Democrats Battling Over Party’s Future

While much of the coverage of the primary races in 2016 focused on what was going on in the Republican Party as Donald Trump surprised critics, pundits, and politicians alike to win the Republican nomination over a field that included current and former Governors and Senators and political leaders such as Jeb Bush who had long been seen as formidable forces in the GOP, there was a battle going on in the Democratic Party. On the one side, there was, of course, Hillary Clinton, who represented the establishment of the party, had the backing of an overwhelming number of party insiders and elected officials and started out the campaign in such a strong position that it scared off serious challengers such as former Vice-President Biden and others who could have made the race difficult for her with appeals toward the minority voters and establishment politicians that largely made her primary win inevitable. The other side of the battle in the Democratic Party was represented by Bernie Sanders, who ironically isn’t even officially a Democrat. In part because of his ability to draw large crowds and in part due to personal factors, Sanders did far better in the primary than anyone could have realistically expected when he entered the race. Because of Sanders’ success, Hillary Clinton was forced to shift her own message to the left to such a degree that it arguably hurt her in the General Election. Nonetheless, the fundamental battle between the Democratic establishment represented by Clinton and the upstart progressives represented by Sanders became the defining

Since November, the battle inside the Democratic Party between progressives and the establishment continues, and there’s every indication that it will continue well into the 2018 election cycle. Toward that end, forces on both sides are beginning to make their arguments for which the direction the party needs to take. In the short-term at least, inside party forces seem to think that they’ll be successful by standing in opposition to President Trump, who remains very unpopular, and the Republicans. Progressives, meanwhile, continue to argue that the party needs to follow the example of Sanders and other politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and move to the left and adopt a platform decidedly to the left of center. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, meanwhile, argue in today’s New York Times that the Democratic Party needs to take a lesson from the Bill Clinton era and move back toward the center:

Central to the Democrats’ diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party’s shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs. They saw the party being mired too often in political correctness, transgender bathroom issues and policies offering more help to undocumented immigrants than to the heartland.



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