Oregon Fail
Oregon Fail
Far-left primary meddling in Oregon this cycle cost Democrats a seat Joe Biden won handily in 2020.
In today’s New York Times, Tom Edsall dials into the “internecine combat” between the Democratic Party’s mainstream and far-left factions.
On one side of the “debate” is Team Normal. WelcomePAC is quoted alongside Third Way and four political scientists highlighting how objective data and academic research overwhelmingly demonstrate that moderates do better:
“Far-left political science deniers refuse to accept the fact that moderate candidates still outperform those at the extremes. While there may be fewer swing voters now, the closeness of elections maximizes their importance. All the data points to moderate outperformance — from political science research to election results to common sense.”
Those far-left political science deniers make up the other side of the “debate”. When asked about how many seats they’ve flipped from red to blue (zero), the executive director at Our Revolution demurred:
“This was not the goal of Our Revolution. Our Revolution’s goal in the 2022 elections was to push the Democratic Caucus in a progressive direction…”
Justice Democrats’ communications director echoed that message:
“We haven’t run really races in those areas. We’ve been focused on blue seats…”
In other words, one side focuses on beating Republicans (keeping the majority and averting fascist catastrophe) while the other… zeroes in on beating Democrats (specifically, those who they deem lack sufficient purity).
If the far-left’s preoccupation with knocking off impure Democrats had stayed in deep-blue seats, we could agree to disagree. But as you can see in the latest recruitment hype video from Justice Democrats, the far-left is jeopardizing Democratic incumbents in potentially vulnerable districts.
In fact, primary meddling by Elizabeth Warren, Our Revolution, and the Working Families Party cost Democrats at least one seat this cycle.
The OR-05 Saga
Heading into the 2022 cycle, Oregon’s fifth congressional district had been held by Kurt Schrader, an incumbent moderate Democrat who won each of his races by 7+ points for the past decade. Not only did Schrader proudly tout his membership in the centrist Blue Dog, New Democrat, and Problem Solvers caucuses, but he became a controversial figure on the left when he voted against parts of President Biden’s agenda.
Unable to bear the prospect of two more years of insufficient progressivism from Schrader, the far-left stepped in to make him pay. Despite the fact that President Biden had endorsed him for re-election — and warnings that a more progressive candidate would jeopardize a Democratic seat — Elizabeth Warren, Our Revolution, and the Working Families Party threw their weight behind a progressive Democratic primary challenger named Jamie McLeod-Skinner.
What had McLeod-Skinner been up to during the decade of Schrader’s incumbency? In 2012, she was a Santa Clara city councilor (yes, Santa Clara, California — 600 miles south of OR-05). By 2017, McLeod had moved to Phoenix, Oregon, where she was fired from her job as city manager after four months due to staff complaints. In 2018, McLeod-Skinner lost a bid for Oregon’s 2nd Congressional seat. In 2020, she lost in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s Secretary of State.
In 2022, after losing the prior two cycles in other races, McLeod-Skinner managed to topple Schrader in one of the cycle’s biggest primary upsets.
What happened in November? McLeod-Skinner lost the general election by 2.2 points. Next month, her opponent will become the first Republican to represent OR-05 in 20 years.
Remember Ruy’s Razor
In the immediate aftermath of the election, The Intercept ran a piece bashing the Democratic establishment for failing to support Jamie McLeod-Skinner. The crux of the argument was that McLeod-Skinner trailed her GOP opponent by only two points and could have won the race if the Democrats’ campaign committees had only stepped in to save her. The headline was even more dramatic, pointing out that the party establishment’s “controversial decision” not to invest in McLeod-Skinner “could cost Democrats the House” (at the time it was published, some of the closest races had yet to have been called).
But this line of argument is entirely backwards! The new OR-05 should not have been a battleground in a year Democrats were within five seats: Joe Biden carried the newly-drawn district handily in 2020, beating Donald Trump by nearly nine points. McLeod-Skinner’s two-point loss in 2022 means she lagged behind Biden by 11 points in the same district lines. The far-left primaried Schrader, then cried foul for not being bailed out. The Intercept was right at the time to argue that a “controversial decision in Oregon could cost Democrats the House” — but that was the far-left’s decision to knock off a well-established incumbent in a district Democrats should have been able to carry.
We’re not arguing Schrader is invincible, nor are we saying he’s perfect. But when it comes to what happened in OR-05, we should not buy the far-left’s over-explaining. What the far-left did in OR-05 was akin to lighting a house on fire and then complaining that the fire department didn’t show up on time. They successfully primaried a moderate incumbent and then lost a district that Biden had carried by a nine-point margin just the cycle before. That’s on them.
As to why Jamie McLeod-Skinner lost a Biden +9 district? There’s no need to get out a chalkboard and go all Glenn Beck.
“Occam's Razor” holds that the most straightforward explanation for a given phenomenon is the likeliest. We proposed Ruy’s Razor last year, arguing that Occam’s Razor applies to electoral politics. If your opponent’s core message is that you’re an out-of-touch progressive and then you dramatically underperform the moderate who won your district just two years earlier, it follows that your opponent’s message clearly had something to do with it. It’s not rocket science.
In the case of OR-05, McLeod-Skinner’s Republican opponent opened up one ad stating “progressives like Jamie McLeod-Skinner don’t get it” and arguing that “their radical ideas and out-of-control spending always lead to the same thing”:
In another ad, McLeod-Skinner’s opponent aggressively linked her to far-left slogans like “Defund the Police” and the “Green New Deal”:
Whereas Schrader had spent years developing an independent brand and a reputation for taking a stand against his own party (including against Biden’s doomed $3.5 trillion Build Back Better spending package), McLeod-Skinner had no such record to fall back on. Instead, she had a California background, the emphatic support of high-profile far-left candidates and groups, and the baggage of having primaried a moderate incumbent from the left.
It’s impossible to know how the race would’ve broken down with Schrader in it, but it’s easy to imagine that a brand-differentiated moderate (with the advantage of incumbency) would have done far better in a cycle where precisely these kinds of candidates overperformed.
Beware the Progressive Penalty
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve heard it before.
A year ago, we wrote about the saga of Kara Eastman, the only Justice Democrats-backed candidate to run in a swing district in 2020. Eastman beat a moderate Democrat in the primary, ran on a far-left platform, and lost a Nebraska swing seat that Joe Biden won handily at the top of the same ticket that year. Like McLeod-Skinner in 2022, Eastman lagged behind Biden by double digits.
The pattern here bears out something political scientists and swing seat operatives have known for years: there is a clear electoral penalty for perceived extremism — and primary meddling by the far-left can cost Democrats otherwise-winnable seats.
This is our political reality. The far-left political science deniers we discussed in the Times are free to do as they please, but they should be honest about their aims. If they’re warned against primarying someone perceived to be too moderate, they do it anyway, and then they underperform Joe Biden, they should just come out and say what they clearly believe: in the far-left worldview, it’s worth the risk of losing a Democratic seat to have a chance at electing someone more progressive.
Democracy is on the line. Every seat is immensely valuable. The Progressive Penalty is real and puts even solidly Democratic seats at risk. Now is no time to risk incurring that penalty.