Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What.
Stopping the party's rightward drift means having a real primary.
The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right. This scenario is extremely plausible. Back to the Clinton era we go!
Forgive me for indulging in a little bit of forward thinking here. Set aside, for a moment, the urge to cry “We just need to win this election!” and allow yourself to imagine the next four years of American politics. Whenever anything that might be construed as a “prediction” comes up, I have to note: We can’t predict specific events, we can’t predict crises, we can’t predict the exact shape of what the next four years will bring. What we can do is to look at what is happening right now within our political parties and extrapolate forward the common sense risks. So let me tell you the common sense risk that is freaking me out.
As the endorsements of Harris by Dick Cheney and a long list of his fellow disgruntled establishment Republicans show, Trump has fully alienated a significant part of the Republican coalition. Specifically, he has alienated the most conservative establishment slice of the party, in the true sense: The business leaders, the military leaders, the longtime party stalwarts, the people whom the Republican Party has long existed to serve. These people see themselves as entitled to run the party. They have always been happy to cater to and accept the votes of the outright racists and loons, but that faction was never supposed to be in charge. Now, with Trump, that faction is in charge, and a fair portion of the traditional Republican establishment has made the calculation that Trump represents such a specific danger of doing crazy shit—a screaming toddler armed with the keys to the global economy, and the nuclear codes—that they are better off backing Harris, just for the sake of stability. These people certainly plan on retaking their place atop the Republican Party after a Trump loss. But it remains an open question whether the Republican Party will snap back to its traditional formation after Trump leaves, or whether the MAGA faction will solidify its leadership of the party, alienating those center-right traditionalists for good.
If MAGA is the future of the Republican Party, some of those temporarily disaffected people will shrug and return to the fold, satisfied with lunacy in exchange for tax cuts. But some other portion of them will drift into what they see as their only alternative: the Democratic Party. For those of us on the left, that rearrangement would only serve to make the center of the party even more distant from us than it already is.
This is not theoretical. This process is unfolding right now. Harris is not just accepting the support of these Republicans. She is leaning into it. She did not just accept Dick Cheney’s vote; she did a rally with Liz Cheney and thanked Dick Cheney for “what he has done to serve our country.” She has earned the support of tech investor Ben Horowitz, until recently a Trump backer, who said that he was “encouraged” by conversations with the Harris campaign about its tech policy. She is cultivating the support of Wall Street financiers—the FT reports that “Two finance executives close to Harris said they had been reassured by her that she could appoint new officials to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission who would take a less aggressive stance than current chairs Gary Gensler and Lina Khan,” which would be a catastrophic loss. And her economic plan, though still vague, is notably less oriented towards the perspective of strengthening labor, and more oriented towards consumer-centric policies that do not attack the dangers of concentrated economic power at its roots.
When Joe Biden was running in 2020, I expected him to exhibit this sort of centrist drift as president. In fact, he did the opposite, appointing Lina Khan at the FTC and Jennifer Abbruzzo at the NLRB and carrying out the most progressive and pro-worker economic agenda of any president in my lifetime. Why did lifelong moderate Joe Biden, the credit card industry’s favorite senator, end up doing so much good economic policy? One major reason is that after a tightly contested 2020 primary campaign that Bernie Sanders looked for a time like he might win, Biden made the choice to bring the left wing of the party into the fold, rather than slamming the door in their face. He created a formal “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” that hammered out a set of policy recommendations for his term. He gave progressives like Elizabeth Warren significant input into staffing decisions for parts of his administration. After watching Democratic presidents freeze out the left for decades, I failed to anticipate Biden’s willingness to allow the left some real policy power. It was a political decision, and it doesn’t mean that Biden himself is a resounding progressive, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Biden presidency produced hugely important tangible victories for progressive economic values.
There is no reason to think that this is the new normal. Political parties are coalitions that are always shifting. It is extremely possible that a Kamala Harris administration would see the pendulum swing back towards neoliberalism, as a result of more right wingers seeping into the Democratic Party, and as a result of Harris greedily seeking out the support of disaffected parts of the traditional Republican base. Rather than just wringing my hands about this possibility, let me suggest a useful response: If Harris wins the presidency, the left wing of the party needs to start planning now for a primary campaign against her in 2028.
What was the biggest factor pulling Biden to the left? Bernie Sanders’ strong primary showing. What is allowing Harris to drift right with ease? The fact that the only counterpoint to her in the public mind is Trump. Strong primary campaigns serve to demonstrate the power of various parts of a party’s coalition. They create political risk for the other candidates and force them to try to adapt to win the support of those other candidates’ voters. Think about RFK Jr., for fuck’s sake: a true unhinged lunatic, a man who should be listened to for nothing but comedy value, and yet one who has managed to make his priorities a part of Trump’s platform just by being the only real challenger floating around at the moment. The 2024 campaign season has been an atypical one, but you get the point.
Any time you threaten to primary your own party’s sitting president you will inevitably hear a zillion angry accusations that you are helping the other side, that you are weakening your own party. Fuck that. Primaries are the proper and designated place for this sort of contest of intra-party factions to play out. (I advocated a leftist primary challenge of Biden centered on Gaza in particular for this very reason.) If the left is pissed with the direction of the Democratic Party and all the leftists say “fuck it” and don’t vote at all, that hurts the Democratic Party. If the left is pissed with the direction of the Democratic Party and the leftists launch a third party that sucks votes from the Democratic candidate, that hurts the Democratic Party. But if the left is pissed with the direction of the Democratic Party and therefore the leftists run their own candidate in the Democratic primary, that helps the Democratic Party. Electorally, it helps by keeping leftists engaged in and voting with the party. Politically, it helps by pulling the median policy position of the eventual primary winner to the left. Morally, it helps by giving voters at least one uncompromised candidate to vote for—a candidate who is, the voters will see, not located in the Republican Party.
Bernie Sanders never won the presidential nomination, but the fact that he garnered so much support in two consecutive campaigns did a great deal to force the party left, and laid the groundwork for the successes of the progressive agenda during Biden’s term. Now, as all of the Democratic candidate’s positions get compared to Trump’s fascism rather than to Bernie’s progressivism, we can see that the backsliding to the center is set to begin anew. This year, I hope, we will beat Trump. As soon as we do, start thinking about who to run in 2028. No need for the left to cower in the corner for four years. This is how democracy works.
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Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Why Would Dick Cheney Endorse Kamala Harris?; The Rashida Tlaib for President Scenario.
One handy fact to note is that organized labor could fold its 2028 general strike right into a 2028 Shawn Fain For President campaign. Dare to dream, my friends. Speaking of the labor movement, my book “The Hammer” is for sale wherever books are sold. I’ll be talking about it at the annual Mother Jones Dinner in Springfield, IL on October 12. You can also hear me talking about the labor movement on the latest episode of the Boundary Issues podcast.
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There is no 'left' in USA politics so exactly who is going to do this?
The Democrats will not allow a primary against their incumbent. Just ask Marianne Williamson and RFK, Jr. This is just futile wish casting.
The fact that Bernie was so loved and lost in his primary efforts is evidence that the establishment wing of the party will not allow a left-wing candidate to represent it.
The Overton window has shifted too far to the right, and there is no pulling the Democrats back. They are too comfortable at the top of their pyramid of false promises and bread crumbs.