Democratic Voters Are Boiling Mad at the Democratic Establishment, and It’s Ridiculous

On the heels of a late burst of poll data projecting a victory for the left-wing anti-Democratic establishment candidate Abdul El-Sayed in today’s Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports that the campaigns of El-Sayed and other like-minded candidates are not strictly fueled by card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America: 

Rank-and-file Democratic voters who once naturally inclined toward establishment-backed candidates are instead supporting — or at least showing an openness to — lefty candidates they would have previously believed to be outside the political mainstream. They’re driven by disappointment in old-guard Democrats’ inability to beat Trump in 2024 and a growing sense that the country’s politics need a fresh direction… 

…even progressive activists say privately they think the movement of these voters toward candidates like El-Sayed is less about a newfound acceptance of lefty policy platforms like single-payer health care and more about their anger with the Democratic establishment. 

That observation tracks with last month’s poll data analysis from G. Elliot Morris in his Strength in Numbers newsletter (New York’s Ed Kilgore published some excerpts). 

…polling data shows relatively few Democrats think their party has moved too far to the left …  What Democrats do say is that their party is feeble … When we asked Democrats in April, in their own words, what bothered them most about their party, the top answer was “too weak / not fighting enough,” at 30%, well ahead of everything else. 

But on what basis and with what metrics can the Democratic Party writ large be found guilty of failing to fight hard enough? 

Democratic elected officials lambast Donald Trump daily on every available perch and platform. The legislative output for the current Congress is on track to be the meagerest in at least the last half-century. Senate Democrats have flexed their filibuster power (which thankfully still exists) to suffocate most of the Republican Party’s legislative agenda. Through litigation, Democratic Attorneys General in the states have stifled many of Trump’s executive orders, including those intended to commandeer the midterm elections. The routine thrashing of Trump has contributed to his atrocious job approval ratings, which are averaging below 40 percent, roughly five points lower than in the months before the 2018 midterm, in which Democrats seized control of the House.  

Democrats are also making the entire GOP suffer. In the Real Clear Politics generic congressional ballot poll average, Democrats currently hold a 6.4-point lead, like the 7-point lead they had at the same point eight years ago. Democrats are running competitively in more Senate races than expected when the year began, including in the Trump-won states of Alaska, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. (Most of these races feature nominees recruited by the personification of the Democratic establishment, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.) And Democrats have had an amazing run in state legislative races since Trump returned to the Oval Office, flipping 30 seats and ceding none. To reiterate my observation from earlier in the year, no such shutout has occurred in at least 15 years. 

No serious case can be made that the Democratic Party has shied away from fighting Trump in the past 19 months. There may be frustration that Democrats have been unable to disembowel Trump and prevent all exertion of executive power and partisan legislative power (via the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process), but that is an impossible standard to meet. 

Moreover, such standards are not consistently applied to all Democrats. Senator Elizabeth Warren led a successful bipartisan effort on a housing policy bill that included negotiations with the White House and, at the point of Senate passage, earned Trump’s endorsement. After the bill cleared both chambers, Trump, in a pique about his inability to get voter suppression legislation through the Senate, turned on the bill but still let it become law without his signature. Even though her bill was a classic bipartisan compromise, Warren has not lost any standing with fight-hard progressives, and her endorsement of insurgent Democratic primary candidates has been coveted and touted.  

Back in February, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani went symbolically farther than Warren; he went to the Oval Office for a chummy meeting with Trump. In the course of lobbying the president on providing $21 billion in federal funding to support a massive affordable housing development in Queens, Mamdani staged a joint photo op with a faux newspaper front page headlined “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD.” Trump reveled in the press attention but didn’t make any promises about the money, and the project remains in limbo. Last week, when asked if he was still waiting on Trump, Mamdani said, “it continues to be a conversation.”  

Meanwhile, Mamdani has trained his political fire on three incumbent House Democrats whom he helped oust in June’s New York primary as well as on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In very stark contrast, Mamdani is treating Trump not like an enemy to vanquish but a potential patron he must delicately cajole.  

 In April, shortly after Mamdani secured the New York Governor’s support for a new tax on New York City luxury second homes, Trump erupted on his social media feed, “Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York! It has no chance! The United States of America should not contribute to its failure. It will only get WORSE. The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG. People are fleeing.” In response, Mamdani turned the other cheek: “The president and I both want this city to succeed. This is how you do it.” 

And last month, after Schumer pledged to block any attempt to rename New York’s Penn Station after Trump, Mamdani sidestepped the issue: “I am more interested in what the station would be able to deliver to New Yorkers than what we call that station.” 

Mamdani’s defenders would surely argue that the mayor is simply practicing savvy politics, trying to stay on Trump’s good side in hopes of securing funds for affordable housing. That is a perfectly sound argument! But many Democrats who wanted scorched-earth resistance to Trump were unhappy with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for meeting with Trump multiple times last year, helping keep a Michigan military base open and securing disaster relief. You shouldn’t have to be an anti-establishment socialist to deserve grace for navigating complicated political waters.  

Not all complaints about the Democratic establishment are about their handling of Trump as president; some are about how Trump was able to become president in the first place, and second place. “The same people who are carping about electability have lost the White House twice to Trump,” said Jeff Weaver—former aide to anti-establishment presidential candidates of different ideological stripes, Bernie Sanders and Dean Phillips—to Politico recently. Sahil Kapur of NBC News observed on X, “Democratic elites want to run it back to 2018, which Haley Stevens embodies. Dem voters that year trusted the establishment and backed their favored candidates. After 2024, that trust has eroded, and they’re looking elsewhere.” 

But why should Democrats regret 2018 and everything that followed? As I noted in my previous column, that year Democrats took control of the House and several governors’ mansions from Republicans despite some high-profile busts by overhyped progressive candidates. That set the stage for a 2020 election in which Joe Biden proved he was the electable choice, defeated Donald Trump, and helped Democrats take the Senate. Biden then brought many progressives into his administration, pushed a populist agenda, and enacted a slew of legislation.  

Yes, because of his visible aging and compromised communication capacity, he shouldn’t have run again. But the entire Democratic establishment does not deserve to shoulder the blame for his stubbornness. After all, following his disastrous June 27 debate, the most prominent elected official urging Biden to stay in the 2024 presidential race was Senator Bernie Sanders. 

Writing in The New York Times on July 13, Sanders dubbed Biden “The most effective president in the modern history of our country” and “the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump.” He praised his achievements on pandemic recovery, infrastructure, climate change mitigation, student debt relief, reduced prescription drug prices, and judicial appointments. Sanders was joined by his fellow democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told her Instagram followers, “I could give two damns about what a bunch of rich people think,” and that the people trying to push Biden out were “the donor class” and the “elites.” During this time, Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were working to convince Biden to stand down. 

Socialists, progressives, and frustrated rank-and-file Democrats aren’t accusing Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez of breaking faith. They remain two of the most popular figures in the party. They are still viewed as progressives in good standing who are fighting the good fight, and understandably so. Their biggest sin was defending an incumbent Democratic president who delivered concrete progressive policy achievements. But why should the rest of the Democratic Party be treated as a bunch of bumbling incompetents who didn’t deliver anything of substance? 

Another complaint feeding anti-incumbent sentiment is the notion that even self-described progressives haven’t produced the big-ticket policies long craved on the left, such as single-payer health insurance.  

The 15-term Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado’s First Congressional District had always been a steadfast progressive. She supported Medicare for All. She not only wanted to abolish the Immigration and Customs Agency, but she also voted against the bill that created ICE and the entire Homeland Security department. But many progressive voters were no longer impressed with an incumbent who couldn’t single-handedly usher in their preferred policies and abandoned her in the district’s June 30 primary for the DSA-backed rookie Melat Kiros.  

In her victory remarks, Kiros declared her voters had “sent a clear message: We. Will. Not. Wait! We will not wait to take the fight to Donald Trump and the oligarchy! We will not wait to abolish ICE and pass ‘Medicare for All!’” Indeed, DeGette was unable to deliver Medicare for All after 30 years in elected office. The same could be said for Bernie Sanders, who has served a combined 35 years in the House and Senate (and endorsed Kiros over DeGette). Neither deserves individual blame for failing to win sufficient votes in Congress for a complicated and radical overhaul of the entire health care system despite their best intentions.   

Sanders, having cultivated a reputation for fighting the establishment, has inoculated himself from charges of being part of the establishment. But all these progressive politicians, whether or not you consider them part of the establishment, have done their best to enact change within the confines of political realities and have records of accomplishment to show for it. However, if only those few officials able to cultivate broad national followings are shielded from blame for the inevitable imperfections of politics, most dedicated public servants will eventually be victims of voter revolts. That would be a disincentive to becoming a public servant at all, and the last thing the Democratic Party needs is a more challenging environment to recruit people into public service. 

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