The Vanishing Moderate Democrat
Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Early last year, as Democrats were preparing to control the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade, Josh Gottheimer met with Nancy Pelosi to discuss their party’s message. Sitting in the House speaker’s office in the U.S. Capitol, he opened up the YouTube app on his iPhone. There was something he wanted to show her.Gottheimer, who represents a wealthy suburban and exurban House district in northern New Jersey, was first elected to Congress in 2016; his victory over a seven-term Republican incumbent, in a district in which Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton, was one of the Democrats’ few bright spots that year. Since his arrival in Washington, however, Gottheimer has been the cause of more headaches than celebrations for Pelosi and her leadership team.As co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus — a group of 29 Democrats and 29 Republicans that quixotically aspires to the goal of bipartisan compromise — he has frequently found himself at odds with his fellow Democrats on everything from foreign policy to President Biden’s domestic agenda to Pelosi’s leadership. In 2018, Gottheimer and eight other Problem Solver Democrats threatened to reject Pelosi’s bid for speaker if she didn’t concede to their demands for rules changes that would make it easier for bipartisan ideas to be considered, angering colleagues who viewed it as yet another instance of Gottheimer and his group’s engaging in pointless grandstanding rather than constructive behind-the-scenes work. “Tell me a problem they’ve solved,” Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, says.Pelosi, however, had agreed to their demands and secured their support. Now she was willing to hear Gottheimer out about how the new Democratic majority should position itself. He pressed play and his iPhone screen filled with waving American flags as an old but familiar voice emerged, proclaiming, “I am honored to have been given the opportunity to stand up for the values and the interests of ordinary Americans.” The video was a television advertisement from Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Over images of construction workers and children and police officers, a series of bold captions touted Clinton’s first-term accomplishments: “WELFARE REFORM, WOREK REQUIREMENTS”; “TAXES CUT FOR 15,000,000 FAMILIES”; “DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG KINGPINS.” His promises for a second term followed: “BAN ‘COP-KILLER’ BULLETS”; “CAPITAL GAINS TAX CUT FOR HOME OWNERS”; “BALANCE THE BUDGET FOR A GROWING ECONOMY” “We are safer, we are more secure, we are more prosperous,” Clinton said. When the ad was over, Gottheimer says, he looked at Pelosi. “This is how we won,” he told her, “and this is how we win again.”Representative Josh Gottheimer of northern New Jersey, a co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus.Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty ImagesIn April, almost a year and a half later, Gottheimer screened the ad again, this time for me. He provided his own color commentary as it played. “Fiscal responsibility … jobs … tax cuts … he put cops in the ad!” Gottheimer, who served as a White House speechwriter during Clinton’s second term, exclaimed. When it was over, he sighed. “Think about how different that message is,” he said. I asked him what Pelosi’s reaction was when he played it for her. Gottheimer demurred. But the answer seemed obvious. The message that Pelosi and the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership had chosen for their party, the message that Democrats would be carrying into the 2022 midterm elections, was not the one that Gottheimer, and the disembodied voice of Bill Clinton, had counseled.Gottheimer and I were eating breakfast at a diner on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J. In a month, he told me, the busy state highway outside would be lined with campaign signs that read “Josh Gottheimer for Congress: Lower Taxes, Jersey Values.” “I’m the only Democrat in the country who puts ‘lower taxes’ on his signs,” he said. “ ‘Jersey values’ are about cops, firefighters, vets — I’ll get your back.” Although the old Clinton ad wasn’t his party’s current message, it was certainly his. “These are the issues that I continue to stress back home in my district,” he said. It would not be hyperbole to say that Gottheimer runs his political life there according to Clinton’s tenets.The most immediate question for Gottheimer and other moderate Democrats is whether that will be enough come November. Midterm elections have been historically brutal for the party that controls the White House. In 2006, Republicans took a “thumping,” as George W. Bush described it at the time, losing 30 seats in the House, six seats in the Senate and control of both chambers. Four years later, it was the Democrats’ turn to suffer a “shellacking,” as Barack Obama put it, with Republicans gaining 63 seats and a new majority in the House. In 2018, Democrats capitalized on resistance to Donald Trump and gained 41 seats on their way to taking back the House.This year, with Democrats clinging to a 10-seat majority in the House (almost guaranteed to drop to nine with a special election in Nebraska on June 28), most political handicappers expect Republicans to reclaim control of the chamber easily; the only real uncertainty is just how big the Red Wave will be, with predictions about the number of seats Republicans will gain ranging from less than 20 to more than 60. (Despite the public hearings of the House committee investigating Jan. 6, most Democrats running for election are not attempting to make the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election a referendum on Republicans.)The bigger, more consequential question — not just for the moderates but for all Democrats — is whether this projected midterm wipeout is merely a cyclical occurrence or the manifestation of a much deeper and more intractable problem. Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left on almost every salient political issue. Some of these shifts in a more ambitiously progressive direction, especially as they pertain to economic issues, have largely tracked with public opinion: While socialism might not poll well with voters, Democratic proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and lower the age of Medicare eligibility do.But on social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party’s base cheer but the rest of the electorate does not. “The Democratic Party moved left,” says Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, “but the country as a whole hasn’t.”Republicans have sought to exploit this gap by waging an aggressive culture war against Democrats. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and frequent Fox News guest who has turned critical race theory into a right-wing cudgel, wrote on Twitter last year that he intended to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” More recently, he has attacked Democrats for, he charged, attempting to indoctrinate school children with “trans ideology.” Rick Scott, the Florida senator who heads the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, told reporters in June, “The election is going to be about inflation, critical race theory, funding the police — that’s what it’s going to be about.” The result, fair or not, is that the Democratic Party is now perceived by a growing segment of American voters as espousing the furthest left position possible on many of the country’s most fraught and most divisive issues.“There’s a sense among voters that Democrats are too focused on social issues,” says Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, “and those are more left-wing social issues that people think they’re too focused on.” In May, CNN asked 1,007 American voters for their opinions on the country’s two major political parties. After four years of Trump in the White House, an insurrection and unsuccessful attempt to overturn a presidential election and now a Republican Party that can be fairly described as a cult of personality and is moving further right on many of the same social issues, 46 percent of those surveyed considered the G.O.P. to be “too extreme.” But 48 percent of them viewed the Democratic Party the same way.All of which has occasioned not just the normal midterm agita but something closer to an existential crisis among moderate Democrats. While some of them remain reluctant to publicly concede the reality that the Democratic Party has indeed shifted left — either out of fear of angering their fellow Democrats or validating Republican attacks — they will readily acknowledge that voters perceive the party as having drifted out of the mainstream. And they are convinced that this is threatening their political survival. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party has a problem as a toxic brand,” says Max Rose, a moderate New York Democrat who lost re-election to his House seat in Staten Island in 2020 — his Republican opponent characterized Rose’s attendance at a George Floyd protest march as anti-police — and is running to reclaim the seat this year. “There’s a perception that the party is not on the side of working people, that it’s not on the side of the middle class.”That perception has penetrated even the immediate families of Democratic politicians. “My own mother-in-law, a Republican, believes I’m some sort of unicorn because I can put sentences together and I’m not rabid and left-leaning,” says Chrissy Houlahan, a moderate Democratic congresswoman who represents a swing district in the swing state of Pennsylvania. “I believe the national Democratic Party is where I am. I don’t believe that the way people perceive the national Democratic Party is where I am.”But the Democrats’ leftward trend, whether real or perceived, is resoundingly popular with, and often reinforced by, the party’s staff members and activists and especially its donors, who fund a slew of nonprofits and super PACs that relentlessly push the progressive line. In America’s very blue and very online precincts, performative positioning is often accepted as a substitute for the compromises that can be necessary to secure legislation — whether it’s Schumer and Pelosi donning kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol to demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in lieu of actual police reform or Biden traveling to Atlanta to attack Republicans as supporters of “Jim Crow 2.0” in a speech on behalf of voting rights legislation that had no chance of passage.The problem, says Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist who most recently worked for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, is that “in today’s world, what happens on Twitter or in a D-plus-40 district doesn’t stay there. It travels to every race across the country.” And it inherently limits the appeal of Democrats in those races. “If we become a party of the elite-elites, there death awaits,” says Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.), the House Democrats’ campaign arm, pointing to the influence of college activists. “We’ll all agree with each other right into extinction.”The Democrats most at risk of extinction this November are Gottheimer and his fellow House moderates, who typically represent the sorts of swing districts where being painted as an identitarian socialist is the political kiss of death. “We are, almost by definition, the low-hanging fruit in every election,” says Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and member of the Problem Solvers. Although Biden won Gottheimer’s district by more than five points in 2020, and the district got even bluer under New Jersey’s newly drawn congressional maps so that Democrats now have a seven-point edge there, the D.C.C.C. has put him on its “Frontline” list of vulnerable incumbents. Of the 37 Frontliners, the overwhelming majority belong to the Problem Solvers or one of the other two groups for moderate House Democrats: the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition. And then there are the two dozen or so moderate House Democrats who have decided not to run at all in 2022, quitting before they could be fired.It’s enough to drive Gottheimer, 47, to frustration — and to send him searching nearly three decades back in time for answers. In Congress, he has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from his more liberal Democratic colleagues, whom he has privately derided as “the herbal tea party.” The enmity has been mutual. After The Intercept reported the “herbal tea party” insult in 2019, the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a link to the article and wrote, “What’s funny is that there *are* Dems that do act like the Tea Party — but they’re conservative.” It was not the first or last time Gottheimer found himself at the bottom of an online pile-on. Two years ago, his clashes with liberals earned him a left-wing primary challenger who branded him “Trump’s favorite Democrat.” Gottheimer won by 33 points. “The social media Democrats are not the Democrats back home,” he told me during another conversation in his congressional office. “Those aren’t my constituents.”But now, he complained, “the far right is trying to do everything they can to equate many of us to the socialist left,” and he’s worried his constituents will start to believe it. The challenge for Gottheimer and his fellow moderates, however, is not just to define what they are not, but what they actually are. While there is a growing group of Democrats who believe that their party needs to become more moderate, it’s not clear that any of them agree on — or, in some cases, even know — what it means to be a moderate Democrat anymore.In January 1989, Al From invited Bill Galston to breakfast at La Colline, a French restaurant on Capitol Hill. From was a former congressional staff member who, four years earlier, co-founded the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.), a group of mostly Southern and Western Democrats who were trying to remake the party in their moderate image. They called themselves the New Democrats.Galston was a University of Maryland public-policy professor who moonlighted as an adviser to Democratic presidential campaigns — in 1988, working for Al Gore’s ill-fated campaign. The previous November, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 percentage points and 315 electoral votes, the Democrats’ third straight landslide presidential defeat. At La Colline, From asked Galston what was wrong with their party. Democrats, Galston answered, were in denial — focusing on the chimeras of higher turnout and better fund-raising when, in fact, it was their “unacceptably liberal” positions that was the problem. By not grappling with that fact, Galston told From, Democrats were engaging in “the politics of evasion.”From commissioned Galston and the political scientist Elaine Kamarck to write up the argument for the D.L.C.’s new think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, which published “The Politics of Evasion” that September. Galston and Kamarck did not mince words. “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote. The Democratic Party was “increasingly dominated by minority groups and white elites — a coalition viewed by the middle class as unsympathetic to its interests and its values.” Unless Democrats convinced those middle-class voters (who at that time were predominantly white) that they were tough on crime, trustworthy on foreign policy and disciplined about government spending, they would continue to wander the political wilderness.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.).Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty ImagesIn the past, the New Democrats shied away from outright conflict with the party’s liberal wing — refusing to return fire, for instance, when Jesse Jackson dubbed the D.L.C. “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” But “The Politics of Evasion” counseled that internecine fighting was good: “Only conflict and controversy over basic economic, social and defense issues are likely to attract the attention needed to convince the public that the party still has something to offer the great middle of the American electorate.” Bill Clinton, who as Arkansas governor became the D.L.C. chairman in 1990, took that message to heart in his 1992 presidential campaign.That summer, shortly after he cinched the Democratic nomination, Clinton gave a speech to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition group — in which he attacked the group for also hosting a relatively obscure rapper named Sister Souljah, who in the wake of that year’s Los Angeles riots said in an interview, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton told the Rainbow Coalition that “if you took the words ‘white’ and ‘Black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Jackson was furious and called on Clinton to apologize — exactly the response Clinton was hoping for. The Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page later wrote that by picking the fight, Clinton “impressed swing voters, particularly white suburbanites, with a confident independence from Jackson that other Democratic presidential candidates had not shown.” A loudly performed repudiation of a putative far-left extremist would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment.”Clinton ran for president as a factional candidate, against the Republicans but also against his party’s liberal wing, so that when he won, he remade the Democratic Party in his own — and the D.L.C.’s — image. In 1995, midway through Clinton’s first term, 23 moderate House Democrats formed the Blue Dog Caucus to, in their words, “represent the middle of the partisan spectrum.” By 2010, halfway through Barack Obama’s first term, the Blue Dogs had grown to 54 members. “To my surprise, ‘The Politics of Evasion’ had some impact,” Galston recently told me. “With the election of Bill Clinton, this little insurgency within the Democratic Party succeeded.” He paused. “Temporarily.”This February, more than three decades after their original salvo, Galston and Kamarck, now both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, published “The New Politics of Evasion.” Once again, they argued Democrats have swerved too far to the left: “A substantial portion of the Democratic Party has convinced itself that Americans are ready for a political revolution that transforms every aspect of their lives. This assumption has crashed into a stubborn reality: Most Americans want evolutionary, not revolutionary, change.” Once again, they argued that Democrats have ignored the political salience of cultural issues to their detriment: “For Americans across the political spectrum, social, cultural and religious issues are real and — in many cases — more important to them than economic considerations. These issues reflect their deepest convictions and shape their identity.”But unlike three decades ago, Galston and Kamarck were actually a little late to the fight. In the past few years, a growing and increasingly vocal cohort of strategists, policy wonks and intellectuals has been arguing that Democrats have overreached on social and cultural issues and that, as a result, the party has become unable to appeal to voters without college degrees — and, increasingly, not just white voters in that group but Hispanic, Asian American and Black voters too. From 2012 to 2020, the support of nonwhite voters without college degrees for the Democratic presidential candidate decreased by 10 percentage points. Much as in the early 1990s, the most vibrant and urgent discussion in Democratic circles currently revolves around why and how the party needs to steer itself back to the center.“For Democrats to win, we have to cater a lot more to moderates,” Sean McElwee told me recently at an Australian coffee shop in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood. Just 29 years old, with a baby face that makes him appear even younger, McElwee runs Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling firm and think tank that in only four years has come to occupy a central place in the Democratic Party firmament. Its ascent is especially remarkable considering where the firm — and McElwee — started.He burst onto the political scene early in Donald Trump’s presidency as a Resistance Twitter personality who popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” and hosted a weekly East Village happy hour for New York’s left-wing activists and writers. He started Data for Progress in 2018 with the express intent of driving the Democratic Party to the left. As a self-proclaimed socialist, McElwee’s early activism revolved around helping far-left candidates win Democratic primaries in safe blue districts. He was an adviser to the left-wing political group Justice Democrats, which fueled the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a.k.a. the Squad. He liked to call himself an “Overton window mover.” (The term refers to a reframing of what is politically possible.)But during the 2020 presidential primaries, just when practically every Democratic candidate except Joe Biden was jumping through that window by promising to abolish ICE and provide Medicare for all and eliminate student debt, McElwee himself started favoring what he calls “a more pragmatic approach.” The reason? While he personally still supported many of these left-wing policy proposals, Data for Progress’s polling showed that they weren’t actually popular with voters — or at least not with the working-class, non-college-educated voters Democrats need to win outside those safe blue districts.McElwee concluded that if Democrats ever want to accomplish their progressive goals, they need to get elected first — and the way to do that is to do a lot of polling to determine the popularity of various policy proposals. Then, when talking to voters, Democratic candidates should emphasize the popular ideas and de-emphasize the unpopular ones, even if that means emphasizing smaller, more incremental, more moderate policies. “I’m now just interested in a fundamentally different set of tactics and tools than I was six or seven years ago,” McElwee told me.The electoral theory to which McElwee now subscribes has come to be known as “popularism.” Its most prominent proponent is David Shor, one of McElwee’s best friends. A 30-year-old data analyst, Shor crunched numbers for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and later went to work for the progressive data firm Civis Analytics. In 2020, during the widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon,” citing a study by the Black political scientist Omar Wasow, and noted that nonviolence was more politically effective. Online activists were furious, with some branding his tweet racist, and after a pressure campaign from outside and inside the firm, Civis fired him — making Shor a political martyr for those who believed the Democratic Party and progressive institutions had become too beholden to far-left activists and liberal political staff members.Now free to speak his mind, Shor co-founded the data-analytics firm Blue Rose Research and began tweeting more and giving lengthy interviews that expanded on his theory. “I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that,” he told The Times’s Ezra Klein last October. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.”Joining Shor and McElwee in the effort to propagate popularism are a host of other liberal-but-tacking-to-the-center writers and thinkers. Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the influential 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” writes for a Substack newsletter called “The Liberal Patriot,” publishing missives on “The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem,” “The Democrats’ Working Class Voter Problem” and “The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party Left.” Matthew Yglesias, a prodigious pundit who co-founded Vox in 2014 before leaving in 2020 because he felt hemmed in by the “young-college-graduate bubble” at the website, now writes his own Substack newsletter, “Slow Boring.” “Part of what we’re doing here is rediscovering old ideas,” Yglesias told me. “I sometimes use the phrase ‘the wisdom of the ancients.’ None of these popularism ideas are particularly original or say anything that people haven’t said for a long time. They just became unfashionable briefly.”Writing in The Nation last October, Elie Mystal accused Shor and his comrades of counseling Democrats to “figure out what the racists want and give it to them.” The popularists, Mystal continued, “would have us believe that by not addressing Black concerns, by refusing to deliver on promises to fix the election system, the immigration system and the police system, Democrats are actually helping themselves attract white voters and counterintuitively, shoring up support from non-college-educated Black people.”Other popularism critics question the wisdom of relying on polls to develop a “popular” agenda at a time when political polling has never been more unreliable. They also point out that popularism’s most prominent preachers are New York- and Washington-based college-educated white guys themselves, whose evidence for what working-class voters want is, the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Daniel Schlozman says, “either survey data or the limited interactions that fancy people have with not-fancy people.” Instead of trying to win over voters who most likely aren’t winnable, the liberal critique of popularism holds, Democrats should instead redouble their efforts to bring Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college-educated white voters, to the polls. “Overpowering Republicans with enthusiasm and turnout is the only way to beat them,” Mystal wrote, “because trying to appease them is both morally intolerable and strategically foolish.”Popularists argue that Democrats have already tried and failed to win elections with the enthusiasm-and-turnout model. “The other side gets to vote too,” Teixeira wrote in January, “and the very stark choices favored by those on the left may mobilize the other side just as much — maybe more! — than the left’s side.” (A recent review of 400 million voting records by the political scientist Michael Barber and the public-policy scholar John B. Holbein found that “minority citizens, young people and those who support the Democratic Party are much less likely to vote than whites, older citizens and Republican Party supporters.”) Over a recent lunch at a Chinese-Korean restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, Teixeira held out hope that after November, the wisdom of the popularists’ case will be even more apparent. “We’re probably going to have a very rough midterms, and the appetite for change among Democrats will grow,” he said. “Defeat tends to concentrate a party’s mind.”No matter how likely the prospect of humiliating defeat, it’s a job requirement of the D.C.C.C. chairman to exude pugnacious confidence. As even his harshest critics would concede, Sean Patrick Maloney, the first openly gay person to hold the post, has a knack for that part of the job. “Sean makes me think of the old adage about Irishmen,” says Representative Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, the only Democrat to win in a Trump district in 2016, 2018 and 2020 and one of three Frontliners from the Keystone State. “They see two people fighting, and they ask, ‘Is this a private fight or can anybody get in?’”Now in his sixth term representing a congressional district in the Hudson Valley, Maloney, 55, angled to run the House Democratic campaign arm for years: In 2017, he conducted an autopsy of the group’s poor performance in the previous year’s election; in 2018, he ran for its chairmanship before abandoning the race because of a medical emergency. That Maloney, a close ally of Pelosi’s, was finally elected D.C.C.C. chairman in late 2020, just in time to preside over the Democratic debacle that’s shaping up to be the 2022 midterms, can make him seem like the dog that caught the car — an analogy that he naturally rejected. “You’re not the first person who’s suggested that,” he said. “But I like that people are underestimating us.”Maloney was enjoying himself — sipping the remnants of a soda from Shake Shack, gesturing to the three aides monitoring our conversation — when we talked in the middle of March in the D.C.C.C.’s new Washington headquarters, where cubicle name plates provide both the job title and preferred pronouns of the mostly Gen Z employees.There was no denying the political headwinds Democrats were facing, but Maloney’s exuberance at the time didn’t seem entirely irrational: The D.C.C.C. was finishing up a record-breaking fund-raising quarter that would ultimately bring in north of $50 million — $11.5 million more than its Republican counterpart raised during the same stretch. Maloney pointed to the State of the Union address Biden gave earlier that month — “the first time in a long time the American people got to see, without a filter, the guy they actually voted for” — and the job Biden was doing marshaling international support for Ukraine — “the most impressive presidential performance since the first Gulf War.” He believed both would improve Biden’s languishing support, which in turn would redound to the Democrats’ benefit in November. (Since then, Biden’s approval rating has dipped below 40 percent and the number of House seats Democrats are predicted to lose has increased.)More than money and polls, what was fueling Maloney’s swagger that afternoon was maps. At the start of the redistricting process that followed the 2020 census, Republicans appeared to hold the upper hand, with total control of the process in 19 states. Indeed, some election experts predicted that the G.O.P. would be able to retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly redrawn congressional maps. But working closely with Democratic officials in the handful of states where they controlled redistricting — including Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico — Maloney and the D.C.C.C. were able to engineer Democratic gains through aggressive gerrymandering of their own. Maloney’s most audacious move was in his home state of New York. There, Democratic legislators went around an independent redistricting commission and approved a heavily gerrymandered map. Their party gained an advantage in 22 out of 26 House districts, halving the number of safe Republican seats from eight to four.When I met with Maloney at the D.C.C.C., it looked as if Democrats had not just fought Republicans to a draw in the redistricting battle but had actually gained a few seats. “We beat ’em,” Maloney crowed. Of course, one driver of the political polarization that Maloney and other moderate Democrats denounce is the sort of aggressive gerrymandering that creates so many safe seats and so few competitive ones: In 2022, fewer than 40 seats out of 435 are considered competitive — in other words, seats in districts that Biden or Trump won by 5 percent or less in 2020.“Competitive districts marginalize ideological extremism and foster moderation in Congress,” Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor, has written. “Safe seats foster extremism.” Given that reality, I asked Maloney if he had any mixed feelings about the victory, considering the Democrats achieved it with such extreme gerrymanders — noting, of course, that Republicans would have done the same thing if given the opportunity. “They did have the opportunity and they [expletive] it up,” he shot back. “That’s what beating them means.”But the beatdown would prove ephemeral. Later that month, a Maryland judge threw out the state’s congressional map, calling it an “extreme partisan gerrymander.” A week after that, a judge in New York ruled that state’s new map unconstitutional. In May, the New York judge approved a new congressional map, drawn by a Carnegie Mellon political scientist, that undid all of the Democratic gains by creating what experts deemed 15 safely Democratic seats, five safely Republican seats and six tossups. Adding to New York Democrats’ misery, the new map either eliminated or drastically altered the districts of at least six Democratic incumbents.One of them was Maloney. An hour after the new, court-ordered maps were released, he announced on Twitter that he was switching from the Hudson Valley district he has represented since 2013 to a neighboring, now bluer district rooted in Westchester County but extending north to Putnam County, where he lives. (Members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent.) The only problem? Much of the district he was moving to is currently represented by his Democratic colleague Mondaire Jones. The prospect of the Democrats’ midterms chief forcing a member-on-member primary — much less a member-on-member primary involving a Black freshman incumbent like Jones — did not go over well with many House Democrats. Suddenly, all the internecine Democratic tensions that were Maloney’s job to resolve, or at the very least elide, were focused squarely on him.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones told Politico. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, a Black freshman member like Jones, complained about the “thinly veiled racism” of Maloney’s maneuverings. Others noted the presumption of Maloney, the man tasked with protecting the Democrats’ House majority, creating an open seat and giving Republicans a better opportunity to win his current district this fall. Ocasio-Cortez called on Maloney to step down as D.C.C.C. chairman if he wound up in a primary versus Jones.In the end, Jones switched from his Westchester district to a new one miles away in New York City. But that didn’t completely defuse the situation. Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive New York state senator from Westchester, decided to challenge Maloney in the August primary, securing the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Biaggi attacked Maloney not just as “an establishment, corporatist” Democrat but for putting his own political fortunes above those of the Democratic Party’s. “What hurt the party was having the head of the campaign arm not stay in his district,” she told reporters, “not maximize the number of seats New York can have to hold the majority.”“This is so counterproductive,” Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, wrote on Twitter about Ocasio-Cortez’s support of Biaggi’s primary challenge to Maloney. “The Supreme Court is about to outlaw abortion. We could lose both houses. So we are going to focus our time running against each other. Now we’re primarying committed progressives because … why? If we lose the House it’s because of dumb [expletive] like this.”With their majority or their own re-elections in doubt, many House Democrats are already heading for the exits in a pre-midterm exodus. So far, 33 House Democrats have announced that they will not compete for their seats in November. Some are leaving to run for other offices, but most are retiring. And while some Democratic retirees represent solidly blue districts and will almost certainly be replaced by other Democrats, many of them hold the sort of purple — or even red — seats that Democrats have little chance of keeping unless they have an incumbent running.In the middle of March, the mood was funereal in the office of Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida who announced last December that she would not be running again for her purple Orlando-area seat. She had just watched the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky give a video address to a joint session of Congress, during which he shared footage of Ukrainian women and children packing bags and weeping as they said goodbye to their husbands and fathers who were staying to fight the Russians. Murphy, whose family escaped Vietnam by boat when she was an infant, wiped away tears. “I’m a little emotional about it,” she explained. “Those images have been hard for me to watch.”As Murphy reflected on her time in Congress, her emotions seemed no less raw. She was first elected to the House in 2016, defeating a 12-term Republican incumbent whose district had become more Democratic after the state Supreme Court made lawmakers redraw Florida’s congressional lines. But it was hardly blue and Murphy won by hewing to the center on fiscal issues and foreign policy.Once in Washington, she joined the Blue Dogs. In the group’s early years, most of its members were older white men from the South who were not just fiscal conservatives but cultural ones as well — firm in their opposition to gun control, abortion and gay people serving in the military. In 2018, when Murphy, an Asian American woman who just turned 40, became the group’s co-chairwoman, it was a sign of how even the Blue Dogs had changed amid the Democratic Party’s leftward march. “I’d love for the world to stop using ‘conservative Democrat’ to define Blue Dogs,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “Because I am pro-choice, I am unabashedly pro-L.G.B.T.Q., I am pro-gun-safety.” (In addition to Murphy, the Blue Dogs also now have two Black and four Hispanic members.)Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMurphy preferred to describe herself as a moderate; her main areas of disagreement with her fellow House Democrats were about national security and pocketbook issues (she supported a law that toughened penalties for deported immigrants who try to re-enter the United States and another that allows new businesses to deduct more of their start-up expenses). For her first two years in Congress, with Trump as president and Democrats in the minority, she was able to stake out moderate positions with little pushback from members of her caucus. But after 2018, when Democrats took back the House, her moderation became a sore point.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More
