Look for the January 7th Democrats
In the aftermath of insurrection, one big question remains unanswered: how can one political party save democracy?
Four years ago, on the first anniversary of January 6th, we wrote in The Bulwark on the need for “January 7th Democrats” who would move the party forward to win majorities.
That has not happened at the level required.
But there is good news: candidates continue stepping up to build that winning team, and an exciting data point came out yesterday - WelcomePAC-backed Jamie Ager is trailing by only one point against incumbent Republican Chuck Edwards in NC-11.
Back to 2022, for lessons that still apply today …
Three weeks after the January 6 insurrection, a high-profile faction on the left launched an aggressive recruitment campaign looking for candidates to primary a vulnerable incumbent.
The recruitment target? Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, fresh off casting his vote to impeach President Trump.
The recruiting entity? An offshoot of Justice Democrats, the progressive group aligned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
That’s right: The founders of Justice Democrats went on the offensive against Manchin—immediately after the insurrection—in an attempt to find a more liberal West Virginia Democrat to primary him.
West Virginia is one of the reddest states in the country, making Manchin an electoral miracle; if the group were to be successful in its effort to oust him with a left-wing primary challenger, that challenger would lose to any GOP nominee in the general. Meaning that these progressives watched the January 6 attack on democracy and decided that what America needed was . . . one more Republican senator.
The net result being that this progressive group had effectively joined forces with the GOP to hobble what could have been a movement of empathetic big-tent Democrats incentivizing red-to-blue party switching.
It’s hard to overstate just how significant an opportunity January 6 initially represented for Democrats: Donald Trump’s anti-democratic movement had, in violent and grotesque fashion, paraded its true colors in front of the nation and the world. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Republican party shed 12 points in favorability among its own voters while Democrats made a 7-point gain with independents. A disgraced Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook, his loudest megaphones. Even some of Trump’s most ardent and vocal propagandists from Fox News acknowledged in private that the president had crossed a serious line. Democrats were handed a chance to win over the middle of the country.
Instead, the biggest recruitment story in the aftermath of the insurrection was the far-left trying to recruit candidates to knock off a fellow Democrat.
Whose job was it to recruit on January 7?
An opposition party with a central command structure could have seized the moment to recruit and make lasting inroads with those conservatives and moderates who no longer recognized the GOP as their own. But “the Democrats” is more of a notional term than a real-world, central coordinating entity in the reality of present-day politics.
This truth is bigger than the old Will Rogers joke “I am not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” There are now organized political sub-parties with distinct brands. They even have their own swag — from MAGA hats to Warren Democrats mugs. In the store run by AOC’s Justice Democrats, you can buy gear that says “Time to Clean House and Senate” which is being sold at a moment when Democrats hold majorities in both.
We live in a political era defined by clear, identifiable factions. We just can’t expect “The Democrats” to be one of them—either as a brand or as an organized allocator of strategic resources that can do things like respond to January 6 with an aggressive recruitment campaign.
That work now falls to entities outside of strict party control. This reality can be leveraged to harm the party—as in the case of Justice Democrats primarying Joe Manchin—or to strengthen it.
So whose job was it to recruit those on the center and center-right who recoiled at the assault on the Capitol?
You can read the full piece in The Bulwark, and support Jamie Ager and the rest of the Win The Middle slate to make it your job to support those recruiting more voters to our side.