Democrats trying to unseat each other II

[lpetrich]

Through it all, he watched as backlash to the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s blew Mr. Rustin’s coalition to smithereens.

Around the world, left-wing parties lost ground with the working class. The exodus had a distinctly racial cast in the United States, where blue-collar whites fled the Democratic Party in droves. Even as African American politicians started winning elections in substantial numbers for the first time since Reconstruction, Republican victories at the national level placed strict limits on what local officials could achieve.

In this essay - Why organize? Aug & Sept 1988 - he

argued that despite the “important symbolic effect” of Black electoral victories, real change had remained out of reach. No single politician could reverse the global economic trends that had devastated urban America, especially when conservatives had a lock on the White House. It would take an enormous redistribution of resources to wrench the nation’s inner cities out of their downward spiral, and that would come about only with support from an electoral juggernaut.

Barack Obama and a fellow student, Robert Fisher, considered what would attract blue-collar whites.

According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”

That seems like Bernie Sanders and his seeming to give social-class issues a higher priority over racial issues.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher didn’t pretend that racism had been expunged from American life. “Precisely because America is a racist society,” they wrote, “we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.” Demanding that white Americans grapple with four centuries of racial oppression might be a morally respectable position, but it was terrible politics. “Those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness,” they wrote, ridiculing the idea that whites would “one day wake up, realize the error of their ways, and provide blacks with wholesale reparations in order to expiate white demons.”

Economics issues were a safer bet, they decided, because blue-collar workers of all races “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.”

Mr. Obama rejected the idea that appealing to Reagan Democrats required giving in to white grievance. Chiding centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council — headed at the time by Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas — he warned against retreating in the battle for civil rights. Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, he argued, as antiracists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany.

By focusing on economics issues, one has a chance to achieve "long-term, structural change, change that might break the zero-sum equation that pits powerless blacks [against] only slightly less powerless whites.”

 

[lpetrich]

He scaled down his ambitions quite a bit when he entered politics, but some of that document's plans showed through. From his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention,

When Mr. Obama scolded pundits for slicing America into red states and blue states, it wasn’t a dopey celebration of national harmony. It was a strategic attempt to drain the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.P. And it elected him president, twice.

Then talking about how Barack Obama won in 2012 to "a majority powered by young, diverse and highly educated Americans." The "Obama coalition".

Today we are living in the world the Obama coalition has made. Yes, Democrats have won the popular vote in each of the past four presidential elections. But thanks to continued losses among blue-collar voters — including Latinos and a smaller but significant number of African Americans — the Obama coalition has remained a pipsqueak by historical standards. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the average Democratic margin of victory was 14.9 percentage points. Since 2008, it’s been 4.4 percentage points.

The party’s record in the midterms has been even shakier. Democrats held unified control of Congress for all of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency. In the Obama era, divided government has been the norm. And no, that’s not just because of gerrymandering. House Republicans won the national popular vote three times in the past 12 years — 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and there’s a good chance they’ll do it again this November.

Then mentioning various people's ideas on what to do next.

What’s missing from all this is a vision for transcending the divide between the party’s rival sects, a plan for both winning elections and securing lasting change — in short, a program for transforming politics. The shrewder popularists are right to emphasize the dangers of Democrats bleeding support with the working class. But electoral victories will go to waste unless they lead to structural changes that break American politics out of its current doom loop.

 

[lpetrich]

"Mr. Obama has navigated carefully around these debates, preferring to cast himself as a peacemaker among feuding Democratic tribes."

Reversing electoral trends half a century in the making is the work of decades, not a single election. But recent history is filled with examples of candidates who built winning coalitions by tamping down polarization (like Mr. Obama) or ramping it up (like Mr. Trump). And if you put together enough successful campaigns, then a realignment starts to come into sight.

I think that the US is due for another political realignment, but it won't happen without a struggle.

 

[lpetrich]

Bringing the Party Home: The Progressive Insurgency in the House of Representatives and its Impact on the Democratic Party by Amelia Malpas, dated 2022-05-16. It is her BA thesis for Mt. Holyoke University, a little north of Springfield, MA, and it looks like a very good piece of research.

Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination—twice. And yet, since his first loss in 2016, the Democratic Party has moved toward his policy stances on a range of issues. Ideas that pundits derided as politically impossible when he first ran are now at the center of the policy debate within the party. Sanders lost his insurgent bids, but the “political revolution” he sought to ignite continues through a movement of progressive insurgents in the House of Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner. Like Sanders, most of these insurgents lose. Despite this, they are a serious force pushing Democrats left. This is puzzling: how do insurgents change political parties and national politics so rapidly when nearly all fail to win election outright? Drawing on original interviews with over 40 insurgent candidates and raw data on campaigns and congressional legislation, this thesis develops a theory of insurgency and insurgent-driven party change, provides a portrait of the Progressive Insurgency, determines what factors predict its candidates’ electoral success, and examines its impact on Democratic Party policy. It finds that the Progressive Insurgency is a semi-coordinated movement that aims to capture the Democratic Party to reorient its policy priorities and through that, turn the United States into a multiracial social democracy. The predictors of insurgents’ vote share vary by type of district—based on the Democratic Party’s institutional and electoral strength—that they run in, but largely concern the quality of the insurgent, like their electoral experience, endorsements, and fundraising. The insurgency has had a substantial influence on Democrats’ policy conversation and proposed policy but only a limited impact in its passed policy. This thesis argues that the efficacy of insurgency comes from its simultaneous institutional and ideological challenge to its host party and that, measured by its rate of electoral victory and policy impact on the Democratic Party, the Progressive Insurgency has been moderately successful. It makes empirical contributions to the study of the Progressive Insurgency, which has yet to receive deep scholarly attention, and theoretical contributions to the study of insurgency and insurgent-driven party change, which remain under- theorized relative to their frequency in American politics.

 

[lpetrich]

She thanked her professors, her friends, and the numerous progressive insurgents that she interviewed.

Thank you to Mama, Alysson Baker, and Papa, John Malpas, for giving me a beautiful childhood and your deep commitment to my education. You raised me in a house that was overflowing with books and sent me to Waldorf charter schools so that I grew up knitting doll clothes, trying to turn our chickens into trapeze artists, writing stories, and playing flute. It is because of you, and my brother Gabriel, that I know how to argue for argument’s sake and on principle. All of this is possible because of your support and your love, and I am so grateful.

After describing how she survived a nasty disease, she concluded with "And I want to acknowledge me for
doing that so I can do what I love most: think."

She dedicated her thesis to "my witty, lefty, favorite grandparent," Dadoo, or Henry Baker. Then she quoted

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "I want to be the party of the New Deal again.
The party of the Civil Rights Act,
the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people.
For that, many would call us radical. But we aren’t “pushing the party left,”
we are bringing the party home.
(vid link)" / Twitter
With video of AOC stumping for Bernie Sanders back in 2020.

“It matters that you’re here—not someone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren to Representative Cori Bush after President Joe Biden’s August 2021 extension of the eviction moratorium.

“In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

“We’re almost running an alternative party. But we don’t have alternative party infrastructure,” Shahid Buttar, 2018 and 2020 insurgent in CA-12, on the Progressive Insurgency.

 

[lpetrich]

"Introducing the Progressive Insurgency" started with introducing Nina Turner's run for OH-11 in 2021.

"It attracted national attention, drawing in millions in spending, hundreds of out-of-district volunteers, and endorsements from advocacy groups and elites aligned with different factions of the Democratic Party."

Most progressive insurgents have lost, but the ones who won have exerted disproportionate influence on national policy. On the day that NT lost her primary, Cori Bush succeeded in getting President Biden to extend the pandemic eviction moratorium.

Bernie Sanders lost in 2016 and 2020, yet the Democratic Party has been moving in his direction. Much like what happened to the Republican Party when Barry Goldwater lost in 1964.

Progressive insurgents have a variety of names for their movement.

• Pessimistic: “Efforts in Futility,” “The Progressive Attempt”
• Optimistic: “Just the Beginning,” “Progressive Wave 2020”
• Populist: “The American Left,” “People Over Profit,” “Everyday People,” “An Effort to Create a Populist Insurgency for Good,” “Grassroots Politics,” “Eating the Rich,” “Movement of Base Voters,” “Not Me, Us”
• Movement: “The Next Generation of Politics,” “A Progressive Movement,” “The Movement to Defend the Future from the Past”
• Revolutionary: “New Wave Revolutionary Progressive,” “The Revolution”
• Mundane: “Brand New Congress,” “Re-envisioning the Democratic Party,” “Un-fuck America.”

So AM settled on "Progressive Insurgency".

 

[lpetrich]

"The nearly 200 candidates who comprise the insurgency are remarkably cohesive in their policy ideas, campaign infrastructure, and electoral strategies, such as trying to strike a balance between cultivating a national base of small-dollar donors and mobilizing voters in their specific district."

Those are the candidates that AM counted in 2018 and 2020, about 100 in each Congressional election season.

Primaried Democrats, especially those after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first upset win in 2018, are largely threatenedby the challenge, and accordingly, greatly increase their fundraising and cosponsorship of insurgent policies and modestly increase their communications about them. The Progressive Insurgency’s greatest direct impact on the Democratic Party is on its policy conversation and proposed policy; its impact on passed policy has been minimal and indirect.

After that thesis was published, however, the "Inflation Reduction Act" came out, with sizable amounts of Build Back Better.

The insurgency has changed electoral and policy dynamics within the party in its favor even as its candidates have defeated only 7.5% of the incumbents they primaried and, as a whole, only 8% of its total candidates have won election to the House over the course of its first two electoral cycles. The Progressive Insurgency has not been so successful as to remake the Democratic Party in its own image, but it has pushed the party’s policy agenda left more rapidly than any other force in the party’s recent history.

AM then noted that the Progressive Insurgency has yet to get much scholarly study, not nearly as much as the liberal "Resistance" to Donald Trump's Presidency. She also notes a shortage of research into political insurgencies in general, as opposed to specific ones.

However, "Unlike insurgency, scholarship on parties and party change is plentiful."

 

[Jarhyn]

Sam Bankman-Fried: After spending big in primaries, the crypto billionaire says he won't help Democrats win the midterms - "Billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried said he’d spend lavishly to elect Democrats in the coming years. But with midterms looming, his wallet is suddenly shut."

When Sam Bankman-Fried was asked during a podcast earlier this year how much money he might give to political candidates over upcoming election cycles, he offered an eye-popping ballpark number. The 30-year-old crypto titan guessed that, at a minimum, he would put down “north of $100 million,” enough cash to make him one of the country’s most important donors. Pressed by the host on whether he might even spend up to $1 billion, he answered, “Yeah, I think that’s a decent thing to look at,” adding that the number was “a sort of soft ceiling” on his potential largesse.

Even if that $1 billion figure sounded outlandishly unrealistic, the comments still seemed to promise a huge tailwind for largely Democratic candidates. After all, Bankman-Fried, who founded the global crypto exchange FTX and is currently worth about $15 billion according to Bloomberg, was one of Joe Biden’s top financial backers in 2020.

And though he did not pledge to fund Democrats exclusively, he said his top causes included pandemic preparedness and “sane governance,” issues where Republicans notably tend to be weak. (Pandemic preparedness is a major area of focus for the philanthropic movement known as effective altruism, which counts Bankman-Fried as its most important financial backer). Bankman-Fried got off to a hot start giving during primary season, too; his Protect Our Future PAC laid out $40 million, largely in Democratic races, making it one of the party’s biggest individual campaign players.

But now, as the general election nears, Democrats are starting to look like the victims of a political rug pull.

Rug pull?

Crypto rug pulls: What is a rug pull in crypto and 6 ways to spot it - "A rug pull is a type of crypto scam that occurs when a team pumps their project’s token before disappearing with the funds, leaving their investors with a valueless asset."

Three types of rug pulls:

Liquidity stealing occurs when token creators withdraw all the coins from the liquidity pool. Doing so removes all the value injected into the currency by investors, driving its price down to zero. ...

Limiting sell orders is a subtle way for a malicious developer to defraud investors. In this situation, the developer codes the tokens so that they’re the only party that is able to sell them. ...

Dumping occurs when developers quickly sell off their own large supply of tokens. Doing so drives down the price of the coin and leaves remaining investors holding worthless tokens. “Dumping” usually occurs after heavy promotion on social media platforms. The resulting spike and sell-off are known as a Pump-and-Dump Scheme.

It says something about cryptocurrency users that their social world is so full of scams.

How many times now have I pointed out that crypto is a money laundering scheme in the same way that "truth social" is in fact an election stealing scheme?

There are exactly two uses for crypto: buying/selling drugs (and other more unscrupulous purchases), and scamming folks.

 

[lpetrich]

Then why an insurgency in an existing party when one can create one's own party. In nations with proportional representation, founding a new party is often very feasible, and one does not have to win very big to get seats in the legislature. But with first-past-the-post voting and single-member districts, it's hard for new parties to get started, and the political system converges on two major parties.

"Where insurgents face constraints from the American electoral system that incentivize remaking a party rather than starting their own, the major parties’ relative decentralization and porosity, especially nomination by primary elections, afford insurgents opportunities to do so."
and
"he US’ institutional constraints and opportunities greatly impact insurgents’ strategies, making the country comparatively unusual for both the centuries-long existence of the same two political parties and the relative frequency of insurgency."

An insurgency can be both an ideological and an institutional challenge to a party, unlike activists and one-off challengers. Ideological insurgents tend to elevate principle over electoral success, like refusing to accept any PAC money. "Expecting to lose because their platforms are so far from the logics of the dominant political order but advancing them for the sake of integrity, these insurgents are the opposite of politicians like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton, who won election by acquiescing to the popularity of the existing political order." Amelia Malpas also makes a contrast with "demagogic insurgents" like Donald Trump, who are mainly after personal power.

When insurgents aim to return to the founding principles of the existing order, they target the political party that inaugurated it (for example, the Tea Party with the Republicans and the neoliberal order). When they offer a new public philosophy without apology or overture to dominant ideas, they target the political party that acquiesced to the existing regime but did not start it (Goldwater with the Republicans and the New Deal order; Sanders and the Progressive Insurgency with the Democrats and the neoliberal order).

 

[lpetrich]

Then "The New Progressives: A Portrait of the Insurgency"

"In this chapter, I argue that the Progressive Insurgency, which emerged following Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential insurgency, aims to capture the Democratic Party—by not only replacing moderates and conservatives in the party but those who call themselves progressive— and make it a font of and fighter for social democratic policies. However, there are unresolved tensions in this movement, between the insurgency and the Democrats, their national audience but geographically-delineated voters, and insurgents’ policies and practices regarding campaign labor."

"Progressive insurgents largely targeted Democratic incumbents who have been in Congress for at least a decade and challenged roughly the same number of liberal and moderate/conservative Democrats."

AM started with a core set of orgs: "Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, Our Revolution, Sunrise, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Working Families Party" and expanded her search with orgs whose endorsements overlapped these ones. "Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson, Blue America, Candidates with a Contract, Climate Hawks, Common Defense, Courage to Change, Demand Universal Health care, Friends of the Earth Action, Matriarch, People for Bernie, People’s Policy Project, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Progressive Democrats of America, Rose Caucus, YoungPAC, and 350 Action."

"To be included in this study, individual challengers must run as Democrats (rather than run as, say, Green Party or independent candidates), get on the ballot, and not withdraw before the primary election."

"The Progressive Insurgency is most closely linked with the electoral sides of the Movement for Black Lives and the climate justice movement." Occupy Wall Street was brief but influential.

Some orgs are new, like BNC, JD, OR, and Sunrise, and some are old but revitalized, like DSA and WFP.

 

[lpetrich]

Amelia Malpas counted 103 in 2018 and 96 in 2020, with a total of 199.

Their strategy changed over those two election seasons. Running against incumbent Democrats increased from 16% to 53%, open D seats barely change, 10% then 13%, open or R swing seats declined from 30% to 8%, and R districts declined from 45% to 26%. Seems like a case of learning from experience.

"Finally, exactly half of the progressive insurgents are women and just under half are people of color. Their most common professional careers prior to running were as lawyers, as teachers or professors, and as community organizers, issue activists, or political staffers." Only 10.5% has prior elected-office experience, but many of them were activists.

Why did they do it? Bernie Sanders's 2016 run, and the successes of AOC and others in 2020. Incumbents not doing enough about climate change, healthcare, inequality and debt.

In the ultimate story of citizen engagement, Arati Kreibich, a 2020 challenger in NJ- 05, volunteered to help Josh Gottheimer get elected in 2018 as part of the midterm Democratic wave. Less than two years later, it “was pretty clear” to her that “this was not somebody who was really fighting for us,” so she primaried him. In sharp contrast to those involved in the anti- Trump Resistance, only four candidates credited Trump’s presidential victory as catalyzing of their candidacy and they tended to be the least left candidates in the movement.

Some of them understood Duverger's law.

One reflected, “if progressives don’t step in and run as Democrats—the only way to actually win in our electoral system—then you’re going to get a corporate Democrat or Republican.” As long as the US is “stuck with a two-party system,” the easiest way to win power is through the Democratic Party.

 

[lpetrich]

Although their strategy has changed since their launch, the founders of these groups were erudite, historically informed, and strategic from the start about how apply pressure and force political change in the US’ two-party system.

(footnote)
Leifer and Shahid, “The Realigners”; O’Connor, “When the Party’s Over.” These groups stand in contrast to the unserious third “party” organization also started by Sanders alumni, the Movement for a People’s Party, home to the hyper-online left whose only organizing is via Twitter trolling and purpose is to proclaim their superiority through not associating with the Democratic Party or even elected progressive insurgents.

Brand New Congress was started by BS campaigners who wanted to continue BS's legacy, and Justice Democrats was an offshoot of BNC. BNC's founders thought of running a unified slate of candidates, much like some political party, but BNC's founders decided against founding one and instead decided to run BNC candidates in the two major parties, because of all the reflexive partisans, all the yellow-dog Democrats and Republicans. BNC ran an Independent and a Republican in 2018, but both lost. A Bernie Sanders Republican?

As one of Justice Democrats’s co-founders, Waleed Shahid explained, in a country with proportional representation, they would “be called either social democrats or democratic socialists ... Our party would win twenty-five per cent of the seats, and we’d have real power.” Given how the US’ electoral system results in a particularly rigid two-party system, “the way to get there is to run from within one of the two parties and, ultimately, try to take it over.”

He understood Duverger's Law very well.

 

[lpetrich]

"A significant number of 2020 insurgents specifically cited Ocasio-Cortez, often along with Sanders, as moving them to run." Triumphing over a big-money long-time incumbent. But candidates who lost could be inspiring, and not just BS.

"Are They Lone Insurgents or Is It a Movement?" Many progressive insurgents consider themselves part of a movement.

Then going into the policies that the PI's tend to favor, like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, increasing the minimum wage, making taxation more progressive, making it easier to unionize workplaces, canceling student debt, reducing mass imprisonment, decriminalizing marijuana and sex work, and making immigration easier. Also democratic reforms that makes it easier for an electorally-viable left party to emerge.

Following in Sanders’s footsteps, insurgents emphasized that it is not their policies but rather the unequal status quo that is “radical” and rhetorically connected their ambitions to those of past economic populist, labor, and civil rights movements in the United States. Perhaps the best illustration of insurgents’ strategic tendency to couch new progressive policies in American political history is the name of their signature Green New Deal, which familiarizes the plan to the public through its reference to past transformative American policy. This corresponds with Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that the movement is “bringing the party home,” which similarly makes their ideas seem more viable because they have a basis in the Democratic Party’s past.

But "Progressive insurgents reflected about their experience running to expand the public’s imagination of what is politically possible beyond the current hyper-individualized, market-based mainstream." and "It was hard for progressive insurgents to convince Americans that change from government policy is possible." and " Several posited that this apathy is the result of both Americans’ experience of an unresponsive government and intentionally cultivated by politicians and the media to keep voters from demanding substantive policy change that would disrupt the current distribution of political and economic power."

Then the question of how to pay for what they want. "This was especially true when insurgents countered that Americans almost exclusively think this way for social policy that helps people and rarely for increasing military or carceral budgets."

"Whatever success insurgents had at changing how voters think about policy likely has to do with the broad popularity of many of their universal policies among the public, including their signature issues of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and student debt cancelation."

 

[lpetrich]

"Insurgents reported notable differences in voters’ receptivity to their ideas based on voters’ class, although their experiences of this do not cohere into one simple narrative." Candidates in poorer districts often discovered that many of their policies seemed like common sense, while "In contrast, insurgents were nearly unanimous about affluent and upper middle-class voters’ interest in their platform: they were not." That “the pushback almost always comes from the upper middle class white people, who are comfortable with their housing, with their health care, with their retirement.”

People who have enough money to get around many of the problems of our society.

But when something bites the upper middle class, that can change. Sarah Smith, challenger in WA-09: "Smith and Shahid Buttar, who ran both years in CA-12 which includes nearly all of San Francisco, both mentioned that the arrival of the climate crisis in wealthy communities on the west coast has recently begun to change some minds." SB: “I think the imagination here has been expanded if only because the wildfires have forced people to be realize something here is not working.”

 

[lpetrich]

"While the Progressive Insurgency is at the left tip of the left wing of the Democratic Party, there is considerable diversity in insurgents’ specific ideological orientations and analyses of capitalism, class, and race." From self-described "democratic socialists" to self-described social democrats or capitalist reformists.

Some 90% of PI's state that their campaigns are more about their ideas than about their personal victories, something totally opposite from Donald Trump.

Then to the challenged incumbents. Some of them have been in Congress longer than their challengers have been alive.

In quartiles: 1, 7.5, 17, 23, 39.
That is, 1/4 each between these values.
I'd like to dig up the numbers for Congrespeople in general - are these numbers unusual?

The challenged incumbents' ideologies had the full range of variation, though slightly more liberal than conservative ones.

 

[lpetrich]

The DCCC blacklist remains the party establishment’s most extreme response to insurgent electoral success against Democratic incumbents, suggesting these are the insurgents who the party is most threatened by.

More informally but perhaps more insidious, local Democratic officials told insurgents primarying Democratic incumbents to “wait their turn,” with all its racialized and gendered connotations.

...
Some of Democrats’ attacks on insurgents’ candidacies were indirectly racial or directly racist.

...
The level of pushback that progressive insurgents who primaried Democratic incumbents experienced contrasts starkly with that of insurgents in open Democratic districts.

PI's sometimes got a lot of support in open-seat races, because of lack of D incumbents.

However, "With the exception of those who challenged Democratic incumbents, insurgents running in open or Republican-held swing seats experienced the most extreme pushback." likely because the party leadership wants relatively conservative D's to run in them.

By comparison, "Insurgents in safe Republican districts tended to have the least interaction with Democratic officials, and even when they did, they received considerably less pushback."

Nevertheless, "Despite the pushback and hostility that insurgents experienced, only 17% reported having incumbent- or party-related issues getting on the ballot.This is notable simply because it shows that challengers overwhelmingly were not obstructed from getting their names on the ballot by any Democrats."

 

[lpetrich]

Then national vs. local support.

But, as many insurgents with tens of thousands of followers found, there is a big difference between gaining a national political following and successfully organizing voters in the district that they were running in. Such is the tension between running for a geographically-delineated seat as part of an insurgency during an era of nationalized politics.

...
If the mainstream national and local media were largely unreliable or absentee narrators for progressive insurgents’ campaigns, independent left publications, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels gave them platforms and publicity—acting as extra-party insurgent infrastructure.

Then campaigning.

Staff are an essential part of a successful political campaign. But building a team of professional, experienced, paid staffers proved a very difficult task for most progressive insurgents who ran with limited resources and little to no party support.

...
With these few exceptions, insurgents’ staff was inexperienced, unpaid, and young or made up of personal friends or family members—hardly conducive to electoral success. The composition of their staff varied greatly over the duration of their campaigns: the number of people on staff and how many were paid was far from static.

Ultimately, many insurgents’ campaigns ended up being poorly run, for which some took responsibility and some did not.

...
Progressive insurgents’ pro-labor platforms coupled with their reliance on largely unpaid staffers was a central hypocrisy within their movement.

...
These issues in staffing come from two primary sources: first, most insurgents’ lack of financial resources with which to pay staff, which other challenger campaigns suffer from, and second, that there simply is a scarcity of progressive staffers who have experience on well-run, successful, professional campaigns.

It's rather hard to campaign if one refuses to be financed by oligarchs.

I recall AOC once being asked what she would do if some billionaire offered to bankroll her campaigns while claiming to be in complete agreement with her positions. I recall her wanting to decline such a thing, so she doesn't feel bought.

 

[lpetrich]

This shortage of money was reflected in campaign strategies.

Progressive insurgents pursued campaign strategies that were financial resource low and human energy resource high. As such, a majority focused on field operations, understanding organizing and mobilizing their district to be necessary for their victory. One challenger put it succinctly, “You need a good ground campaign to be competitive or to win.”

Instead of doing lots of mailers and TV ads and social-media ads.

What made some progressive insurgents win?

About 8% of them win, and 7.5% who primary Democrats succeed in that. Their median performance was 23.5%:

0% - 28 - 10% - 74 - 25% - 33 - 40% - 17 - 50%

They did much worse when challenging D incumbents than in the other sorts of seats.

Then the average change in how much of the vote, by candidate feature.

For primarying a Democratic incumbent, the most success was for having previously held elected office, at 18.5%. Women did about 6% better than men, every $10,000 raised bumped up by %0.11, and more than one insurgent bumped them down by 10.4%. Among endorsements, Justice Democrats: 15.8%, Our Revolution: 15%, Working Families Party: 14.2%, Democratic Socialists of America: 13.5%. Insignificant factors included median household income, voter turnout, and Brand New Congress endorsement.

For endorsements, one has to be careful about the direction of cause and effect, because the endorsers may select those that they think will win.

For an open Democratic seat, there were no clear correlations.

For a swing seat, a WFP endorsement gave 30.8%, and an increase of the Gini inequality coefficient by 0.1 gave 16.8%.

For a Republican seat, a WFP endorsement gave 13.8%, but a 0.1 increase in the Gini coefficient reduced by 36.4%.

For 2018, the only significant factor was running against a Republican, giving an increase of 13.8%.

FOr 2020, each previous run gave 14.8% and each 1% increase in how Democratic a district is reduced by 0.7%.

 

[lpetrich]

Then Amelia Malpas considered how well her six core progressive-insurgent organizations did: Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Sunrise Movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Working Families Party.

Only a few candidates have ever been endorsed by all six: in 2018, AOC, in 2020, Jamaal Bowman, and in 2021, Nina Turner.

The orgs had a lot of variation in how many candidates they supported and the success rate of those candidates. Also in what services they provided to the candidates that they supported.

Organizations’ greatest contributions to insurgent campaigns was helping with media coverage and their platform, followed by campaign strategies, fundraising, volunteers, and campaign staff. One challenger said the group gave his campaign “legitimacy,” in line with research that shows that advocacy group endorsements’ greatest benefit to campaigns can be their symbolic stamp of approval rather than financial resources.

...
Finally, not all ostensibly progressive groups were supportive of progressive insurgents’ primary bids.

...
Organizations like pro- choice Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood and environmental League of Conservation Voters and Sierra Club supported establishment Democrats over them

Labor unions were often helpful to candidates running for open Democratic or swing seats, but they were not so helpful against incumbents. As one candidate explained, “Unless you’ve got big money, unions are not going to endorse you. Even though [the incumbent’s] labor policy is terrible, and he supports all these terrible trade deals, they’re not going to not endorse him ... they’re not going to endorse me because they don’t think I can win and union endorsements are cowardly as hell.”

 

[lpetrich]

Then about funding. Progressive insurgents primarying incumbent Democrats raised the least money.

How much of PI's' funding came from within their districts? "Almost half (48%) of insurgents running against Democratic incumbents reported that a majority of their fundraising came from their district. None in open Democratic seats and only 33% and 20% in swing and Republican districts, respectively, did so."

Very few candidates received any funds from official local, state, or national Democratic Party organizations. The median party contribution was $0, with a few challengers in swing and Republican districts receiving up to $4,000, primarily in Texas. Predictably, no challengers in the two types of Democratic districts received any party funding.