Move to the Center, My Ass

 

In the run-up to last Tuesday’s election, it was hard to avoid the overpaid pundits repeating the oldest and laziest clichés in the pundit handbook:

“Democrats need to move to the center.” “Democrats are out of touch with voters.” “Democrats can’t just talk about Trump and expect to win.”

As it turns out, they don’t, they’re not, and they most definitely can, respectively.

But while the election blew those clichés to bits, the “Democrats-in-disarray” story remains a staple of modern journalism. In the week since the election the same pundits, not content to have been wrong before it, have moved on to stories with headlines like “Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think” and “Election Wins Tuesday Won’t Ease a Divided Democratic Party’s Troubles.”

One of the more obvious purveyors of this slop has been, no surprise, the New York Times, which is trying desperately to gin up a Democrat-versus-Democrat narrative to carry them into the next election season. Given the Times’ quisling tendencies since Trump resumed power, it’s offensive that they should presume to tell Democrats anything, and I recommend we not listen.

But according to the Times, the Democratic Party is hopelessly split over a “vision” that will ultimately be either “center-left or left-wing.” They’re putting Tuesday’s landslide winners into buckets, with so-called moderates Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in the “center-left” bucket, and Zohran Mamdani in the “left-wing” bucket. There’s no mention of their opponents, or why Republicans got thumped, only about the trouble all that damn winning has caused:

These Democrats are chafing over style, substance and strategy — just as the party’s ideological direction is at an inflection point.

This is largely bullshit. Yes, Democrats will always chafe over “style, substance and strategy” — it’s in their nature and it’s why we like them. And yes, there is a divide in the Democratic party. But it’s not about ideology at all. Mostly it’s about age. There is an entire generation — mine, as it turns out — that is well past its sell-by date, and needs to move out of the way. They know who they are.

But as to “ideological direction,” at the risk of repeating myself, Democrats are sitting in the very center of the center.

If you define the center — which few people bother to do — as what most people want and expect from their government, you couldn’t get more centered than the Democratic Party right now. Over and over, in poll after poll, in survey after survey, these are the things Americans say they want, even the ones who’ve been bamboozled into voting against them. Say them with me now:

Human rights, economic fairness, a working safety net, healthcare for all, care for the environment, bodily autonomy, responsible government, national security, and a few other things that are so obvious, it’s pathetic we’re even having this conversation.

Every Democrat, almost without exception, is in favor of these things. Every Republican, almost without exception, is against them.

So let’s be clear. There is little or no ideological daylight between, say, Spanberger and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not on any of these issues. Labels like “progressive” and “moderate” have virtually no meaning when the only real issue is the survival of the American Experiment.

That goes double for “socialist,” a word that needs to be retired, since it only has meaning to right-wing nutjobs who use it to bludgeon Democrats. I doubt even Bernie Sanders knows what it means anymore. To me, the only mistake Mamdani made was sticking that stupid label on himself.

But right now, there are too many Democratic consultants out there urging candidates to be less confrontational on such issues as transgender rights and immigration policy. And indeed, there are many electoral districts, districts that Trump won, where a Democrat like Spanberger or Sherill might be wise not to bring those up.

But there’s a big difference between not bringing it up and throwing immigrants and trans kids under the bus. On both of these issues, we needn’t worry about either of these new governors, no matter what they said or didn’t say on the campaign trail.

One of the more interesting things about these two relative newcomers is that they’re both leaving jobs in Congress, for jobs where they actually have to do something. And we get to see what they actually do.

In the case of Sherill, she’ll be governor of a state where immigration issues will be front and center. Stephen Miller and ICE have big plans for New Jersey, home both of high concentrations of immigrants and of the transportation infrastructure to deport them. Sherill has deliberately placed herself in the middle of that fight.

Neither Sherill nor Spanberger are as “moderate” as the Times would have us believe. By the same token, Mamdani is hardly the foaming-at-the-mouth communist that everybody besides most of the New York City electorate seems to think he is.

But this election wasn’t about ideology. It was about Trump, full stop. Just as the next three will be. There is no other issue. It’s all about what Rachel Bitecofer calls “negative partisanship.” People vote their hate, never more than now. And there’s enough to hate surrounding Trump to sweep away all other considerations.

In California, Trump was the only reason to vote. The gerrymander proposition was the only thing on the ballot, and the advertising around it couldn’t have been more in-your-face: “Stick it to Trump” was literally the message. Roughly 6.5 million voters swarmed to the polls to do just that.

If you don’t think the results were about Trump, ask yourself this: Who among those voters even knew what a gerrymander was? How many of them understood the nuances of modifying a law that was designed to be fair, but needed to be made unfair just because Texas had gone rogue and forced California into a position where it had to save democracy. You’d think that would be a bit complicated for today’s electorate, yet 6.5 million people showed up, and they showed up angry. The lesson here is that any message about sticking it to Trump is bound to be a winner.

And speaking of gerrymanders, Tuesday’s tsunami exposed what could be a fatal flaw in the Texas-inspired Republican strategy, which is that legislators can stack a district any way they want, but they still have to win that district.

In other words, Republicans can make sure the district leans Republican, but if enough people in that district have lost health insurance, SNAP payments, veterans’ benefits, a federal job, or perhaps their farm, then there’s a good chance that even the thoroughly brainwashed will figure out which party made that happen. That’s when the gerrymandering starts to backfire.

Trump has whined that he wasn’t on the ballot, and that’s why Republicans did so poorly. As usual, he’s deluding himself. He was on every ballot that was cast that day. Just as he’ll be on every ballot next year, and the year after.

At the rate Trump is alienating just about everyone, Democrats don’t have to move to the center. The center is moving to them.