The ’90s gave birth to the so-called “New Democrats,” the centrists who’d jettisoned the old liberalism and adopted a more corporate-friendly aspect. For decades, you had to be a New Democrat to be taken seriously. But this week, we entered a new era.
But both candidates ran as aggressive economic populists, attacking billionaires and vowing to fight on behalf of working-class people. El-Sayed was ceaselessly on-message: money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for All. And Talarico, while he did walk back some of his more progressive stands on cultural issues, never wavered on economics and delivered what for my money was the single most memorable riff of the campaign: “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. We are focused on the wrong one percent. Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools. Immigrants aren’t cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.”
Fine. All that’s true. On the other hand: Both had some $200 million thrown into vicious attacks on them and their character. Talarico was unmasculine, gay, nonbinary, whatever. El-Sayed was a jihadist, even a terrorist. And according to the old Democratic conventional wisdom, those attacks are supposed to work.
Who? Erskine Bowles was a good Democrat—of his time. He was a chief of staff in the Clinton White House. After Clinton left office, Democrats in his home state of North Carolina needed a known-name candidate to run for Senate against Elizabeth Dole. He was exactly the kind of candidate the Democrats of that era wanted—a white, moderate businessman from a Tarheel State political family who’d buffed and shined his corporate credentials, in his case spending years at Morgan Stanley.
I don’t mean to pick on Bowles. I single him out because he’s emblematic of the kind of person the Washington Democratic establishment types all agreed in their wisdom for three decades the party simply had to put forward for the Senate in swing states (in fact, even in many blue states). The national political media, by the way, by and large parroted this line.
If El-Sayed can win in Michigan and Talarico can win in Texas, it means that economic populists can win in a lot of places where Democratic conventional wisdom said they could never win. It means that come 2028, when populist Democrats are running in Senate primaries in Wisconsin or Iowa or North Carolina or Florida or maybe even Missouri—all states where Republican incumbent senators will be up for reelection two years hence—no one can say they can’t possibly win.
It’s an absolute sea change inside the Democratic Party—the erasure of 30 years of conventional wisdom that’s been running on fumes for at least 10 of those years—and it means that by 2029, if there’s a Democratic president and the party controls both houses of Congress, they may actually have a critical mass of legislators who are ready to fight for working people.
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