Blue Dogs, Red in the Face

The left’s winning streak in Democratic primaries has sparked panic among party centrists. As more Democrats warm to democratic socialism, they correctly intuit that their grip on the party is finally, at long last, slipping. 

This panic was evident last week when eight House Democrats voted for a Republican resolution condemning democratic socialism “in all its forms.” Many more Democrats would have backed the resolution had it not also included a “poison pill” endorsement of the GOP’s voter-suppression bill, the SAVE Act. We know this because, last November, 86 Democrats joined Republicans to denounce the “horrors of socialism” after Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York. But the price of supporting the SAVE Act was worth it for signatories Kathy Castor, D-Fla.; Henry Cuellar, D-Texas; Don Davis, D-N.C.; Jared Golden, D-Mass.; Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash.; Darren Soto, D-Fla.; and Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M.. 

Despite their ideological hostility, centrist Democrats have mostly presented their opposition to democratic socialism in pragmatic terms. They argue that the party’s embrace of left-wing ideas and policies will doom it in general elections, and paint left-wing insurgents as outsiders who want to “hijack” and destroy the party. In the words of centrist Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., “They’re against our leadership, they’re against our values and they’re running on an extremist platform.” Gottheimer and others insist that democratic socialists “are not Democrats” and should not be running in Democratic primaries. 

This claim that leftists aren’t “real” Democrats is especially ironic given last week’s minor revolt against the Democratic leadership by two of the party’s most conservative members. Indeed, the measure to condemn socialism nearly failed to make it to the floor when five far‑right Republicans refused to support a procedural vote for unrelated reasons. The measure only advanced because two House Democrats from the conservative Blue Dog caucus, Reps. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez, broke with their party’s leadership and provided House Majority Leader Mike Johnson with the necessary votes. 

Johnson’s Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, quickly denounced this move as “a significant breach of trust” and vowed a “serious response.” The revolt also invited comparisons to the GOP’s recurring struggles with party discipline and unity. “If there’s no understanding that we need to stay together on procedural measures, then we’re going to be like Republicans,” remarked Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, who serves as the top Democrat on the Rules Committee. “I mean, they can’t get anything done because everybody’s going off in different directions.”

Last week’s Blue Dog revolt showed that Democrats’ unity problem really stems from its declining centrist wing — not the left. While the press often casts leftists as internal saboteurs, it’s the centrist factions like the Blue Dogs and New Democrats who consistently derail Democratic efforts to legislate and govern. 

This intransigence was evident throughout the first half of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Democrats held an extremely narrow trifecta in Washington. With the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, every Democratic vote was essential for passing legislation, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker. This gave each Democratic senator veto power over the party’s legislative agenda, and it was the party’s two leading centrists — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who sabotaged much of that agenda. The sweeping ambitions Democrats laid out at the start of the Biden years were ultimately carved up into a series of smaller, less impressive bills, thanks to the obstinance of two conservative Democrats. 

Five years later, the successors to Manchin and Sinema are doing everything in their power to prevent Democrats from winning back a majority in the Senate, if it means slowing the left’s momentum. This has been most obvious in Michigan, where the Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El‑Sayed, has faced a barrage of bad‑faith attacks from a small but vocal contingent of centrist Democrats who are smearing the progressive candidate as antisemitic due to his principled criticisms of Israel and association with left‑wing podcaster Hasan Piker. 

Centrist groups have also been preparing for a larger confrontation with the left. 

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” declared the president of Clinton-era centrist group Third Way, Jonathan Cowan, shortly after El-Sayed’s victory in August. To fight this war, Cowan’s group has announced plans to spend $15 million over the next two years to “discredit” democratic socialism and blunt the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, which he describes as a “mortal danger” to the Democratic Party. 

While undermining progressive candidates like El-Sayed risks costing Democrats power in Washington, it offers an obvious upside for centrist ideologues like Cowan. As Branko Marcetic recently noted in Jacobin, an El-Sayed defeat would “reap benefits for [centrists] as an ideological faction” that is currently losing grip on the party and allow them to “resume casting progressives as the party’s biggest electoral liability and help Democratic voters forget that party centrists handed Trump the presidency twice.”

Centrist groups like Third Way and the Blue Dog caucus claim to represent the “mainstream values of the American public.” In reality, they increasingly represent views that are unpopular with Americans and especially Democratic voters. Consider two  major issues that El-Sayed has become most known for: “Medicare for All” and Israel-Palestine. While El-Sayed’s support for universal healthcare and Palestinians puts him squarely at odds with Third Way types, polls show that a majority of Americans — and a supermajority of Democrats — agree more with the Michigan candidate on both issues. 

On Medicare for All, a Data for Progress poll from last year found that nearly 8 in 10 Democrats support the proposal, as do two-thirds of Americans (and almost half of Republicans). On Israel and Palestine, Americans are slightly more divided but increasingly aligned with El-Sayed’s critique of Israel and its horrific treatment of Palestinians. The most recent survey from Pew Research found that 60% of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022. Democrats are even more uniformly aligned, with 8 in 10 respondents identified as “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents” expressing an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters also oppose U.S. military aid to Israel according to a New York Times/Siena poll from May. 

Clearly, the Democratic Party of the 2020s is not the same party that it was in the 1990s, when Third Way-style Democrats emerged as influential figures. “New Democrats” may be losing their collective mind over the rise of democratic socialists and Israel critics within the party, but it’s their own views that are becoming the fringe.