Dems in Game of Chicken

With the start of the campaign, Democrats eagerly pulled out the playbook that worked so well in 2018 and 2020: Zero in on Trump. It worked in the midterm elections, it worked in the 2020 presidential race, but it didn’t go so well in 2021. Maybe because of the minor point that Trump, at least for now, is not in the running. Yes, he’s in the bleachers, but not in the game. In order to win Virginia, Democrats would have needed to explain why their education platform is better. Instead they focused their efforts on portraying Glenn Youngkin, a mainstream Republican by all accounts, as a Trump copycat. It didn’t work.

It’s hard to separate the Virginia loss from what the party is going through nationally. Here’s the paradox: A party fights hard to return to power, wins control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, only to descend into in-fighting and then fail to pass a stimulus bill for half a year, all while the president is mired in foreign policy disasters and is desperate to notch some victory on the home front.

The thing is that the differences between the moderate and progressive wings are not trivial. It’s not that they can sit down, iron out points of disagreement, and find a way to cooperate. The two wings are rivals, and there’s little love lost between them. They’re playing a game of chicken, and both sides are unable to compromise. The tension is understandable. After all, AOC’s voters are expecting something very different from Joe Manchin’s or Kyrsten Sinema’s.

And for all this, it’s hard to escape the impression that the loss was not just a rough patch, but a signal that something is not working. The attacks on Trump succeeded in getting the Democrats back in power. From the moment that was achieved, the party was judged by its actions, not by the actions of the last guy, or of the guy “who might come back if you don’t vote for us.”