The Great Progressive Collapse

Twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off an amazing feat. No, not emerging victorious in her candidacy to represent New York’s 14th District in Congress, an area that favors Democrats by almost 30 points. Ocasio-Cortez’s real accomplishment was how she managed to navigate several months of intense media scrutiny without ever formulating a coherent response to the many interviewers who asked her how she intends to bridge the financial gap between her hopes and dreams and their 13-figure price tags. In this high-wire act, she had the help of some willing accomplices in the press. How should the country pay for the estimated $32 trillion it would cost to nationalize the health-insurance industry, Ocasio-Cortez was recently asked? “You just pay for it,” she averred to credulous nods.

Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez is on her way to Washington, but most of her fellow progressive hopefuls were not appealing to a similarly complacent population of voters. Wide-eyed progressive candidates spent much of the 2018 election cycle generating levels of attention from the political press wildly disproportionate relative to the likelihood of their victories. In fact, the gauzy aura that political media erected around some of these left-leaning candidates seems to have done them no favors.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar and the Nation contributor Sean McElwee put together a list of eight of the country’s most progressive candidates in challenging races in a helpful effort to gauge just how receptive the public was to the modern progressive message. Today, we have the answer: not very.

In his campaign for the governor’s mansion in Arizona, David Garcia vowed to treat access to health care as “a right,” pass a single-payer health-care plan for his state, make access to college “free,” and “double down on solar” energy investments. “He doesn’t seem to be outrageously progressive,” University of Arizona Professor Thomas Volgy told the left-wing outlet the Intercept. Arizonans disagreed. Garcia lost to incumbent Gov. Doug Ducey by over 17 points.

Former NAACP chief Ben Jealous ran for the governorship of Maryland by promising to transform that mid-Atlantic state into a model for progressive racial and economic justice. He, too, promoted a plan to institute a single-payer system, tuition-free college funded by ending “the era of mass incarceration,” and a $15 minimum wage. Jealous lost his bid for the governorship in dark-blue Maryland to incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan by over 13 points.

University of California, Irvine, law professor and “Elizabeth Warren’s protégée” Katie Porter ran for the House in a suburban Golden State district that should have been ripe pickings for Democrats in a year in which the suburbs turned sharply against the GOP. On the campaign trail, Porter railed against “predatory” banks, the GOP’s tax code reform legislation, and charter school legislation. Porter affixed her name to a letter attacking Justice Brett Kavanaugh for failing to be properly impartial and dispassionately deferential when defending himself against accusations of sexual violence. Voters in this targeted district opted to stick with the Republican Party.

Scott Wallace, the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s former vice president and Communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, was criticized for co-chairing a fund that gave liberally to anti-Israel organizations and to the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Western British politician George Galloway. His allies promoted him as a pioneer “on climate justice” and promised to expand Social Security and impose sick- and medical-leave plans on firms. Ultimately, Wallace cost the Democratic Party a key swing district in the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia.

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