Laboratories of Centrism
Centrists were invisible in DC during the McCarthy-Gaetz speaker fight, but innovating in state legislatures across the country.
Speakerships are usually decided on election night, with January votes in the US Capitol — and state capitals around the country — just a celebratory formality.
Kevin McCarthy’s slim GOP majority unfolded differently, with C-SPAN becoming must-see TV during January’s speakership vote. That drama featured anti-democracy extremists in all the starring roles. The semi-fascists held all the leverage in the negotiation, without a whiff of leverage coming from the bipartisan center.
As a result, Kevin McCarthy had nothing in the center to turn to, even when he only needed a handful of votes.
That same week, state legislatures dealing with extreme right fringes proved that a different outcome was possible. In Ohio, Democratic representatives in the state legislature — including all WelcomePAC-endorsed candidates — joined with the moderate third of the Republican caucus to knock off the presumptive far-right choice for the chamber’s leadership. That led to headlines like Statehouse ‘coup’ — Ohio GOP members bitterly divided by deal with Democrats to elect ‘moderate’ House Speaker.
In Ohio’s neighboring House of Representatives, a bipartisan group went even more independent in electing a moderate leader (headline: “Surprise in Pennsylvania: Republicans Back a (Former?) Democrat for Speaker”).
Far from these Big Ten headlines, Alaska’s state Senate took it a step further still with a formal caucus (headline: “In new bipartisan Alaska Senate majority of 17, members vow compromise and consensus”). The group’s cross-partisan leadership “formalizes what had been a de facto coalition in recent years comprising Senate Democrats and the more moderate Republicans”. This built on the Ranked Choice Voting-infused victories from moderates over Trump Republicans in both the Senate (Lisa Murkowski) and House (Mary Peltola). The RCV process allowed for clarity in seeing the crossover voters who split their ballots while ranking.
Back in DC, such bipartisanship never made an appearance on Capitol Hill.
Kevin McCarthy had no moderate, bipartisan alternative to the extortion artists the Freedom Caucus. In negotiations-speak, he had no “BATNA” (“best alternative to a negotiated agreement”) while the lack of an agreement gave Matt Gaetz what he wanted most: attention.
Into that vacuum stepped… nothing. Despite McCarthy needing only one hand to count the votes necessary for crossing the aisle, nothing emerged to strengthen his hand against the extremists on the far-right. Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Bernstein framed the opportunity:
In Harrisburg and Columbus, Republicans had the majority of votes in the chamber but moderate leverage came from outside the GOP caucus and iced out the extreme right.
In DC, bipartisan moderates did not wave the white flag — they didn’t show up to the battle at all.
Centrist politics has evolved over the past two decades from a focus on making democracy work better to a banding together of unlikely bedfellows to protect democracy itself.
It is often said that states are the laboratories of democracy. In recent years, states have also become Laboratories of Autocracy, the prescient warning advanced by former Ohio Democratic Party chair (and WelcomePAC Ohio Advisory Board member) David Pepper.
DC was dismal again last week. Centrists had no bat signal to flash, and no BATNA.
Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert won. But many of their allies in states lost to moderate Democrats — on election day in November and again in January.