This summer, I volunteered to help a primary-election challenger to one of Delaware's two Democratic senators.
The experience reminded me why I don't fit into the unworldly organizations run by progressives. The longer I had a view into the candidate's, the faster darkened my view of her chances of winning.
Prudently, House leaders are warning fellow Democrats to shun leftist messages. “If we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, and socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” Rep. Jim Clyburn said on a phone call Thursday.
No sucker for lost causes, four weeks out from the primary, I quit.
The trouble with the campaign, as I saw it, was two-fold:
- The candidate. Cast in the image of AOC, she was a bright, brassy outsider who championed progressive talk. But she had no strategy for getting elected and put most of her efforts into landing endorsements from disgruntled community organizers and sketchy, far-left websites.
- The staff. All twenty-somethings, the campaign staffers were sincere, but overbearing, and lacked all understanding of Delaware's centrist electorate.
She captured only 27 percent of Democrats' votes in the primary—a measurably worse showing than that of the progressive candidate for the Senate in the 2018 primary. Her campaign was deemed by the media to be a flop and a death toll for the progressive movement in Delaware.
Democrats everywhere should heed the lesson: lean center.
Despite Biden's victory, last week's election was another consummate flop, failing to capture the US Senate for Democrats and dramatically thinning the party's majority in the US House of Representatives. It also left statehouses around the country in GOP hands.
And so are pundits. "This election for the most part was an absolute repudiation of the Democratic Party as a brand," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough told Fox News yesterday.
