy McBath's more intellectually honest campaign won a year later. Ossoff spent 2017 telling people how he wouldn't go too far or run too fast or do too much, and he lost. McBath said what she wanted to do and won. And then Ossoff did the same damn thing and won statewide. There's a lesson here.

Head to the UK, and ask why Jeremy Corbyn managed the best seat haul in England for Labour since the 70s from someone not named Tony Blair, and you get a series of befuddled looks. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn, in all his… I refuse to say glory, so let's just say… Corbynism managed to do better than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, and Neil Kinnock, three leaders who were absolutely seen as better leaders than the Islington Anti-Semite. And yet, Corbyn did better in England than all 3 in 2017, a function of the fact that the "soft left", as that faction of UK Labour is so often called, just suck at elections there. Oh, and if you need more evidence, Keir Starmer is an adherent to this set of beliefs as well, and he is currently failing miserably.

What was Milibandism, or a Brownite view of the world? It wasn't actively left wing - both Brown and Miliband had fairly austere economic agendas in their manifestos, just less sharply austere than the Tories, and they had some tax rises on the margins, but no real innovative plans for a radical reimagining of the economic consensus. Miliband's signature policy for students was lowering tuition fees to £6000 a year, a £3000 cut from what the Tories made students pay, sure, but still double what students paid under New Labour. Corbyn went for free college, and he managed to beat Nick Clegg in his Sheffield seat full of students where Miliband failed (amongst others).

Look at Canada, and you'll see the same thing. In 2015, the Canadian Liberals campaigned on the left - tax rises, redistribution of wealth, deficit spending, the works - while the NDP of Tom Mulcair ran on a soft left, kinda sorta meekly left wing but not committing to it fully platform and got the shit kicked out of them. Ah, but in 2019, Trudeau won again, I can hear you saying. Yes, by running as a moderate, offering tax cuts for the middle class and harping on about the Tories can't be trusted on marriage and abortion.

…

Why does the Eastman-Miliband-Mulcair wing suck at politics? It's because it's not seen as authentic or real. There is no guiding line, no first principle, no sense of an overriding goal. You can love or hate Joe Manchin, but he at least manages to articulate a vision of the America he wants, as laughable as that vision may be. He wants a return to civility and to the normal ways things used to work. He had managed to convince his voters of this enough to win, and that's a talent. But, look at the other red and purple state Democrats, and you'll see a clear line of demarcation. Jon Tester is a fairly progressive member, even if he doesn't go around claiming so, and is a reliable vote for progressive economic values. Sherrod Brown may be the 4th or 5th most left wing member of the Senate, and he represents a state that voted, what, 13% right of the nation last year? Tammy Baldwin is consistently the best performing Democrat in Wisconsin, but nobody would call her anything but a full throated vote for a strong, stable, and radical agenda of economic reforms.

It's not always about ideology, it's about authenticity, and the problem that so many on the soft left find, across all countries, is that that ideology isn't authentic. An ideology that presupposes that left wing ideas are good but we can't go too far or run too fast leads people to rightly wonder why that is. The worst candidates, and the worst electoral results, for parties of the broad centre and left come when candidates focus on what they're against, not what they're for, and this soft left bullshit is the ideological deathzone. Find your Baldwins and Browns or find your Manchins and (Joe) Cunninghams, but everyone needs to stop running candidates from the pseudo soft left. It only ends in tears.