Lessons for Biden from the Democrats’ blowout in California
Rick Newman·Senior Columnist
Wed, June 8, 2022, 11:24 AM
Liberal Democrats known as progressives have never commanded a political majority. Not even close, really. That’s why progressive candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren bombed in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, while the more centrist (at the time) Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, then the presidency.
The high point for progressives may have been the Green New Deal, which the newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York spearheaded in 2019 after her come-from-nowhere upset of a party stalwart. Democrats re-took control of the House that year, and the Green New Deal was a vision for sweeping, egalitarian change in the energy sector and much of the economy. It wasn’t a legislative package, but a manifesto for ending 40 years of crony capitalism.
It's been mostly downhill from there, and the majority of Democrats themselves may have now tired of progressive visions of a mythical Shangri-La. In the June 7 primary elections in California, voters recalled the progressive San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, whom they elected in 2019. Boudin crusaded against “two systems of justice,” one for the wealthy and one for everybody else, and he advocated alternatives to prison for many convicts. San Francisco’s liberal voters endorsed that view a couple years ago, but with worsening crime, homelessness, drug use and untreated mental illness on the city’s streets, they’ve now said, enough of that!
Concerns about urban crime also propelled developer Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Caruso, a former Republican who recently switched to Democrat, ran as the tough-on-crime candidate, vowing to put 1,500 new cops on the beat. His main opponent, Rep. Karen Bass, ran on her record as a prominent Democrat and years of outreach to LA’s minority communities. Caruso’s surprisingly strong showing will force a runoff in November.
The California results follow another upset in the Virginia governor’s race last year, where Republican newcomer Glenn Youngkin beat Democratic titan Terry McCauliffe in a race that hinged largely on culture wars over school curricula. State and local races don’t automatically translate into identical outcomes at the national level, but it’s hard to think of any progressive policies that are catching on with mainstream voters, while some — especially “defund the police” — are utterly dreadful.
'Prepare yourselves for permanent minority status'
The implications are ominous for President Biden and his fellow Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. “If national Democrats don’t wake up to what happened to progressives … this cycle prepare yourselves for permanent minority status,” Jim Kessler, a long-time Democratic operative now at the Third Way think tank, tweeted after the California primaries.
One immediate consequence of the progressive drubbing could be Biden’s action on student-loan forgiveness. Like many issues, student debt divides Democrats. Sanders and Warren have pushed hard for forgiveness of $50,000 in student debt, or more, by executive action, if necessary. Biden backs up to $10,000 in debt forgiveness, but he wants Congress to do it by passing a law, and the votes aren’t there. Not all Democrats would vote for even that much forgiveness, and Republicans loathe the whole idea, as do many policymakers, who say it would be poorly targeted aid helping Americans who in many cases are better off to start with.
The Biden administration recently canceled $5.8 billion in debt for 560,000 borrowers who attended the now defunct Corinthian Colleges, which defrauded students in a variety of ways during 20 years of operation. But that’s a tiny portion of the $1.8 trillion in all student debt. The Biden White house has hinted for weeks that some kind of broader relief is coming, but it’s shaping up as a lose-lose outcome for Biden. Young voters are disgusted with Biden, who they think promised something he hasn’t delivered. Maybe Biden could win them back with a huge debt write-off, but that's very unpopular among moderate voters, who think it’s an unfair giveaway to a privileged group, while people who paid their loans or worked their way to school or didn’t go to college get nothing. Whatever Biden decides, he’ll enrage a significant bloc of voters.
Biden’s whole presidency has been a tug-of-war between Democratic progressives who expect Biden to back their expansionist social-welfare goals and party centrists like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin who won’t go along with that. Biden has drifted to the left since getting elected, letting Congressional Democrats lard up his “build back better” legislation in 2021 with hundreds of billions of dollars for social programs that aren’t especially popular. The BBB package collapsed in December, when Manchin said he couldn’t vote for such a costly and overstuffed bill. Progressives can't stand Manchin, but his views are much more closely aligned with the moderates and Independents who put Biden over the top in the 2020 presidential race—and he's far more popular in his home state, where most voters are Republicans, than Biden is with any group of voters.
There’s still a slim chance Democrats could revive some of the BBB elements this year, such as green energy investments, with modest tax hikes to pay for those and to also help reduce yawning budget deficits. One of many Democratic concerns is that voters will show up in November with little memory of their 2021 rescue plan or the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed, and instead rate the Democratic party as a fractured mess that can't get anything done. So there's still a desire to pass something to dangle in front of voters during the next few months.
It might be too late. Voters are already rejecting some of the ideas most closely associated with the Democratic party—and those are the more liberal Democrats progressives thought they could count on. They can’t, not when big ideas seem radically disconnected from everyday life.
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