Democrats struggle with their identity

The party’s leftward tilt is a gift for Donald Trump.

People gather in front of the White House to protest Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration. Picture: AP

How do you beat Donald Trump? One might imagine this is the burning question for the burgeoning field of Democratic candidates now vying for their party’s presidential nomination in 2020.

Not so. At this early stage, the 14 Democrats who have so far ­declared their intention to run for president have hardly cast their eyes in the direction of Trump and the White House.

Instead, they are absorbed in a bruising internal battle to reshape the Democratic Party in their image, away from the centrist ­positions of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and towards the sort of left-wing, liberal policies their party once baulked at.

“You can feel it now. In congress it has started to shift. We’re not there yet, but it has started to shift,” liberal Democratic contender senator Elizabeth Warren told voters in Iowa recently when discussing changing attitudes to progressive issues such as climate change.

Another contender, senator Cory Booker, captured the mood of the party’s liberal wing when he slapped down critics of the party’s leftward lurch. “ ‘Oh, it’s impractical. Oh, it’s too expensive. Oh, it’s all this,’ ” he said. “If we used to govern our dreams that way, we would never have gone to the moon.”

The question moderate Democrats are now asking is whether their chances of defeating Trump in 2020 may also go to the moon if the party’s presidential candidates keep pushing a raft of policies that were once considered electoral poison.

“The party is not going to go in the direction of (Bernie) Sanders-style socialism because it’s not winning on the issues and it doesn’t win politically except in a very limited number of places,” Jonathan Cowan, head of the Democratic centrist group Third Way, told Time magazine. “It’s going to go in the direction that won it two presidencies. The last two-term Democratic presidents were mainstream Democrats.”

But Cowan was speaking ­before any of the present crop of Democrats declared their candidacy for the presidency. Since then almost all of the Democratic presidential candidates have fallen over themselves to push the party to the Left. They have embraced policies on healthcare, immigration, climate change, racial justice and taxation that were too extreme for either Obama or Clinton, much less for the swinging voters who the Democrats must win over in order to defeat Trump.

For example, Warren has called for an across-the-board wealth tax on the richest Americans, a universal childcare plan, a Medicare-for-all healthcare pledge and government-funded reparations for black Americans to acknowledge the ongoing legacy of slavery and discrimination. Any of these platforms, if embraced by the party, would represent a historic leftward tilt for the Democrats, ending decades in which the party has sought to occupy America’s political centre.

“We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations,” Warren says. “We need systemic, structural changes to ­address that.”

Another high-profile early Democratic candidate, senator Kamala Harris of California, has also backed reparations for black Americans affected by the legacy of slavery. This is despite warnings that such a scheme could cost several trillion dollars. Even Obama, the country’s first black president, rejected the idea as impractical.

“I’m not so optimistic as to think that you would ever be able to garner a majority of an American Congress that would make those kinds of investments, above and beyond the kinds of investments that could be made in a progressive program for lifting up all people,” Obama said in 2016.

Healthcare, which has consistently ranked near the top of voters’ concerns, has also ­attracted sweeping and audacious policy promises from the Democratic nominees. Most of the senators running for president — including Warren, Harris, Booker and Sanders — have advocated some form of Medicare-for-all health cover that would mean bringing all Americans under the government’s Medicare insurance scheme that is now limited to those aged over 65.

There is no doubt that America’s health insurance policies are a shambles compared with those in Australia, Britain and Europe, but the political risk that these Democrats are taking by advocating such a sweeping change is obvious. Obama struggled for many years to achieve a more conservative health insurance scheme with his Affordable Care Act, and even that scheme was a ripe target for Trump and conservative voters in the 2016 election.

On climate change, many of the Democratic contenders have been broadly supportive of the radical so-called Green New Deal championed by young New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising darling of the party’s Left. Her grandly ambitious plan calls for the US to get 100 per cent of its power needs through renewable and “zero-emission” energy sources within a decade. But it does not explain how such a utopian blueprint would be funded or what the costs would be for traditional energy ­industries and jobs.

On immigration, Democrats have become implacably opposed to the notion of a wall along the US-Mexico border, even though the party’s leaders embraced building more border fences during the Bush and Obama years.

Some say the stridently liberal policies of the early Democratic contenders are an attempt to distinguish themselves politically from the vanquished Hillary Clinton and the party’s mainstream wing that has been dominant for so long.

To many Democrats, Clinton’s moderate, cautious presidential campaign was a mistake because it allowed a brash populist like Trump to command attention with simple sweeping ideas like building a border wall.

They watched Trump capture the attention of voters with ideas that were once considered outside of mainstream Republican policies, such as a tariff trade war, withdrawing from climate change pacts and free-trade agreements, and bringing US troops home from Middle East trouble spots.

These liberal Democrats believe they may be able to command similar public attention with sweeping populist policies from the Left. Polls do suggest that Democratic voters have shifted to the Left. A Gallup poll in January found for the first time in more than 20 years that a majority of Democrats describe themselves as liberal, compared with 34 per cent who called themselves moderate.

America’s largely liberal media has championed this trend, elevating young Democrats like the 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez to rock star-like status despite her advocacy of policies like a 70 per cent top tax rate (on income over $US10 million) that would doom any Democratic presidential nomi­nee to defeat. For Trump, the leftward tilt led by liberals like her and early Democratic presidential hopefuls has been a political gift.

Many in the party’s left wing cheered Ocasio-Cortez for her attacks on Amazon which played a part on the company’s recent decision not to build its second headquarters in New York, costing the city an estimated 25,000 jobs.

“We believe in the American dream, not in the socialist nightmare,” Trump told conservative supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. He claimed Democrats “have totally abandoned the American mainstream”.

“But that’s going to be good for us in 2020,” he said. “They’re embracing open borders, socialism, and extreme late-term abortion.”

On the Medicare-for-all pledge, Trump said: “They want to replace individual rights with total government domination.”

He lampooned the Green New Deal, joking that it had “tremendous promise and tremendous ­potential”.

“No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric,” Trump said. “ ‘Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”

Trump and the Republicans will also portray calls by Democratic contenders for reparations for African Americans as anti-white policies that are out of kilter with mainstream America.

The key question at this early stage of the Democratic race is whether this cluster of liberal candidates will eventually be eclipsed by more mainstream centrist candidates as the contest intensifies.

The path is clear for a high-­profile moderate Democrat, and several of them appear to be pre­paring to run. The natural front­runner among the moderates is Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden, who is yet to confirm his candidacy but is widely tipped to do so. Biden can tout foreign policy experience and a more moderate approach to economic management, immigration and healthcare than the present crop of contenders.

Former vice-president Joe Biden. Picture: AP

Other moderates, such as Montana Governor Steve Bullock, are also considered likely to run but two potential centrist candidates, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and billionaire Michael Bloomberg both declared this week they would not run. The only centrist candidate to have already declared her candidacy is Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, who has distanced herself from the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all proposals.

“I’d like to see somebody come in and make the case for electing a more moderate candidate,” says former New Hampshire governor John Lynch. “And I believe that if the Democrats want to beat President Trump, their best bet is somebody in the middle.”

The mid-term elections last November showed a solid swing against Trump from voters in the suburbs and fringes of the nation’s cities. These were largely moderate voters, both Democrats and Republicans, who voted for Trump in 2016 and are now disillusioned with him. These voters will be looking for a Democratic candidate in 2020 who they consider to be a “safe” alternative to Trump. Of the 67 new Democrats who won seats in the house at the November midterm, roughly one-third came from districts which Trump won in 2016.

These moderate voters may be scared off by a Democratic presidential candidate who espouses stridently left-wing views — at least by the standards of US politics — on race, immigration, tax, climate change and healthcare.

Mainstream Democrats are awake to these issues and, in the months ahead, we are likely to see a push by the moderate wing of the party to reassert control. Democratic House Speaker Nancy ­Pelosi has subtly distanced herself from some of the more populist policies. She was espec­ially dismissive of the Green New Deal.

“It will be one of several or maybe even many suggestions that we receive,’’ Pelosi said. “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

The Democrats are still working out who they are and what they stand for in the Trump era. With 11 months until the first Democratic primary contest next February, the battle between the liberal and moderate wings is just beginning. But Trump will be happy with what he has seen so far.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.