The left’s insurgency against the Democratic party establishment has hit its first serious bump in the road in Wisconsin. Democratic socialist Francesca Hong entered Tuesday up by big margins in the polls, the huge betting favorite. She left it just a few thousand votes short of the Democratic nomination. What happened, and how, offers extremely important lessons for both the left and the Democratic establishment.
The first is that the party still matters. Its institutions and leaders matter. We saw that power in Democratic primaries in 2020. After Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses and emerged as the frontrunner, party leaders rapidly consolidated around Joe Biden.
Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed him, and within days Biden went from trailing badly to winning majorities of the Democratic vote across much of the country. It was a stunning demonstration of the power of the party, its institutions and its elites to signal to voters who the party’s candidate was and rapidly consolidate support around him. The same basic thing happened here.
For all the talk of the party’s discredited and elderly establishment, the party can still move enormous numbers of voters. Sure, it has lost some legitimacy in the eyes of Democratic voters. But a majority of Democrats in most places still like the Democratic party and trust many of its leaders.
This is how, in the span of a month, David Crowley went from licking his wounds after dropping out of the race to being the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin. Governor Tony Evers and other party leaders were able to send a strong signal to voters who trust them and the institutions they represent that Crowley was the party’s candidate and the best vehicle for continuing Democratic governance in the state.
Years of organizing and ground game, and even a well-developed socialist base, were enough to bring Hong within a few thousand votes of winning statewide.
But they were not enough by themselves to withstand a rapid consolidation among Democratic voters outside the left’s organized base. The Democratic party establishment is not as hollow and desiccated as it sometimes may appear. It is still one of the strongest political forces in the country.
Second, the left needs to address the problem of scale. It has built powerful political machines in many urban quarters, built on door-knocking and tight social connections. But that is not enough to win at a statewide scale. This form of organizing has built a deep base for the left, but still a narrow one. To win across an entire state, especially a swing state, the left needs to learn statewide mass communication.
Many on the left scoff at TV ads and other traditional political strategies they view as padding the pockets of consultants and forgoing the base-building, on-the-ground, roll-up-your-sleeves hard work that builds political organization. But these tactics are used because they work.
They reach voters outside community networks and social media, including hundreds of thousands of voters who may have little connection to organized politics at all. To win these races, the left has to build its own knowledge and expertise in television, paid digital, earned media, opposition research, rapid response and message discipline.
The left also needs to reckon with the fact that it is now taken seriously as a threat. Candidates and organizers used to operating at a local level are now facing national scrutiny, opposition research, hostile interviews and an unforgiving media ecosystem. The left may take some of these attacks as bad faith, the product of a media apparatus that defaults to the status quo.
This may be true, but it is an obstacle that cannot be avoided. The left needs to be better at communicating through a hostile media ecosystem and at translating principle into concrete, defensible policy. The tactics and rhetoric that work with the left’s social base do not necessarily translate to the median voter, even the median Democratic primary voter.
Hong’s defeat may have been shocking and disappointing, but it still represents a meaningful gain for the growing left. If, when Hong announced her campaign as a virtually unknown state legislator, an observer had been told that she would get about 40% of the vote in the gubernatorial primary, most would have seen that as a surprisingly positive result against many better-known and better-funded rivals.
The left has built a social base among a rising class fraction at the heart of the postindustrial economy: teachers, nurses, social workers, researchers, public and non-profit workers, and other skilled wage earners who possess substantial education and organizational capacity but lack capital, accumulated wealth or authority over other workers.
Many earn decent salaries but remain renters deep into adulthood, carry substantial debt and find themselves unable to accumulate the property and economic security once associated with professional employment. They are workers central to the institutions and industries that increasingly organize American economic life, and an increasingly central part of the Democratic coalition itself.
Over the past decade, these shared conditions have helped make democratic socialism one increasingly coherent political expression of this class fraction. And the left has also grown beyond this base, winning over segments of other classes.
But it still does not command a majority of the Democratic party, just a substantial stratum within it. The traditional institutions of the party – elected officials, editorial boards, churches, unions, non-profits and more – still retain credence with broad sections of the Democratic electorate whom the socialist left does not yet organize, even as many of those institutions have slowly hollowed out and lost power.
But the establishment should not rest on its laurels. The left continues to grow and advance, and represents a growing segment of the electorate and a key strategic segment of the economy. The voters who first voted for Bernie in their 20s now have kids and are moving into their 30s and 40s without necessarily leaving their politics behind.
A fairly overtly radical socialist winning about 40% of the vote in a primary like this was unthinkable even a few years ago. Even as Hong lost, in neighboring Minnesota, progressive Peggy Flanagan won the nomination for Senate by a wide margin over a much better-funded opponent.
The left is still a minoritarian force even within the Democratic electorate. As its ambitions have grown, so have its losses. There are many lessons yet to learn if the left wants to turn a substantial minority into a democratic majority for egalitarian governance.
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Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America
