The recent string of primary victories from left-wing insurgents are not ushering out moderates, but fellow progressives. The post The Fight in the Democratic Party Is Not Left vs. Center, But Left vs. Left appeared first on Washington Monthly.
After 15-term Denver-area U.S. Representative Diana DeGette lost her Democratic primary to the 29-year-old Democratic Socialists of America member Melat Kiros, the socialist streamer Hasan Piker, drink in hand, crowed, “Thank you for not retiring Diana DeGette … and hand select[ing] your replacement, which would’ve been a cookie-cutter neoliberal faux progressive Democrat.” He threw in some advice to Democratic incumbents: “Stop fighting the left.”
But the candidates Piker has been cheering are the ones fighting the left.
Last week’s two defeated Democratic House incumbents, Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, were victims of “Tammamdani Hall”—as Peter Sterne has dubbed the budding political machine of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s DSA chapter. Yet both of the vanquished are in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where Espaillat is Deputy Whip. Both want to abolish ICE, in the case of Espaillat, since 2018.
But they did run afoul of Tammamdani Hall in two ways. Neither endorsed Mamdani’s mayoral run during last year’s primary. Espaillat backed former Governor Andrew Cuomo until his primary flameout, then switched to Mamdani. Goldman supported the wonky state Senator Zellnor Myrie, who won 1 percent of the primary vote.
And both were tagged as too sympathetic to Israel. They stopped short of calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide,” preferring “horrific” as a descriptor, and both had received campaign funding support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The substantive difference between Goldman and his victorious opponent, Brad Lander, the city’s former comptroller, was minimal. Both identify as Zionists who support a two-state solution; Lander even stopped paying DSA dues after October 7 because of the group’s vehemently anti-Israel posture. But of the two candidates, only Lander was willing to accuse Israel of genocide. Espaillat also supports a two-state solution, yet he lost to pro-Palestinian activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who once posted on social media, “Israel doesn’t exist!”
DSA uses the Israel-Palestine conflict as a progressive litmus test, and clearly more and more Democratic voters—repulsed by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and his militant expansionism—are following suit. But historically, support for the continued existence of Israel and a two-state solution are squarely progressive positions, and those positions can be held simultaneously with criticism of Netanyahu’s actions. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist elder statesman, said after the October 7, 2023, attacks that “Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas,” and in 2024 expressed support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome defense system while opposing “unfettered offensive military aid.” Last September, Sanders charged Israel with “genocide” for the first time but still limited his opposition to military aid to “offensive arms sales to Israel.”
Aside from the use of the term genocide, Sanders’s position is the same as DeGette’s, whereas Kiros does not believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state. Yet shortly before the primary, Sanders endorsed Kiros because she was “not afraid to stand up to corrupt special interests like AIPAC and Big Pharma,” implicitly slighting the incumbent DeGette for accepting pharmaceutical industry donations and receiving indirect support from AIPAC.
No one ever produced any evidence that DeGette carried water for Big Pharma. She did attract and accept health care industry donations as the ranking member of a key subcommittee. But those donations didn’t stop her from voting for caps on drug costs during Joe Biden’s administration and proposing to go further to make medicine more affordable.
Kiros hammered DeGette for voting for a spending bill to keep the State Department open, which included military aid to Israel. (Espaillat and Goldman voted against the bill, but that didn’t do them any favors.) And in March, DeGette lost her cool, on camera, as she tried to explain to a constituent—who was presumably trying to embarrass the congresswoman on video—why she had technical disagreements with a particular bill designed to block military aid to Israel. Considering DeGette’s rock-solid 30-year progressive voting record, these were the best opportunities to create some daylight and peg DeGette as a “corporate Democrat” who will “sell us out every single time.”
Elevating the issue of Israel has clearly worked to benefit DSA-backed candidates over progressive Democratic House incumbents in deep-blue New York City and Denver. But DSA and other like-minded insurgent operations have had less success knocking off true Democratic moderates in primaries to date.
Beyond DeGette, Goldman, and Espaillat, only two other Democratic incumbents in the House have lost primaries this year: Al Green and Julie Johnson. Both were in Texas. Both backed Medicare for All and supported abolishing or defunding ICE. Thanks in part to a redistricting squeeze, the 78-year-old Green lost to another incumbent, 38-year-old Christian Menefee, who holds the same health care and immigration positions, but only Green accused Israel of genocide. (Menefee was also buoyed by cryptocurrency industry support.) Johnson lost to former Representative Colin Allred in a runoff after they boxed out a third candidate who stood alone in making the genocide charge.
Perhaps the greatest primary success from the socialistic left this year was Graham Platner’s resounding triumph over the relatively moderate Governor Janet Mills in Maine’s U.S. Senate primary. The victory, however, will be pyrrhic if Platner can’t beat the incumbent Republican Susan Collins. New polls this week from The New York Times and Fox News showing a much tighter race than two months ago—before revelations of extramarital sexting and alleged abuse towards past girlfriends—are putting Democrats of all ideological stripes on edge. Both polls show Platner performing poorly with the working-class, non-college graduate voters his gruff charisma and populist policies were supposed to charm.
Otherwise, Piker’s preferred progressives haven’t yet drawn much moderate blood. What they have mainly accomplished is the imposition of new purity tests designed to ensnare fellow progressives, mainly over Israel. This may well provide some political benefits in the short run. But unless socialistic insurgents can prove general election viability in battleground races, moderate Democrats won’t become endangered. On the contrary, any general election whiffs by the left in 2026 would tilt the perennial electability debate back toward the moderates and strengthen establishment forces in the 2028 presidential primary.
Piker is correct, just not in the way he intended. The left should stop fighting the left. Stop drawing all the attention to the few points of division among progressives over extremely complicated and challenging issues. Instead, find the areas of unity to help make the best case for an electorally potent progressive agenda that can not only win over voters today but also strengthen the Democratic Party’s future.
The post The Fight in the Democratic Party Is Not Left vs. Center, But Left vs. Left appeared first on Washington Monthly.
