Wanted! - A moderate US-Democrat with progressive ideas

After 10 years of the world turning around Donald Trump, after six years with a malicious narcissist in the White House, with a war he can’t win and inflation he can’t tame, one should think that US-Democrats would easily win the midterm elections on November 6 of this year. But maybe not. They might retake the House of Representatives, but it is by no ways certain that they will also be able to control the Senate. That is because there are still too many members of the party joining the internal fight between the “party establishment” and the “insurgent left” without noticing that they’re only reciprocating the terms and stereotypes used by the media and the populist right. Yes, there is a sizeable shift in the political mood of the country, and Democrats will probably turn Donald Trump into a lame-duck president for the rest of his second term. But if the Democratic Party will find the discipline to select a moderate candidate with progressive ideas to win the presidential election in 2028 is still an open question. 

In January of 1991 I was sitting in the Burlington office of the newly elected Congressman for Vermont with the name of Bernie Sanders. After eight years as the mayor of this neat town of 50.000 inhabitants this activist turned politician would become US-Senator in 2007 and is today, at the age of 85, the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history. Interviewing him about his time as a mayor and his reasons for running as an independent I was struck by him presenting his “socialist” views as simple bread-and-butter issues, by his intricate understanding of race and class, and by his practical and political instincts. This newly elected representative of the American people, I thought in 1991, was as authentic as a politician could be. 

Bernie Sanders later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, coming in second both times. But his influence moved the Democrats to the left, and you could argue that he has been a more consequential figure for the Democratic Party over the last ten years than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris have been. Not even being the member of that party. 

But how do you achieve this kind of authenticity in today’s fragmented politics driven by permanent polling and radicalised discourse on social media? Definitely not by fighting for your influence within the Democratic Party at the cost of unity, consensus and the image of your party. But this is what has been happening in too many contests of this topsy-turvy primary season. 

The Democratic party establishment had been panicking because of the new popularity of mostly young left-wing candidates and created a 15-million-dollar-fund to countervail the efforts of the “Democratic Socialist Alliance”. The DSA used to be a fringe group in Democratic politics whose membership has risen from about 5000 in the early 2010s to more than 100.000 after the remarkable campaign success of New York’s youthful new mayor Zoran Mamdani showed that you can win on a “socialist” ticket. At least in New York City. 

“I can’t be in the same party”, railed former Clinton-Advisor James Carville against one of the DSA candidates in a New York, with other figures of the donor dependent Democratic wing adopting the language of internal civil war against those who proved that you could win a primary against much better funded mainstream candidates. Yes, it is a fight about power inside the party, but it is also driven by the not unjustified fear of moderate Democrats that “socialist” candidates will not be able to attract the independent voters needed to win the few contested and decisive House and Senate seats. 

So, what is “socialist” about the DSA and other left-wing candidates of the Democratic Party? When you listen to Bernie Sanders it is nothing more than ordinary European Social Democracy with a welfare state including universal healthcare and free college; being pro-union and against large corporations and mega donors. When you look at the DSA program it promises to abolish the police and prisons, removing the presidency and Senate and overturning America’s capitalist free-market system. And when you listen to DSA- and other left-wing- candidates it is a hotch-potch of progressive demands and some crazy ideas or slogans they have used on WhatsApp - like abolishing Thanksgiving or the border. Thus, it is no wonder that Republicans will have a field day in the now beginning election campaign quoting from this reservoir of youthful and undisciplined utterances of those candidates in the past. 

Yet what explains the surprising successes of left-wing candidates in the democratic primaries? Firstly, they listened in their door-to-door campaigns and promised voters to help with everyday issues. Secondly, they have shown impressive organising power mobilizing a democratic base highly frustrated by the top-down and money-driven campaigns of their party’s establishment. And thirdly, most of them have moved from “identity to affordability issues, from issues of race to issues of class, even if there are still social media-traces of formerly held “woke” convictions. 

Although, it must be said, most of the DSA candidates won mainly because of college-educated urban voters and are representing the “working class” more in statements than with their biographies. If that will be rated as “authentic” in the face of a Republican election campaign, which will inevitably label them “communists”, is still to be seen. The failure of the DSA to rename itself in less threatening terms shows two things: the disproportionate influence of its extremist minority and the lack of a term for more egalitarian politics in the American vocabulary. 

Under Donald Trump the Republican Party might have moved to the far right, but at the same time the corruption in his administration and the excesses of neoliberalism have softened the public’s aversion against anything left of centre. One does not have to believe the Gallup poll that 38% of independent voters now have a positive view of “socialism”, but there is a growing belief among young people who feel - without having ever read Karl Marx - that “capitalism is no longer working”. Even somebody like Vice-President J.D. Vance recently felt he had to declare himself “pro labor”. 

It is not that under Donald Trump half of America has turned fully MAGA. Many of his voters just wanted a change and then checked out of politics. It was more the failure of Democrats to find the right messaging and convincing candidates who - for all their talk about identity – could explain what they stood for in such turbulent times. They could not. 

Yet now, with Trump’s poll ratings having dropped to 32% - and almost all his attempts to manipulate the electoral register being rejected by the courts - the chances of Democrats, even progressive ones, to win back a fair number of seats in the House of Representatives are pretty good. Yet in the six highly contested Senate seats in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas too much identity, ideology or ill-discipline in the behaviour of democratic candidates can still endanger their and the party’s success. Like in Maine where the first choice of a spurious candidate backfired after he had to withdraw because of multiple allegations. 

In Michigan Abdul El-Sayed has been swaying the Democratic audience with his trademark tight black T-shirt, great communication skills and populist leftism; but it remains to be seen if the retraction of some of his former controversial statements will be enough to beat his republican opponent. And in ultra-conservative Texas a very bold and eloquent evangelical Democrat is polling close to the deeply embedded if corrupt Republican candidate. These campaigns and races show that fake authenticity does not work and that real character will be measured differently in New York, Detroit and Dallas. 

According to most polls and observers the midterm elections are for the Democrats to lose. But this is less because of the strength of their party, its program or its presentation but more because of the weakness of the Trump Administration’s standings. And Democrats have managed to lose winnable contests before. The Democratic leaderships “defining problem”, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker, “is how to manage the movement that Senator Bernie Sanders started a decade ago, whose populist appeal and generational momentum it needs in this anti-institutional moment, but whose principles it does not fully share”. 

The Democratic Party also needs a convincing win of both houses of Congress in November to prepare for a decisive take-over of the Presidency in 2028 since it will require clear majorities to correct the wrong turns taken by the Republicans in domestic and foreign policy and to repair the damage done to American democracy under Donald Trump. 

This won’t be done by campaigning as usual or by suggesting a purely progressive strategy but only by recentring towards policies acceptable to a clear majority of the US-electorate. There are enough issues to be taken up by a more aggressive Democratic Party, from corruption to the backlash against data centres. But it will require a new generation of Congressional leaders, and a new language sprinkled with some old values to generate a sizeable shift toward the Democratic brand. 

And it would take a presidential candidate who combines the attempted bipartisanship of Joe Biden with the left-leaning authenticity of a Bernie Sanders. In short, the Democratic candidate for President in 2028 must be a moderate with progressive ideas. That is all a post-Trump America will be ready to take.