According to an analysis in the New York Times, “The path to Democrats’ sweeping victory this week, when they seized control of both chambers of Congress, was paved overwhelmingly by moderates who had spent months persuading voters in Republican-leaning states and competitive congressional districts that they could be trusted to govern and would deliver dissatisfied voters a practical alternative to President Trump.”
The story goes on to quote Rebecca Cooke, who won Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District. “We’ve got to do things incrementally,” she said. According to the Times, rather than pursuing Medicare for All, she called for a more modest expansion to cover vision, dental and hearing, as well as the restoration of Affordable Care Act subsidies that Republicans allowed to expire at the end of last year.
“We have to show that when people vote for Democrats, they can feel it in their bones and feel it in their pocketbooks that things have changed,” Cooke said in an interview. And she called for prioritizing cost-of-living relief over aggressive investigations of the president and his team.
The truth is that Democrats owe their new majorities in both houses of Congress and in the Wisconsin Legislature to new caucus members who won in only marginally Democratic districts or states or even in ones that went for Trump just two years ago. For example, in South Carolina the new Democratic senator is now representing a state that went for Trump by 18 points.
Few of these new legislators are going to want to pursue Bernie Sanders’ agenda or that of the Democratic Socialists of America. And Democratic leadership, whose first priority will be to preserve their majorities, will want to do all they can to shield the moderates from having to take tough votes that risk alienating either the swing voters or the liberal Democratic base in their districts. The best strategy for Democrats is to keep the hot button issues off the docket entirely.
The federal government majorities are a little more secure because the new senators are there for six years and the House majority will be pretty healthy. But here in Wisconsin the Democrats can afford to lose only one seat in the Senate and only six in the Assembly.
So, the question is just how responsible the hard-left will be. Can they discipline themselves to take the incremental progress that Cooke is talking about? Or will they drive away swing voters — and their own majorities — by pushing an unpopular leftist agenda?
