The Left Needs More Than Low-Hanging Fruit to Win Power

[Uncle Joe]

The reality is that passing any big-ticket items on even the immediate democratic socialist agenda — if possible at all — will require a major pivot in progressive electoral strategy. The recent depressing spectacle around President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan, held hostage by two Senate Democrats who are thoroughly unimpressed by threats from the Left, starkly illustrates this fact. If progressives had a candidate who could have not only defeated Kyrsten Sinema in the 2018 Democratic primaries but also appealed broadly to Arizona voters, we might not be in this mess. Until we learn how to compete effectively outside traditional Democratic strongholds, our political leverage will remain sharply limited at the local, state, and national levels.

But now comes the inevitable million-dollar question: How? Beyond rare cases like senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat from Ohio) and congressman Matthew Cartwright (Democrat from Pennsylvania), congressional progressive candidates (never mind socialists) have shown little capacity to win in purple, let alone red districts. What, if anything, can progressives do to improve their odds in these races?

Figuring out what kinds of left-wing candidates are most likely to succeed (or at least do better) in the difficult places required to build durable coalitions for change is harder than you might think. On the most basic level, only a smattering of progressive Democrats who have run serious campaigns in those competitive districts, and a slew of differences between candidates, races, and electorates in the few cases where they have run has plagued any statistical analysis trying to tease out which specific types of candidates perform best.

To better understand these issues, Jacobin recently teamed up with the polling firm YouGov and the newly formed Center for Working-Class Politics to field a survey of working-class potential Democratic voters in swing states. (We covered a large swath of voters, but for reasons we describe in the report, we did not poll respondents who self-identified as strong Republicans.)

(snip)

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/progressives-election-messaging-bernie-sanders-race-class-populism

[comradebillyboy]

1. Jacobin is so out of touch with

reality it hurts. The politics they push would make the Democrats as irrelevant as Corbyn’s Labour Party.

[Budi]

3. 👍

"If they were any farther left they'd be -----."

[Budi]

2. What percentage of the Progressive Caucaus also refers to themselves as DSA?

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is composed of nearly 100 progressive members -- 95 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and one U.S. Senator.

Just asking for a breakdown %

[progressoid]

4. Marking this to read later.

Thnx

[JudyM]

5. This is telling, to the extent the study had robust sampling, etc. (I didn't dig into those facts)

The plainspoken, populist messaging was particularly effective among swing voters, for whom Republican messaging was more popular than virtually all Democratic messaging, with the exception of “Populist Progressive” messaging.

Our greatest weakness, IMO, is messaging. I can only hope our leadership has a workgroup looking into this.