990: Open Primary Problem

How 2010's Red Wave is stretching into 2028

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Why don’t Democrats contest right-leaning voters, districts, and states more aggressively?

A smart thread from the ACLU’s head of digital engagement, Stefan Smith, has a compelling perspective that has been missing from our prior analysis of this problem:

there is a missing generation of campaign operative and political staffer who should be in powerful positions in the party right now but their members were defeated in wave elections in 2010 and 2014.

If it feels like the people in charge are aren’t up for this moment, it’s because they’re largely the staff of safe district Democrats who survived that moment. And that has some benefits, but it’s also a filter for a certain type of politics.

We have blamed a lot of structural changes for Democratic struggles: gerrymandering, technology, MAGA; incentives facing overzealous leftists, cautious institutions, etc. And we have hit on the talent pipeline problem before - Democratic staffers are way whiter, richer, and more elite-educated than voters - or Republican staffers.

But Smith’s point is distinct and important. In 2010 alone, Democrats lost 6 governorships, 6 Senate seats, 63 House seats, and more than 680 state legislative seats. That is thousands of elected officials, chiefs of staff, communications directors, policy directors, legislative aides, and field organizers.

And it is not a random sampling of talent: these staffers were, by definition, engaging the realities of swing districts at every level.

Smith also provides a little AI structure to this dynamic:

• Red waves in 2010 and 2014 didn’t just cost seats, it decimated the ecosystem of operatives and junior staff who should, by now, be in senior strategic positions.

• Survivor Bias: operatives who did succeed in that era were “disproportionately clustered in safe districts, and built their political instincts in low-risk environments. That’s who got promoted. So now, the dominant strategic class was filtered buy structural insulation … the problem isn’t just who’s missing, it’s what mindsets, urgencies, and adaptive instincts were never formed.”

This is a progressive interpretation of our current situation. We shouldn’t blame the individual agency of the staffer universe that’s messed everything up. It’s a structural problem!

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Down with the Open Primary Problem?

The talent problem connects directly to the last two primaries, as recently outlined by Biden advisor

Stef Feldman

in her must-read piece on “why Joe Biden shifted left.”

Writing in Vox, Eric Levitz has another big lesson from the recent Biden book: we cannot be confident the current Democratic ecosystem could produce a winning candidate from an open primary.

Original Sin is a sad book, made all the sadder by this week’s news that Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. It is also an infuriating read that illuminates the selfishness and self-delusions that led an unwell octogenarian to run for a second presidential term — and a team of sycophantic advisers to conceal his condition from the public (and possibly, even from himself).

This said, Original Sin’s core argument — that Biden’s reluctance to retire was the primary cause of Democrats’ defeat in 2024 — is unconvincing.

Levitz pins the blame on selecting Harris in the first place. Fumbling the baton handoff is a secondary concern when the next runner will lose ground the more the race goes on:

Recall that Harris’s 2020 primary campaign rendered her a weaker general election candidate four years later by associating her with unpopular positions on immigration, health care, and much else. Harris likely would have taken a more cautious approach to position-taking in a 2024 primary (as she did during her general election bid). But a contested primary would have forced her to either make high-profile concessions to Democratic interest groups with unpopular demands or else loudly reject those stances. Either way, she was liable to engender bitterness among one part of her coalition or another.

…

All of which is to say, it’s plausible that Biden dropping out so late actually redounded to his party’s benefit. His tardy departure enabled Harris to immediately focus on appealing to the general electorate. And although Harris’s advisers argue that their campaign’s truncated timeline hurt them, it’s not obvious that this is true. In many cases, presidential nominees have grown more unpopular the longer they’ve been in the national limelight: Hillary Clinton’s favorable rating fell from 64 percent in 2014 to 38 percent in 2016, according to Gallup’s polling.

And Harris appears to have suffered from the same basic trend: Her favorable rating was 48.8 percent last September but fell to 46.7 percent by Election Day, in RealClearPolitics’ polling average. It’s therefore possible that Harris benefited from having a shorter campaign calendar.

Our initial analysis of the late Kamala-for-Biden swap hit this point last year. Back in 2019, The New York Times wrote a pre-mortem just months into her presidential primary campaign that captures the upside of Harris as a natural centrist:

At her strongest, Senator Kamala Harris is forceful and pragmatic. She elates crowds in Iowa and South Carolina with her denunciations of President Trump, and spells out her policy agenda — on matters like restricting gun sales, reducing prescription drug prices and giving tax benefits to renters — in precise terms.

And it also captured a downside, about both Harris and the 2020 Democratic primary zeitgeist for extreme litmus tests. Here’s the next paragraph in the same article:

Then there is another version of Ms. Harris: unsteady when addressing litmus-test questions — the hypothetical or intensely ideological queries like whether a single-payer system should void all private insurance, or whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison. She is intensely resistant, sometimes to the point of visible discomfort, to her own party’s thirst for policies that would redraw the American economy and system of government.

Wait a second, Kamala Harris was “intensely resistant” “to the point of visible discomfort” at Democratic activists’ “thirst for policies” that would lead to massive changes?

Back to Vox:

in 2024, Democrats needed a nominee who either had distance from the White House or generational political talent (and ideally, both). By choosing a running mate in 2020 who 1) plainly had presidential ambitions and 2) was a suboptimal standard bearer for Democrats nationally, Biden made it extremely unlikely that his party would have what it needed in last year’s race.

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The talent pipeline problems are real. In the 2028 South Carolina primary, now just 990 days away, the vast majority of Democratic staffers will never have worked on a race on unfriendly turf.

But there is a 100% chance of an open primary. So what can we do to increase the chance a winner emerges?

We’ve written about one initiative before, the W.A.R. Room:

While learning how to win tough districts is knowable, you still have to learn it. And while a lot of progressive infrastructure may be counterproductive, there is still too little investment in training for how to win over swing voters. So we encourage any mid-career campaign and political professionals interested in learning and discussing how to win close elections in difficult environments to check out the W.A.R. Room.

Short for Wins Above Replacement, the sports-derived shorthand for overperforming candidates, the W.A.R. Room is a virtual masterclass series. The 8-week, virtual night school will be followed by an in-person gathering in DC June 4-5.

Each week consists of one 75-minute Zoom seminar and a homework assignment. Approximately 20 students will be assigned to a single instructor for the entire course; each instructor will teach the core curriculum through the lens of their expertise.

Enrollment for the program is currently closed, but the core curriculum and instructors are worth checking out. Shoutout to the W.A.R. Room organizers & instructors for tackling this structural problem. More of that is needed, because - despite MAGA’s best efforts - these 990 days may fly by.