How, then, to characterize the Democrats’ response to Trump?
To observe the 2018 election season was to witness the party out of power struggling with its very identity, torn between two diverging paths forward. One was to straddle the center, targeting independents and disaffected moderate Republicans. The other was to push unapologetically leftward, courting the energy and activism of the progressive left.
There was no right or wrong answer; in many cases, the calculus depended on the district and its constituencies. But at the dawn of the 116th Congress, with the forty new Democratic members arriving on Capitol Hill, it became apparent that something would have to give.
Consider two incoming members of Michigan’s delegation: In the Thirteenth District, a safely blue stronghold anchored in west Detroit, Rashida Tlaib ran on a platform of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pursuing a single-payer health care system, and cutting off foreign aid to Israel. (In 2018, Tlaib was one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.) An attorney and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tlaib offered a distinct vision for the opposition party.
Twenty minutes away, in Michigan’s Eighth District, a longtime Republican lock stretching from Detroit’s affluent suburbs westward toward Lansing, Elissa Slotkin offered another. A former CIA analyst who grew up on a farm, Slotkin defeated GOP incumbent Mike Bishop by running as a “midwestern Democrat,” emphasizing her support for gun rights, opposition to single-payer health care, and eagerness to secure the southern border, albeit not with a big, beautiful wall.
The weekend before the election, at a rally in Lansing, Slotkin described the ways in which she was ready to work with Trump.
The day she was sworn in, at a party hosted by the group MoveOn, Tlaib declared, “We’re gonna go in there and impeach the motherfucker.”
There could be no splitting the baby. Even if in agreement on certain issues, this pair of Michigan lawmakers shared as much of a common purpose as Boehner and Jordan, the once-neighboring Ohio Republicans.
The majority-makers were those Democrats like Slotkin, and Jason Crow of Colorado, and Dean Phillips of Minnesota. These freshmen, and others, flipped suburban, culturally moderate GOP districts by presenting themselves as pragmatic centrists. But if the previous ten years had taught Washington anything, it was that the louder, more ideological voices rise to the top.
Not surprisingly, as the new House majority settled in, it was the likes of Tlaib and her fellow Democratic Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who dominated the conversation about the party’s direction. Ocasio-Cortez was especially effective in moving the Overton window, more so than any incoming Democratic lawmaker in at least a generation if not much longer. After Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for suggesting a top tax rate of 70 percent on a narrow slice of multimillionaire earners, a number of public polls showed widespread support for the idea, including among Trump’s own blue-collar supporters.2
“She’s got talent. Now, that’s the good news,” Trump says of Ocasio-Cortez. “The bad news: She doesn’t know anything. She’s got a good sense—an ‘it’ factor, which is pretty good, but she knows nothing. She knows nothing. But with time, she has real potential.”
Other Republicans were less sanguine at seeing the Democratic Party lurch leftward in response to the GOP’s decade-long drift toward the right. “What I hope is that thirty years from now, your children are reading that this was an aberration,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator, said before leaving office. “But as of now, I am worried both sides of the political aisle are moving toward unacceptable extremes—Republicans toward authoritarianism by not appropriately pushing back on executive overreach and Democrats toward socialism.”
It’s imperative to assess Trump not as the cause of a revolutionary political climate, but as its consequence; the forty-fifth president’s election was the by-product of a cultural, technological, and socioeconomic convulsion that bred disparate yet interconnected strands of populism on both the right (Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street). Maybe those fatigued Americans pulling for moderate Democrats to take things back to “normal” are fooling themselves. Maybe there’s no “normal” to which America can return.
The tactical case for Democrats to hug the middle, in the short term, is the Electoral College: Trump’s path to reelection is even narrower than it was in 2016. Once-competitive states such as Virginia and Colorado are off the map; and even states that he carried, such as Arizona and North Carolina, might prove difficult to hold. Trump’s strategy is centered on the same trio of Rust Belt states that won him the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without one, he’s in trouble; without two of them, he’s almost certainly defeated; without all three, there is no scenario for his reelection.
Recognizing this, Democrats such as Slotkin and Phillips came into office with a message: The party didn’t need to veer far left, abandoning the persuadables in Middle America that they won over in 2018. It didn’t need to run up its margins in blue states to take back the White House.
“In Michigan, I know a lot of people who voted for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. And they tell me, ‘You know, my life hasn’t gotten better from Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama. I’m like a stage-four cancer patient, and Donald Trump is my experimental chemo,” Slotkin says. “We need to hear that as Democrats. A lot of people felt like, last cycle, that Donald Trump was the only one talking about the issues that dominate their lives: their job, how much money they make. . . . If we can’t address those things, we’re not going to win. We don’t deserve the Midwest vote if we can’t talk about those things.”
It sounds good in theory. But the gravitational pull of a party’s base can render resistance futile. Phillips, who flipped the suburban Twin Cities district held by Republicans since 1960, said on the Sunday before the election that he wouldn’t vote for Pelosi as Speaker—in part to push back against the stereotype of Democrats a coastal party.
And yet, on January 3, in the first vote of their congressional careers, Phillips and numerous other freshmen Democrats supported Pelosi’s return to the speakership. In fairness, nobody was running against her, and the promised wave of widespread opposition never materialized. Still, the decision of some Democrats to renege on a core campaign promise in the opening hours of the new Congress reflected the same instinct toward self-preservation that over the previous decade had eroded the institution and left voters feeling cheated by politicians.
“No one here is pure. Every group has their own agenda. When new people come to Congress and ask for my advice, I tell them to do what they told their voters they were going to do,” says Raúl Labrador, the retiring Freedom Caucus congressman whose time on the front lines of the Republican civil war holds valuable lessons for the Democrats.
“As long as you keep your promises, you’ll at least have your integrity. I think some people lose their soul here. This is a place that just sucks your soul. It takes everything from you.”
WHATEVER RELIEF REPUBLICANS FELT AT SEEING THE LEFTWARD TRAJECTORY of the opposition party, Democrats were just as elated to witness the GOP’s lack of course correction after its mauling in the midterms.