“Two House Democrats in safe Democratic seats used a party-sponsored video call with donors on Wednesday to solicit help against progressive challengers,” the HuffPost reports.
“The conversation offers insight into how incumbent Democrats in deep-blue areas think about the activist left and use the resources of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ official campaign arm, to fight off competition within the party.”
Geoffrey Skelley: “On the one hand, more Americans identifying as independent probably doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Independents are often portrayed as more open-minded and less dogmatic in their political views. And in a nation whose founders feared factional politics, the value of political independence is also an attractive one to many Americans.”
“The problem is that few independents are actually independent. Roughly 3 in 4 independents still lean toward one of the two major political parties, and studies show that these voters aren’t all that different from the voters in the party they lean toward. Independents who lean toward a party also tend to back that party at almost the same rate as openly partisan voters.”
“Leading progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a choice after they won election in 2018 and expanded their ranks in 2020: challenge Democratic leaders from the sidelines, or get in the game,” Bloomberg reports.
“Now their decision to play by Congress’ rules is giving them clout in a government under unified Democratic control with President Joe Biden.”
“Members of Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called Squad are taking leadership roles in the House and building experience on Capitol Hill, turning them into not just ideological purists but also strategic legislators. They’re gently pushing a bolder Democratic strategy and meeting regularly with White House aides, bringing liberal dreams like a $15 federal minimum wage and a permanent child tax credit within reach.”
“President Joe Biden’s sprawling infrastructure plan doesn’t just attempt to turn decades-old progressive policy pursuits into law. Aides and operatives inside and out of the White House are coming to view it as an ambitious political play to cement, and even expand, the coalition of voters that delivered Democrats to power in November,” Politico reports.
A new Gallup poll found that 49% of respondents consider themselves Democrats or leaning that way, while 40% consider themselves Republicans or lean that way — the largest gap in almost a decade.
Gallup said the jump comes mostly from Republicans leaving the party at the end of President Donald Trump’s tenure. Only 25% of U.S. adults firmly identify with the Republicans, down from 29% late last year.
CNN: “The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday announced it will review the 2020 presidential nomination process, setting the stage for changes on how the party will choose who is at the top of the ticket in 2024.”
Matt Yglesias: “The urgency is understandable. But from a political standpoint, Democrats would be better off focusing on parts of their agenda that have more realistic prospects of success. It’s not just that the odds are low for passing even modest gun-control legislation. It’s that the kinds of measures that are politically feasible would have little effect without policing reform, while those that would save large numbers of lives are politically toxic.”
Andrew Sullivan: “One of my deepest concerns about Trump as president was that he was fundamentally distorting our field of political vision. By creating a caricature of some of the worst elements of the right, he intensified a stark polarization that actually empowered the extreme left in America, and helped its takeover of all our cultural institutions.”
“The most successful politicians in my lifetime — Reagan and Thatcher — shifted their opposition toward their own agenda, bestowing us with Clinton and Blair. In contrast, Trump actually helped radicalize the Democrats — as they swung, for understandable reasons, to the equal and opposite positions to his.”
Politico: “Buoyed by large donations from New York City billionaire Michael Bloomberg and a South Florida health care executive, Florida Democrats have stabilized their finances and are poised to move ahead with ambitious plans to expand their operations ahead of the 2022 elections.”
“Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz helped raise $2 million in the two months since he took over — enough to let the party wipe out much of its debts. Party officials say that Bloomberg gave $500,000, while Mike Fernandez, who was once a large Republican donor before President Donald Trump was elected, kicked in $100,000.”
“She’s looking at defining what a Western Democrat looks like. A Western populist Democrat that’s not owned by the unions or traditional Democratic constituencies (like) minorities and women. She’s not going to be so pigeonholed.”
— Ex-GOP strategist Chuck Coughlin, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).
“The Democratic National Committee said it raised the most money it ever has in February in a non-presidential election year, $8.5 million, according to a DNC spokesperson,” Politico reports.
Philip Bump: “In other words, it is not the case that these businesses are now going to send floats to participate in left-wing marches, certainly. It is also not the case that this shift reflects a broad embrace of Democratic Party principles. Cultural debates yield a very different calculus than issues like union membership, as we pointed out last week. A business like Coca-Cola, which expressed its concerns about Georgia’s voter registration changes and gave more to Democrats than Republicans through its PAC in 2020, is probably not going to actively advocate for increased worker rights.”
“Nonetheless, there’s been a shift. Corporate actors are more open to Democratic politicians and priorities than in years past.”
Matt Yglesias: “But obviously what made Obama a much better president than Bush is that he subscribed to Democratic Party ideology, not that he could beat Bush at a multiple-choice reading comprehension test. I know some dumb Democrats and some smart Republicans. I hope that when Republican Party politicians are in office, they listen to the smart Republicans about things rather than the dumb ones. But I’d rather have a dumb Democrat win a Senate race over a smart Republican any day. Smarts just don’t matter that much.”
Perry Bacon, Jr.: “On the left, we are now seeing the culmination of a number of movements and events that happened over the last decade: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sanders’s 2016 campaign, Donald Trump’s election, Trump’s presidency, the emergence of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ‘The Squad,’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s and Sanders’s 2020 campaigns, and the protests after George Floyd’s death during a police arrest. These events and movements built on one another. For example, it is likely the protests over Floyd’s death were so large, in part, because many of the people attending them had become more passionate about fighting racism in America because of Trump’s presidency.”
“The result has been a big shift in public opinion on the left — many of the views I noted above were held by few people and even fewer major public figures like politicians as recently as five years ago.
David Leonhardt: “So how have Democrats nonetheless won control of the Senate, allowing them to pass an ambitious bill last week that will reduce poverty, lift middle-class incomes, cut the cost of health insurance and more? There are two main answers.”
“First, the Democratic Party has been the more popular political party nationwide for most of the past three decades, and this national edge sometimes allows it to overcome the Senate’s built-in bias. Last year, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 percentage points. That was enough for him to win exactly half of the country’s 50 states and for Democratic Senate candidates to flip seats in Arizona and Georgia.”
“The second answer is more succinct: Joe Manchin and Jon Tester.”
Adam Serwer: “The future of American democracy depends on Joe Biden’s ability to show that even when the Republican Party loses, Americans who vote Republican do not.”
“The Democratic National Committee, in cooperation with the Biden White House, will kick off a sweeping effort to sell the newly signed Covid-19 relief package to a politically divided American people on Friday, releasing a new national ad bragging about the bill along with a detailed guide on how Democrats across the country should tout the legislation,” CNN reports.
“The multi-prong effort is aimed at turning the bill into something Democrats can run on, not run away from, in the coming years, including in the politically critical 2022 midterms.”
Politico: “A slate of uber-progressive Sanders allies, endorsed by the tightly organized Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, won control of the Nevada Democratic Party in leadership elections on Saturday. On the losing side was one of the most powerful forces in Democratic politics: the well-oiled operation run by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.”
“It’s a development that could have effects that stretch well beyond state borders — and a sign that Sanders himself is playing a long game in the battle for control of the Democratic Party.”
Aaron Blake: The extraordinary rise of the democratic socialists in Nevada.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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