TWO YEARS AGO, in a post-election column here, I caught blowback for criticizing Elizabeth Warren for costing Democrats a House seat. Our senior senator had backed a progressive challenger to a longtime Democratic incumbent in Oregon who failed to pass all the progressive litmus tests. The “Warren Democrat,” Jamie McLeod-Skinner, knocked him out in the primary but went on to lose the general election and in the process help Republicans narrowly take the House.
We are back again in a narrowly decided House, too close to call with a slim advantage likely for Republicans. But there is a happy ending to the Oregon story for Democrats. While McLeod-Skinner ran again this cycle, Warren did not endorse and she lost to a more moderate Democrat in the primary. Janelle Bynum went on to defeat the GOP incumbent, will be the first Black woman to represent Oregon in DC, and is keeping a flicker of hope alive for Democratic control of the House.
So, kudos to Warren for showing that progressives can pick and choose their fights.
Which brings us to the dynamics of the presidential election in which Donald Trump won all seven swing states. Coalitions changed, and with them election results. That was true even in deep blue Massachusetts, where Trump became the first Republican nominee to carry Fall River in 100 years.
Democrats face two major structural headwinds on the path to regaining a majority coalition.
First is governance in blue states, which have not exactly created a progressive utopia in recent decades. To use the slanderous Republican term, the way that “Democrat-run” cities and states manage housing stock, transportation, cost of living, and education is not attracting new voters to the cause. It is driving voters to leave blue states for red states, or start voting Republican while remaining in blue states.
Massachusetts was among the five states where voters moved most to the right this election, along with fellow wealthy blue states New York, New Jersey, and California.
To our fellow Americans, Massachusetts remains synonymous with progressivism. We have the highest rate of self-identified liberals in the country and play an outsized role in debates over the direction of our nation. The country sees the prohibitively expensive housing and cost of living, brutal traffic, and other shortcomings that lead to wealthy blue states losing our share of the national population.
And it is not random population shifts: People are moving from blue states to red states. And the loss of population has greater electoral impact than just congressional seats that are being pulled from blue states through decennial reapportionment. It is damaging to the Democratic brand.
There is no shortcut to improving quality of life in blue states. A broad reform movement is required to significantly shift the experience of blue state governance. Promising cross-ideological approaches like the “Abundance Agenda” have emerged to tackle the cost of housing and energy by mixing progressive prioritization of human welfare with more libertarian instincts on regulation. In Massachusetts, that is already manifesting itself in a significant push for more abundant housing that is reducing regulation while overriding excessive local control. Those are fights worth having.
The second problem is interest groups that dominate the party coalition by practicing a politics of subtraction, whereby policy purity tests seek to narrow the big tent required for progressives to wield power nationally. This is the tent-shrinking path that Warren took two years ago in Oregon, but largely avoided on the campaign trail this year as Kamala Harris worked to pivot away from the leftist policy positions she took in her brief presidential run in the 2020 cycle.
While Harris tacked significantly to the political center in the four-month sprint, her short-lived 2020 presidential run was animated by her efforts to appeal to the left in a crowded primary field. On some issues, such as fracking, Medicare For All, and mandatory gun buybacks, Harris was explicit in abandoning prior unpopular progressive positions. On many others, from the Green New Deal to electric vehicle mandates, she simply refused to answer.
During the progressive surge of the past decade, a case was made that a heightened contrast between MAGA populism and litmus test progressivism would cause a coalition realignment that favored Democrats. Back in 2016, Chuck Schumer famously said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
That math, obviously, has not worked out that way.
The Massachusetts version is that, in presidential races since 2016, Democratic nominees went from winning Lawrence by 67 percentage points to winning by just 17 points.
From 2016 to 2024, Democrats lost 50 points in Lawrence, but gained three points in Wellesley. While that is surely not a good trade for a political party seeking to win elections, it may not be a bad one for progressive groups looking to fundraise.
It is now social media clicks and foundation cash, not votes, that drive much of the key entities comprising the Democratic ecosystem. When people refer to “The Democratic Party,” what they typically mean is the sum of interest groups, not the formal party structure. Political scientists have termed this dynamic “Hollow Parties,” where weak formal institutions are overrun by outside groups.
The most stark example of policy litmus tests from such groups is found on policy questionnaires from nonprofit and political groups.
In 2022, then-candidate Maura Healey refused to even fill out the candidate questionnaires from the two most prominent Massachusetts groups of this type, Progressive Mass and Our Revolution.
This could hypothetically have cost Healey support. As Progressive Mass leader Jonathan Cohn said at the time, “Progressive groups are filled with people who are the types of people who end up being activists on campaigns and active in organizations.”
But, as Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky noted in the story about Healey’s decision, there was also a potential downside to completing the surveys that she avoided: “Her policy questionnaire answers could have been used against her,” she wrote.
The purpose of the modern progressive policy questionnaire is at odds with the purpose of a political party, which is to win. There would be no point in the ACLU or Progressive Mass asking where candidates stand on policies that are broadly popular. The point is to separate the merely progressive candidate from the completely pure candidate who is willing to take unpopular stances that appeal to a small but organized part of the primary electorate.
Kamala Harris faced significant headwinds, weighed down by Joe Biden and the post-pandemic dynamics that have felled incumbents around the globe. But when it came to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on swing state ads, the Trump campaign elevated Harris’ 2019 responses to the ACLU candidate questionnaire to demonstrate her fidelity to a broad range of progressive litmus tests.
In rejecting progressive litmus tests in her gubernatorial race, Healey was prioritizing those who pay the price for electoral defeat: the most vulnerable in society. Trump’s second victory will primarily hurt those who progressive advocacy groups are organized to defend. Progressive groups are often organized to defend the poor and marginalized, but seeking maximalist policies that lose elections can have the opposite impact.
These are good faith places where the balance is difficult to strike. Maura Healey took a hardline stance on immigration in June, but this week is pledging to use every tool to fight Trump deportations. Healey is picking which fights to have, balancing electoral and governing pressures to be able to deliver on behalf of the vulnerable.
The current coalitional heavyweights in the national Democratic Party focus too much on enforcing policy litmus tests that narrow the coalition, and do not focus enough on improving governance of blue states. These are the politics of subtraction, and the policies subtracting population and power from blue states.
These are distinct problems with different solutions. Massachusetts demonstrates the promise and peril of both, and a potential path forward for prioritizing the fights that can lead back to a majority party.
Liam Kerr writes the WelcomeStack.org newsletter, and is co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports Democratic candidates in center-right districts and advocates for a big-tent Democratic Party.
The post The politics of subtraction appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.