Democrats trying to unseat each other II

[lpetrich]

Then the issue of small-dollar donations.

“There’s a myth where I went into this thinking, ‘Oh, AOC, Bernie, and progressives are really changing the whole thing. They’re making it possible to live off of and win from online small dollar donations.’ But unless you’re Bernie or AOC, or truly just a handful of people, that doesn’t work,” Agatha Bacelar, 2020 insurgent in CA-12.

“I was really bad at call-time. My finance director hated me,” Laura Moser, 2018 insurgent in TX-07.

“The big thing that still really plagues the left is the inability to fundraise the way that Republicans can,” Roza Calderón, 2018 insurgent in CA-04.

“It’s really hard to raise money when you’re trying to represent people who don’t have much money,” David Benac, 2018 insurgent in MI-06.

“I was like, ‘how do working class people run for office?’ This is impossible,” Nick Rubando, 2020 insurgent in OH-05.

One of Bernie Sanders’s innovations in his 2016 presidential campaign was his methods of fundraising. Digital small-dollar donations, the average of which was $27, fueled the Sanders campaign, instead of large contributions from wealthy individuals and political action committees (PACs). This fundraising infrastructure freed Sanders from traditional candidate fundraising activities, like call-time with donors or schmoozing with elites at private galas—or wine caves— where admission costs thousands of dollars a head. Sanders’s campaign raised over $200 million from contributions that were $200 or less. In foregoing traditional sources of fundraising as part of his ideological challenge to the Democratic Party’s politics, Sanders took a gamble. And it worked—because of his high profile, his singular candidacy, and that his campaign catalyzed a political movement with supporters across the United States.

But it is hard to go that route if one is not much of a political celebrity.

While most insurgents flirted only briefly or semi-seriously with call-time, a few were dedicated to “disciplined” call-time. One clarified that 40 hours a week of call-time is what it takes to raise enough money to run a competitive campaign—something they usually fell short of.

Call time = dialing for dollars

Then on rejecting all PAC money vs. rejecting only corporate PAC money. Some candidates even rejected money from PAC's which agree with them. But "Some progressive insurgents did accept PAC contributions, the amount of which parallels their broader fundraising patterns by district."

 

[lpetrich]

But the lack of personal wealth and connections to people who did have large financial resources was an even bigger obstacle—in traditional campaigns, consultants commonly tell people not to run if they cannot start by raising several hundred thousand dollars from their personal network. Many insurgents did not have a such an affluent network. An insurgent observed, “I realized retrospectively that there’s a path that for people who are connected to money, people who are expected to run, people who are expected to win.”

Kina Collins, who ran for IL-07 in 2020, said that financial pressures “limit the ability for working class people to run. I don’t have a network of millionaires and billionaires who I can call on. The people who I’m calling on are activists and organizers and blue-collar workers. They can give $25 here or $50 here at the most. You should be funded by the people.”

Sarah Smith, WA-08 in 2818, “I always took stewardship of donations seriously. We weren’t taking any corporate money, so it was not lost on me that some people are using their last $5 for the week to donate to my campaign.”

Another: “Other people were like, ‘Oh there’s people with money.’ I’m like, ‘Where the hell are they? Because everyone I talked with doesn’t have any.’ It was terrible. It felt disgusting to ask people to donate.”

 

[lpetrich]

Progressive insurgents’ backgrounds, beyond not personally knowing many wealthy people, impacted their comfort with asking strangers to spend money on their campaigns. Women candidates, especially women of color, also had to overcome gendered and/or racialized socialization that trained them to not ask for things or think they were worth other people’s resources.

As a result,

The conclusion of many was that it is very difficult to run for Congress as a working- class American. Indeed, this reflects a broader problem in American politics: the rarity of working-class candidates, much less electorally-successful ones

That put them in a dilemma: either continue with a full-time job and not have much time to campaign in, or quit it and suffer severe economic consequences.

Then the issue of PI vs. PI in the same primary.

“The hardest part about my race was not that I was challenging Nancy Pelosi but that I was challenging other progressives,” Agatha Bacelar, 2020 insurgent in CA-12.

Like Shahid Buttar, also running against Nancy Pelosi. In first-past-the-post contests, similar candidates tend to cause vote splitting, something that can be devastating for them, as happened in NY-10 this year.

While they would turn against each other when trying to primary some incumbent Democrat, they would get along better if they were the only ones in the race in some Republican district.

COVID-19 caused a lot of campaigns to shut down field operations, something that hurt a lot of campaigns badly.

 

[lpetrich]

This tidbit is interesting: "Democrats, one insurgent hypothesized, were also punished by voters in the general election for their covid response, which may help explain why the party did worse than expected down ballot and why several progressive insurgents who made it to and came close to winning in the midterms 2018 did a few points worse in the 2020 election."


What did the PI candidates themselves think?

“Running against the Speaker of the House as an immigrant with no property, I recognized that my odds were long,” Shahid Buttar, 2018 and 2020 insurgent in CA-12.

“We were infinitely more prepared to lose than to win,” Jen Perelman, 2020 insurgent in FL-23.

"These findings broadly correspond with others that show that challengers tend to overestimate their chances of winning."

What did they need? More funds, more ads, more mainstream media coverage. Some of them complained about gerrymandering and "electability" stereotypes.

 

[lpetrich]

How did the targets of primary challenges view their challengers?

At first the incumbents didn't take them very seriously. AOC says that she was happy with being underestimated during her first campaign. But when she and Ayanna Pressley primaried some incumbents, incumbents and the Democratic establishment started taking primary challenges much more seriously.

"While an appreciable minority of Democratic incumbents fundraised less than they had for the previous one or two primary elections, about half of them raised significantly more, evidence that they were in fact threatened by the insurgent’s primary challenge."

"Beyond significantly increasing their fundraising and spending, incumbents indicated—to insurgents, at least—that they took the challenge seriously through greater campaign activity. For some, this meant canvassing parts of the district for the first time in years or sending a deluge of literature by snail-mail and text."

Many incumbents refused to debate their challengers. "A less common response from incumbent Democrats and/or the local party was to orchestrate smear campaigns against the progressive insurgent."

Like charges of sexual harassment against Alex Morse (2020, MA-01) and Shahid Buttar (2020, CA-12), and what Nina Turner (2021, OH-11) had suffered.

As unfortunate for the individuals involved as this is, it shows that incumbents and local party operatives rarely tried to discredit insurgents through their policy. Instead, they were discrediting insurgents through weaponizing and exploiting issues that progressive voters care about, like sexual harassment, to assassinate the candidate’s character, which they may perceive to capture local or national media attention and voter interest more than policy disputes.

 

[lpetrich]

Some incumbents tried to associate themselves with elected PI's.

A few incumbents responded to their 2020 challenges by emphasizing their closeness with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other elected insurgents in the “Squad.”

...
Incumbents’ final common response to an insurgent challenge was to coopt their policy, rhetorically if not sincerely. Rather than broadly attacking insurgent policy as unfeasible or a pipedream—although that still does happen on occasion—incumbents aimed to neutralize the threat the progressive insurgent posed to their institutional power through coopting their policy.

Then a chapter on "Punching Above Their Weight: Insurgents’ Impact on the Democratic Party’s Policy"

"In this chapter, I argue that the Progressive Insurgency’s greatest impact on the Democratic Party is in its policy conversation and proposed policy rather than its passed policy."

"Specifically, I find that Democrats issue very few tweets about the Progressive Insurgency’s three key policies—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and student debt cancelation—but nearly all are endorsements. They issue more press releases about these policies, a majority of which are also endorsements."

"There are numerous examples of Democrats’ cooptation of progressive insurgent ideas or favored policy."

"Neither a substantive policy or retaliatory rules change, performative proximity is when incumbents who are or fear being challenged perform their closeness to the elected insurgents without coopting their policy."

 

[lpetrich]

Amelia Malpas then tried to quantify this co-optation by collecting tweets from politician and coding them as positive, neutral, or negative on Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, and student-loan cancellation. For press releases, she added "partial".

After stripping out function words like "the", she came up with the most common words:

Their most common words are the verbs “will,” “must,” “can,” “need,” “get,” “help,” “protect,” “work,” and “working.” They also tweeted frequently about “people,” “health,” “time,” “American,” “care,” “families,” “support,” “public,” “communities,” “climate,” “federal,” and “workers.” On the procedural side, “now,” “act,” “bill,” “house,” and “Congress,” are among their top words. Finally, they tweeted about “covid,” “crisis,” “rights,” and “vote” a notable amount.

Most common three-word phrases:

They are: “Back Better Act” (in reference to Biden’s Build Back Better agenda), “American Rescue Plan,” “virtual town hall,” “Green New Deal,” “child tax credit,” “public health crisis,” “years ago today,” “pay fair share” “cancel student loan debt,” “fossil fuel industry,” “one step closer,” “voting rights act,” “congressional art competition,” “make ends meet,” “minimum wage 15,” “health care human right,” “health care system,” “raise minimum wage,” and “student loan debt.” Some of their other top three-word phrases are “paid sick leave,” “gun violence prevention,” “combat climate change,” “housing human right,” “justice policing act,” “racial wealth gap,” “put food table,” “extend eviction moratorium,” and “black brown communities.”

Thus revealing many of their concerns and policies.

How do other politicians compare?

While Democrats dominate messaging about student debt cancelation, this is not true with the other two policies, where Republicans’ press releases numerically-mirror or vastly exceed Democrats’. While 45% of statements about Medicare for All are from Republicans who lambast it as “socialized medicine,” 74% of statements about the Green New Deal are from Republicans who tar it as a socialist Trojan horse. With regard to the persistence of messaging, Democrats are losing—badly.

Which goes to show what cowards mainstream Democrats often are. Are they really that afraid of displeasing the Republican Party?

 

[lpetrich]

What have the elected PI's done in Congress?

Between January 3, 2019, and November 20, 2021, elected insurgents sponsored 582 bills in Congress. Broadly categorized and in descending frequency, insurgents’ sponsored bills are primarily about issues concerning finance and the financial sector, government operations and politics, health, the armed forces and national security, crime and law enforcement, public lands and natural resources, education, taxation, housing and community development, and international affairs.

Most of Congresspeople's bills don't get out onto the floor let alone become law. But a good indicator of how much they are received is what cosponsors they get.

A little over 1/6 of the bills have no cosponsors, and of those that do, about 1/4 have fewer than 3 cosponsors, another 1/4 fewer than 9, and another 1/4 fewer than 26. With all together, 1/4 have fewer than 3, another 1/4 fewer than 6, and another 1/4 fewer than 21.

It would be interesting to see how this distribution compares with other Congresspeople's bills' distributions.

The bills with the most cosponsors are Representatives Nikema Williams’s act to rename a major post office after the late John Lewis with 260 cosponsors; Ayanna Pressley’s condemnation of police militarization, brutality and racial profiling with 177 cosponsors; Pressley’s act to strengthen reproductive health care with 160 cosponsors; Joe Neguse’s Coronavirus Community Relief Act with 152 cosponsors; Katie Porter’s act for mental health justice with 125 cosponsors; Deb Haaland’s ANTIQUITIES Act with 113 cosponsors; Chuy García’s health equity and Joe Neguse’s post office protection bills which both have 106 cosponsors; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2019 and 2021 Green New Deal resolutions which have 103 and 101 cosponsors, respectively.

Congress does a heck of a lot of post-office renaming. What a thing to agree on.

But the rest of them are more substantive bills.

 

[lpetrich]

The most frequent non-insurgent cosponsors are Democratic Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton (who has cosponsored 207 bills), Barbara Lee (153), Earl Blumenauer (131), Pramila Jayapal (118), Raul Grijalva (110), Jan Schakowsky (109), Jim McGovern (93), Alan Lowenthal (90), Andre Carson (90), Ro Khanna (88), Adriano Espaillat (86), Bonnie Watson Coleman (85), Carolyn Maloney (84), Grace Napolitano (83), Steve Cohen (83), Nydia Velaquez (82), Jamie Raskin (81), Jerry Nadler (79), Yvette Clarke (78), Jahana Hayes (77), Grace Meng (76), Jared Huffman (75), and Sheila Jackson Lee (75). Many of them are prominent progressive Democrats who comprise the left wing of the party. Jayapal, Grijalva, and Khanna were endorsed by Justice Democrats once they were already members of Congress when the group began in the aftermath of Sanders’s 2016 presidential insurgency. Further, in 2020 insurgents challenged Blumenauer, Lowenthal, Maloney, Cohen, Nadler, Clarke, Meng, and Jackson Lee.

Then comparing the American Rescue Plan of 2021 with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Compared to the 2009 stimulus, the 2021 American Rescue Plan did much more for ordinary Americans. The different scope of these stimulus bills and the greater emphasis on aiding Americans rather than just bailing out business in the 2021 Rescue Plan compared to the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment equivalent is significant evidence of the Democratic Party’s leftward movement. Bernie Sanders gave large credit to the Progressive Insurgency for the scope of the bill, describing it as “the most consequential piece of legislation for working class people” in decades.

The Democrats had larger margins for the ARRA than the ARP, something that makes the differences even more significant. (H: 255, S: 58) vs. (H: 222, S: 50+VP)

Further, the respective new Democratic presidents in these two moments had different intraparty brands: Barack Obama was the outsider who got elected on “hope and change” while Joe Biden was the veteran insider and proud moderate.

 

[lpetrich]

Then a lot of effort to try to determine how much incumbents' tweets and cosponsorships had changed in response to primary challenges.

These findings on challenged incumbents’ tweets and press releases give credence to two causal relationships: that incumbents tweeted more about insurgent policies once insurgents challenged them or that insurgents targeted liberal incumbents who were already communicating about these policies. It is likely a mix of both.

...
An insurgent challenge did not on average affect the number of insurgent bills the incumbents has cosponsored, a greater commitment than communicating about policy. It did on average impact their communications endorsing Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and student debt cancelation, a lesser commitment than cosponsorship. This shows insurgents’ challenges to have a greater impact on incumbents’ rhetoric and the party’s policy conversation than their association with elected insurgents’ proposed policies.

...
These results show that the relative success of 2018 progressive insurgents, either in the incumbent’s district or in their state, are the greatest determinants of how much incumbents changed their cosponsorship of insurgent bills in relation to a progressive primary challenge in 2020. Unlike their total number of cosponsored insurgent bills, which are most influenced by their ideology, these findings show that incumbents’ changes in cosponsorship are most impacted by how severe of a threat they perceive insurgents to present to them.

...
Policy cooptation, as one challenger put it, “demonstrates the policy impact of an unsuccessful political campaign.”

...
Establishment Democrats may “kick and scream” against their leftward movement, but the Progressive Insurgency has momentum as its candidates challenge them for their votes.

So being challenged does make an impact, especially as long-time incumbents notice what happened to certain of their colleagues: Joe Crowley, Mike Capuano, Dan Lipinski, Eliot Engel, Lacy Clay.

 

[lpetrich]

Then, "The Rise and Fall of Insurgent Ideas in—and the Prospects of—Biden’s Build Back Better"

That was done by last spring, so it does not include some recent partial successes for the progressive-insurgent agenda.

Then what PI's themselves think.

Most, although certainly not all, insurgents perceive that the Progressive Insurgency to have moved the Democratic Party toward their policy stances in some ways. As with other parts of the movement, they were quick to credit Bernie Sanders for starting it all.

...
That is, while Sanders made running as a Democrat on bold, progressive ideas possible, the Progressive Insurgency has kept these ideas at the center of the party’s policy conversation and proposals, some of which have passed, with a vigor and persistence that likely would not exist if it were only Sanders.

Something like Barry Goldwater nearly 60 years ago.

Cori Bush got the pandemic extension moratorium extended on August 2021, and this action got her this praise from former candidate Lauren Ashcraft (2020, NY-12): it was “really what it means to have working class people get in [to Congress].” Shahid Buttar: “She demonstrates, as AOC did with the sit-in at Pelosi’s office when she first went to Washington, the value of direct action wielded by a progressive legislator. In both cases, they got the goods made AOC. didn’t win the Green New Deal. She didn’t get her committee assignment. But there’s a whole country talking about it now.”

The Progressive Caucus still does not have anything close to the amount of veto power over party leadership as the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus did over the Republican Party. But, it is starting to have real power—seen in its newfound strategy of not compromising on policy ahead of time and holding the line to maximize its leverage.

 

[lpetrich]

Insurgents in Republican districts see a disconnect between the popularity of progressive policies among voters and Democrats’ electoral performance nationwide. “I sometimes feel like Democrats don’t actually want to win. Look at what’s happening in our country right now. There are things that the Democrats could do to help [that they are not],” Julie Oliver, a 2018 and 2020 insurgent in TX-25, said. “There is no cohesive message that Democrats put out that is digestible and easy to understand. You look at the 2020 election and there were so many progressive policies that outperformed Biden and Democrats everywhere. For whatever reason, people are not connecting a $15 minimum wage with Democrats.”JD Scholten, a 2018 and 2020 challenger in IA-04, elaborated, “The majority of progressive policies are extremely popular, even in Republican areas. There’s Medicaid expansion in Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho. Voters passed a $15 minimum wage in Florida, workers’ rights in Missouri, marijuana in South Dakota. So we’re right on policies. I don’t think we’re right on politics right now: the Democratic brand is very tarnished.” That is, the Democratic Party did worse than insurgent ideas at the ballot box. The Democratic Party should know by now, Randy Bryce of WI-01 said, that regardless of their policy if “you’re a Democrat, you’re going to get called a socialist anyway.” They might as well help people while they are at it.

That is why Brand New Congress originally hoped to run its candidates as Republicans as well as Democrats. In 2018, they tried one, Robb Ryerse of Arkansas, but he lost his primary, and all of BNC's candidates have since run as Democrats.

I think that if the US was more multiparty-friendly, like if it had proportional representation in Congress and state legislatures and city councils, then there would be an opportunity for a political party that is socially right-wing and economically left-wing, a party like the French National Rally. In fact, Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 like such a politician, even though when in office, he governed like a typical Republican.

 

[lpetrich]

"Many Democrats in Congress, the insurgents ascertained, are simply not acting with the urgency required of the moment even if they have acceded to some insurgent positions." Some of the PI's suspect that it is in part because they are too comfortable. One of them said “I think for a lot of Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is the perfect symbol, nothing’s at stake for her. She doesn’t know what it’s like to not have health insurance or she doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t have health insurance.” Consider all her fancy ice cream in her big refrigerator.

Although the Democratic Party is changing, it is not changing fast enough.

But really, as Eva Putzova, a 2020 challenger in AZ-01, put it, the problem is that Democratic Party change is “not happening quick enough to save lives, to get people out of poverty, and certainly not quick enough to do anything about climate change.”

 

[lpetrich]

Finally, "Conclusion. There Still Isn’t Really a Tea Party of the Left: Comparing Insurgencies and Looking Forward"

“If [being a Tea Party of the left] means that we c[a]me out of nowhere and, within a few years, we have one of the two major parties implementing our agenda—and if our agenda is to promote multiracial democracy and give people union jobs and help avert a climate crisis—then, yeah, I’m down to be the Tea Party of the left,” Max Berger, early employee of Justice Democrats, on the Progressive Insurgency.

“What people don’t realize is that there is a Tea Party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Progressive Insurgency’s tactics within Congress compared to other Democrats’.

“We still have, what, 429 seats to go?” Angelica Dueñas, 2020 insurgent in CA-29, on the future of the Progressive Insurgency.650

Author Amelia Malpas then recaps her findings on the movement.

Based on these findings, I argue that the efficacy of insurgency comes from its simultaneous institutional and ideological challenge to its host party, which allows insurgents to change politics without winning election, and that, measured by its rate of electoral victory and policy impact on the Democratic Party, the Progressive Insurgency has been moderately successful. While the insurgency has not fully taken over the party and only 8% of its candidates have won election to the House, it has pushed the party left more effectively than any other force in its recent past.

AM then compares the progressive insurgency to the Tea Party and the Green Party, and also with other post-2016 progressive movements.

The Tea Party was spectacularly successful electorally and in changing the Republican Party’s policy, the Progressive Insurgency has been moderately successful electorally and in changing the Democratic Party’s policy, and the Green Party has been unsuccessful electorally and muted in its policy impact.

Then where they are similar and where they are different.

This comparison reveals that are many similarities between the Tea Party and the Progressive Insurgency, including the broad distribution of where their candidates challenge their host party based on its institutional and electoral strength, their willingness to lose elections for principles, and their advantageous use of host party weakness to advance.

There are some differences. I don't know of any Tea Partier who said that he experienced a very transformative experience that motivated him to get involved. Some experience like being aboard a big yacht with some rich people -- rich people who moaned and groaned that they pay too much in taxes to be able to afford a yacht that big.

Their greatest differences are in relation to their number of congressional candidates, their orientation to the dominant political order, and their financial resources and media support from their insurgent infrastructure. The two insurgencies defeated a similar number of incumbents at their start and both elevated insurgent groups within their parties. However, they had disparate rates of turnover (especially in effecting it between the parties in general elections) and degrees of combativeness. They also differed in their ability to provide their host party with additional incentives to coopt their policy from flipping seats, convincing their party’s elite to see their insurgency as electorally beneficial, and bringing new constituencies into their party’s electoral base.

AOC got criticized a lot for calling Nancy Pelosi "Mama Bear of the Democratic Party", but Jim Jordan never called John Boehner "Papa Bear", as far as I know.

 

[lpetrich]

The Tea Party was named after the Boston Tea Party, a protest against Britain's crony-capitalist colonialism in only allowing its North American colonists to buy tea from the British East India Company and not from (say) some Dutch company.

The Tea Party was a radical right insurgency within the Republican Party that started in early 2009. It mobilized in response to the United States’ election of its first Black president, Democrats’ aid to “undeserving” Americans in their Great Recession bailout, and conservative Republicans’ unhappiness with George Bush’s presidency.

How did it do?

While the Tea Party primaried Republican incumbents whom it saw as insufficiently conservative and fielded candidates in open Republican districts, most of its first candidates ran in districts far less conducive to Republicans’ general election success but where it was much easier for them to win primary elections. Of its roughly 135 primary victors in 2010, 67% ran in strongly Democratic or Democratic-leaning districts, 18% ran in toss-up races, and 14% ran in strong Republican seats—a strikingly similar distribution across districts to the Progressive Insurgency. In subsequent electoral cycles, the Tea Party shifted toward targeting more incumbent Republicans and running in swing seats.

The Progressive Insurgency did a similar shift.

 

[lpetrich]

The Tea Party was named after the Boston Tea Party, a protest against Britain's crony-capitalist colonialism in only allowing its North American colonists to buy tea from the British East India Company and not from (say) some Dutch company.

The Tea Party was a radical right insurgency within the Republican Party that started in early 2009. It mobilized in response to the United States’ election of its first Black president, Democrats’ aid to “undeserving” Americans in their Great Recession bailout, and conservative Republicans’ unhappiness with George Bush’s presidency.

How did it do?

While the Tea Party primaried Republican incumbents whom it saw as insufficiently conservative and fielded candidates in open Republican districts, most of its first candidates ran in districts far less conducive to Republicans’ general election success but where it was much easier for them to win primary elections. Of its roughly 135 primary victors in 2010, 67% ran in strongly Democratic or Democratic-leaning districts, 18% ran in toss-up races, and 14% ran in strong Republican seats—a strikingly similar distribution across districts to the Progressive Insurgency. In subsequent electoral cycles, the Tea Party shifted toward targeting more incumbent Republicans and running in swing seats.

The Progressive Insurgency did a similar shift.

 

[lpetrich]

Equally important as their institutional challenge is insurgents’ simultaneous ideological challenge to their host party. Candidates within both ideological insurgencies have taken principled stances that likely lessened their chances of election, although what that principled behavior looks like varies between them. Tea Partiers did not moderate their agenda to increase their chances of victory, even if it meant losing to a Democrat: in the 2010 midterm election, for example, several lost races that an establishment Republican likely would have won. The Tea Party’s policy stances were far to the right of the Republican elite but not the party’s electoral base, which was likely instrumental in their rapid rise (dynamics that would be repeated with Donald Trump’s presidential insurgency in 2016). Their policy objectives included restricting federal spending— especially if it would aid racialized “unproductive” and “undeserving” Americans, lessening taxes, repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and generally preventing the government from modifying any outcome of private markets. Broadly, theirs was a politics of first implicitly and then explicitly racial reaction and resentment

The Progressive Insurgency?

In contrast, as part of their ideological challenge to the Democratic Party, most progressive insurgents explicitly forwent particular forms of funding, such as PAC contributions, in addition to not moderating their progressive platforms. Such decisions likely hurt their vote share, especially in primary elections in swing seats. Their primary policy priorities are to the left of the elite of the Democratic Party and include passing universal social policies, especially regarding health care and education, strengthening organized labor, increasing the progressivity of individual and corporate tax rates, and mitigating climate change—many of which are supported by the Democratic base. Both movements comprised ideological insurgents more committed to their political ideas than their own personal victory or that of their host party.

That's not exactly hard left - not like some self-styled party of the workers taking over everything and killing everybody who gets in their way.

 

[lpetrich]

Then how they relate to the existing neoliberal order, a sort of soft right-libertarianism.

The Tea Party did not challenge the broad ideological principles and institutional relationships of this order; rather the insurgency sees it as having been ideologically corrupted and wishes to return to the purity of its Reaganite founding. While the Tea Party is known for its bombastic critique of politicians, including many Republicans, Ronald Reagan is one of the few spared from its ire. This exceptional admiration for the president credited with the ushering in of the current dominant order is strongly suggestive of the insurgency’s orientation toward it.

Seems like they wanted to restore Reaganism as they imagined it.

The Progressive Insurgency, on the other hand, aims to inaugurate a redistributionist, egalitarian, social-democratic regime and sees Democrats’ acceptance of neoliberal principles and logics—particularly its replacement of government intervention with veneration of the free market—in the 1990s as some of the party’s most glaring failures of the last decades.

After noting the Tea Party's wanting to restore Reaganism, she described the PI's plans.

In contrast, the Progressive Insurgency has articulated an expanded Democratic base to deliver the Democratic dominance needed for such a development. They view the multiracial working class as the core of their new base and understand organizing white workers who currently vote Republican, politically-apathetic workers of all races, Americans with populist economic views, and young people as key to its expansion.

Very ambitious goals.

 

[lpetrich]

Then how they struck when their parties were weak, the Tea Party after Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008, and the PI after Democratic defeats during Obama's presidency and in 2016, with Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump after barely beating Bernie Sanders. The TP was unhappy with both Obama and George Bush II, and the PI with both Trump and Obama.

Both the TP and the PI have connections to activists movements outside their parties, though details differ.

The Tea Party was animated by adherents of various existing conservative movements, from libertarians who emphasized economic conservatism to the Christian Right who emphasized cultural and social conservatism. The Tea Party was an amalgam of a grassroots movement, an elite coordinated and funded movement, and an electoral insurgency that proved potent.

Rank-and-file Tea Party activists seemed happy to be funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers, while the PI seems much more principled, even if it is at a cost of poorly-funded campaigns. I think that right-wingers getting worked up about George Soros is yet another case of right-wing projection, thinking that their villains must be just like them, funded by some oligarchs.

The Progressive Insurgency has close connections with movements for environmental, economic, and racial justice, but there is no distinct social movement so dedicated to its candidates.

 

[lpetrich]

The Tea Party had “a multimillion-dollar complex that includes for-profit corporations, nonparty nonprofit organizations, and PACs.”

"The Tea Party Nation was a new organization, with several thousand local chapters. It was the most grassroots of the insurgency’s core groups and neither raised nor spent large sums of money on candidates." - it's still around

In contrast, Republican operatives refashioned groups like FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Express to aid the insurgency from preexisting groups in the Republican orbit—the Tea Party Express, for example, came out of a PAC to support John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. These organizations’ leaders included former Republican politicians: they were already close to power within the party. These elite groups spent vast resources to kickstart the mobilization of the Tea Party movement and aid its candidates.

Supporting John McCain? That seems very mainstream Republican.

A critical component of the Tea Party’s infrastructure was Fox News and other outlets in the rightwing media ecosystem. Fox acted like an arm of the social movement through its positive coverage of its early protests and encouragement of its viewers to join them. Further, Fox News’s near-total allegiance to the Tea Party predates its current commitment to the Republican Party: it was through the Tea Party’s successful contestation within the Republican Party that Fox News became wholly committed to the host party.

That explains why right-wingers hate MSNBC so much - in their minds, that network is just like Fox News, but on the wrong side.

Right-wingers have long created their own news-media companies, calling mainstream news media left-wing.

Summarizing the Tea Party’s unusual level of support from monied interests and established political actors, Nella Van Dyke and David Meyer write that “unlike most progressive movements, which gathered their resources from their own constituents and battled for a voice in a media, the Tea Party has enjoyed an unusual level of support from powerful economic and cultural actors.”

Self-styled populists financed by oligarchs.