Unity Eve
After Kamala Harris announces her VP selection, every Democrat will rally around the ticket.1
Until then, we glimpse of the intense intra-party factional battles that emerge during the selection of presidential tickets. Headlines like “Sanders pushes Harris on progressive agenda“ and “Sanders Backs Walz in Veepstakes” and “Progressives sound alarm as Shapiro VP stock rises” highlight this struggle.
For the third time in eight years, Bernie Sanders' wing of the party has lost a primary but continues to push the nominee leftward. Unlike previous primaries, where Democratic voters rejected the left, the post-primary push has had significant ramifications beyond the primaries. With no competitive primary in 2024, the VP selection holds more importance, potentially shaping the national party into 2032 and beyond.
The Bernie faction punched above its weight in 2016 and 2020. But the Far Left Has Peaked, Kamala is Moderate, and Democrats are poised to finally close the door on the 2020 primary disaster. With some hard work and good luck, the VP selection may slam that door shut for years to come.
The Recent Forever Primaries
The 2016 and 2020 primaries lasted well after the last votes were cast.
In 2016, a head-to-head factional battle pitted the ultimate credentialed insider against a literal socialist. While the socialist lost, Democratic elites took the wrong lessons from Hillary vs. Bernie. They were wrong twice, first by pivoting left after the primary (NBC News: Hillary Clinton Indicates No Pivot to Center For General Election) and then again after the devastating loss by nurturing a leftist ecosystem celebrated by everyone (except voters).
In 2020, those misinterpretations manifested in a bizarre leftward lurch that dragged nearly every candidate away from the preferences of the Democratic primary electorate - except a 77 year old whose campaign mantra was to stay off Twitter. But the centrist nominee again refused a pivot to the center, instead forming a “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force.”
The COVID-year presidential stretch run was a bit of a blur, with relief in the days after the election giving way to anxiety over the transition of power. But the election results and ideological aftermath were clear: after under-performing the polls and losing House seats in a narrow victory, Biden largely followed the Bernie path all the way to his finals days as a presidential candidate.
Left Out of Control
Five years after announcing his campaign for the presidency, and 52 years after his first election to the United States Senate, Joe Biden announced a rent control proposal on July 16, 2024.
In an alternate version of history, the rent control proposal represents the final victory in leftist battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. A president elected as a moderate, holed up in his beach house with longtime aides - including the former CEO of the ultra-moderate Democratic Leadership Council - announcing a plan at odds with any pragmatic reading of policy or the electorate.
Despite being rejected by voters in the 2020 primary, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had in many ways won the White House. The “Biden-Sanders Task Force” infused the Biden Administration with the staff of Warren, the language of the Wesleyan faculty lounge, and too often the policy of the Twitter Left. The rent control deal was part of a spate of leftist policymaking meant to animate the base, and the final rejection of what had won Biden the nomination and White House in the first place: persuading voters in the middle.
The plan, which included the court-packing proposal Biden had previously rejected - and been angered at Ed Markey for pitching during the stretch run in 2020 - was hatched through an electoral deal for the support of Sanders and the Squad.
But it was not a final victory born out of strength. It was the final spasm of a misreading of an electorate, and of a movement that persuaded some elites - nonprofit advocacy leaders, philanthropists, a subset of mainstream media, and a battalion on Twitter-obsessed small donors - to reject what voters told pollsters and cast ballots.
Axios called it Biden’s “leap left to survive”. As every other 2020 primary rival found it, the leap left failed.
Kamala’s Party-wide Pivot
Tomorrow, after just three weeks after Biden’s rent control proposal, Kamala Harris will announce her moderate running mate. In just twenty days, Kamala has rejected the lowlights of the 2020 primary and doubled down on the immigration and energy accomplishments that the Biden Administration was cautious to promote. It is clear: Kamala is Moderate.
The crop of VP contenders has, like most everything else in presidential nominating processes, settled along ideological fault lines. But the allegedly progressive pick shows just how much the Democratic Party has returned to normalcy.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has emerged as the pick of progressives. And the leftists are juxtaposing Walz against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the headliner of moderates under consideration with various attacks incoming from leftists (along with Senator Mark Kelly and, to a lesser extent, Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary Pete Buttigieg).
But, as
notes about the progressive pick’s time in Congress, “The thing about Walz is that when he had a more conservative constituency as a House member he did very well there through the magic of having more conservative stances on key issues.”Walz’s vote history backs it up - both in winning over swing voters, and how he voted in Congress. For the latter, check out the ideological ranking DW-Nominate, which plots members of congress on a liberal to conservative scale on economics (X axis) and other votes (Y axis). And consider he was endorsed by the NRA in 2016.
This ideological visualization is from one of Walz’s last sessions of Congress; like other years his blue dot is right-of-center compared to his Democratic colleagues (represented by the ~200 data points on the left).
Search it for yourself here
Moderates Must Keep Winning
Welcome was launched during - and because of - the insanity of the 2020 Democratic primary. Our first WelcomeStack post captures why we need a more aggressive center-left:
We were motivated by two concerns: the fragility of our democracy, and the narrow path to Democratic Party control that too many on the left and in the media seemed eager to ignore. We wanted to do our part to widen that path, increasing both democratic participation and the chances of Democratic success.
We wish we were wrong: that our democracy was stronger, and that a Democratic landslide was guaranteed despite a primary process focused on ever-escalating progressive dreams.
But by the Fall of 2019, the data was clear. And now in February 2021, it is even more obvious that our democracy is in trouble and the Democratic Party is vulnerable to mistaken narratives, insular bubbles, and ambitious risk-takers.
That is why we are re-launching The Welcome Party.
Three and a half years after our re-launch, it is clear the intra-party between the 2020 primary winners and losers will continue. Here’s a POLITICO headline from this morning:
Vice President Kamala Harris is already starting to break with the party’s left flank.
Harris has been able to keep a low profile on many issues that cleave Democrats. But in the short period it took for her to lock down the party’s presidential nomination, she has already staked out positions … that buck progressives who hoped she would go further than President Joe Biden.
To win in November, Kamala needs to continue closing the door on the regrettable 2020 primary. The leftist overreach has been defeated, but not forgotten. As clips from Republican senate candidate Dave McCormick demonstrate, the insanity of that time will live on in living rooms from now through the election.
Principles, not Purity
Now is the time to re-state what we knew then: the principles that many of the 2020 presidential nominees had - including Vice President Kamala Harris - have remained steadfast in support of freedom, opportunity, and patriotism. And we need to affirm that while those principles were often manifest in begrudging, halting, and awkward nods towards the unreality of the 2020 zeitgeist, the principles have remained while pragmatism has again been prioritized.
But there is a reason the “leftist Kamala” clips in the McCormick video are choppy, halting, and often rely on the words of the questioner more than on Kamala’s own words. She was resistant. Because Kamala, personally, is moderate. And the 2020 primary was ridiculous.
But the 2020 primary is now over. As that primary started, we wrote in NBC News that the media was wrong and a moderate would win. It ended with Biden taking a “leap left to survive”.
Regardless of which faction is celebrating tomorrow, the party will be united through November.
But, as we learned from the last primary, the factional winning can’t stop there for the winning to continue.
Tim Miller has a good summary of why the VP pick won’t actually “divide” the party: The Democrats Will Unite Behind Any VP Choice (even if your niche corner of the internet will not)