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POLITICS
Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
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upset against a tainted Republican Senate can-
didate in deep-red Alabama.
Liberal voter intensity and grass-roots energy,
driven by anger at Trump, sometimes evokes com-
parisons to the Tea Party. But the resistance has
less money, is less organized, and therefore is less
able to bend the party in its direction. “I envy how
well-funded the right is,” says Karthik Ganapathy,
a spokesman for the progressive activist group
MoveOn. “It’s not the most glowing thing to say
about the progressive movement, but at this point
in the Tea Party cycle they were purifying the ranks.
And we’re still catching up to that.”
At the same time, the resistance is avoiding the
suicidal tendencies of the Tea Party, which nomi-
nated radical candidates who blew winnable races
for the Senate, such as Sharron Angle in Nevada,
Todd Akin in Missouri, and Richard Mourdock in
Indiana. In 2010 and 2012 the movement defeated
Republican incumbents with strong general elec-
tion appeal such as Delaware’s Mike Castle and
Indiana’s Dick Lugar, only to watch Democrats
win those races. “The only signiicant races we
won in 2010 were in races where Republicans ate
themselves alive,” says Senator Chris Murphy, a
Connecticut Democrat. “What should scare the hell
out of Republicans is that we have energy and rela-
tive unity. That’s hard, because with energy usually
comes some opposing forces, and that has not hap-
pened in any meaningful way so far.”
While red states such as Indiana andWest Virginia
drew the most attention on May 8, Democrats also
stopped populist insurgents in important swing
states like Ohio. Democratic leaders had worried
that their preferred candidate, former Obama oi-
cial Richard Cordray, might lose to Dennis Kucinich,
the outspoken populist ex-congressman who won
the backing of Our Revolution, an advocacy group
that emerged from the Bernie Sanders campaign.
But Cordray trounced Kucinich by 40 points. Rather
than representing a broad divide between two poles
of the party, Cordray says, he and Kucinich shared
many policy positions, lessening the temptation of
grass-roots activists to defect to his left-wing rival.
Trump is enough of a unifying force that
Democrats can paper over policy diferences. The
party also isn’t nearly as much of a top-down orga-
nization as the GOP, where big donors like the
Kochs exert outsize inluence. “Our donors have
much less impact on our grass-roots structure than
Republicans do,” Murphy says. “That’s one of the
outstanding questions for us: Are they still going
to have a big money advantage that we’ll have to
counter with an enthusiasm advantage?”
Progressives have found ways to move the
THE BOTTOM LINE Antipathy for Trump is energizing Democrats
and, so far at least, keeping the party from fracturing over internal
diferences or nominating extreme candidates.
policy conversation to the left, without attack-
ing moderates. Potential presidential contenders
such as New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Massachusetts’
Elizabeth Warren, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand,
and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders have endorsed single-
payer health care and a federal jobs guarantee, two
left-wing pipe dreams that were conined to the
fringes during Obama’s presidency. Progressives
are thrilled that a number of candidates—mostly in
safe blue districts—are running on those ideas this
year. “Democrats are being bolder and proposing
big solutions to big problems,” says Ari Rabin-Havt,
a senior adviser to Sanders. “We have been way too
limited in our thinking, and I’m very glad Democrats
are breaking out of that as a whole.”
By contrast, the Tea Party was less about policy
and more about capitalizing on cultural resentment
among older white voters. While its leaders styled
it as a iscal conservative movement, its goals were
rife with contradictions, such as reducing the dei-
cit while cutting taxes and preserving Medicare. In
the end, the true power of the Tea Party was in chan-
neling voters’ revulsion to demographic diversity, a
phenomenon embodied in the election of the irst
black president. “The Tea Party movement became
efective because they were able to vilify President
Obama and tag every Democrat to him,” says Mike
Caputo, Democratic minority whip in the West
Virginia House of Delegates. “If you were running
for dog catcher, they would do a mailer telling about
how you and Obama used to have lunch together.”
Democrats still face huge challenges, including a
depleted bench. The party lost more than 1,000 leg-
islative seats during Obama’s presidency. “The pro-
gressive movement hasn’t done enough to cultivate
the bench down-ballot,” Ganapathy says, adding that
the left is “lacking the sort of roster that we need”
to elect liberal candidates in higher-level races.
Democrats also have a geographical disadvantage. In
the House, GOP-drawn congressional districts have
stacked the deck against Democrats, whose voters
are concentrated in urban areas. In the Senate, red
states with fewer than a million people carry the
same weight as California, with 40 million residents.
“We have to simultaneously represent working-
class voters in Michigan and Brooklyn hipsters and
Southern California farm workers,” Ganapathy
says. “That’s a more diverse coalition, and it pres-
ents more of a challenge. If that means we’re going
to have some more discordant views in our party,
we have to be OK with it.”
—Sahil Kapur, with
Joshua Green and Tim Loh