The progressive-vs.-establishment fights that we can expect in the Democratic Party going forward

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't waste any time after the election beginning the post-election fight against ... Democratic progressives (Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris, Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races Politico 11/05/2020):

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants had a stark warning for Democrats on Thursday: Swing too far left and they’re all but certain to blow their chances in the Georgia runoff that will determine which party controls the Senate.

Congressional Democrats are collectively pinning their hopes on a pair of Senate races in January in one of the most competitive states in the nation — an outcome that could determine whether Democrats hold all levers of power in Washington next year, despite a disappointing night on Tuesday. While Joe Biden is looking likely to win the presidency, Democrats were shut out of key Senate races, dashing their hopes of reclaiming control of the chamber, and lost ground in the House despite being expected to significantly expand their majority.

Pelosi has been advocating the notion that the way to grow the Democratic House majority was to - of course! - appeal to those invisible sprites and elves known as "moderate Republicans". Who of course once again remained largely undetected in the 2020 election. In fact, Trump's margin among self-identified Republicans reportedly increased in 2020 compared to 2016.

A word of caution on parsing the election results by demographic groups. Voter as a percentage of eligible voters in 2020 was the highest in 120 years in the US, a big increase which could affect some demographic breakdowns in unfamiliar ways. A higher percentage of black voters voting for Trump in 2020 probably result in part from the increased polarization that helped produced the higher turnout. Clinton critical loss in Michigan in 2016 featured historically low turnout among black voters in heavily black precincts in Detroit and Flint. If black turnout increased in 2020 enough to provide a sufficient number of votes to deliver Michigan to Biden, for instance, that is a more significant event than the national percentage of African-Americans voting Biden. Also, the voting demographics are heavily based on exit polls. More detailed analysis of actual voting results could provide a different picture. 

Benjamin Siegel of ABC News reports on the House results in 'It was a failure': House Democrats grapple over surprise 2020 losses 11/06/2020. The fact that Pelosi and the Democratic establishment automatically go to "hippie-punching" - blaming The Left - whenever their conservative, appeal-to-mythical-moderate-Republicans approach fails is sad. Typical, but sad.

But there were some notable Democratic House wins on Tuesday, as Mindy Isser reports in What Democrats Should Learn From the Spate of Socialist Wins on Election Day In These Times 11/05/2020.

Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur report on the inner-Democratic-Party discussion that will go on for the next four years and more in AOC Just Ethered This Centrist Democrat TYT 11/07/2020:



There will be plenty of surprises during the next four years. But my expectation right now is that during the next four years, the biggest push from the Democratic base - which in Beltway punditry is synonymous with The Left - will be over whether and how hard Biden and the Democrats in Congress fight for the platform they ran on.

There are two overlapping but distinct kinds of sentiment among base Democratic activists that will produce Democratic divisions. On is about policy, e.g., should the Democrats support national health insurance, aka, Medicare For All, or should they stick to advocating a "public option" for health insurance and extending Medicare coverage down to age 60. The other is over whether and how serious the Democrats fight for the positions to which they are committed. Progressives, for instance, would happily support extending Medicare coverage down to age 60, which Biden formally supports. But if Biden and Harris fail to pursue it as a priority, or if Democratic Senators and House members appear not to be serious about pushing for it, that will be a argument not about ideology or policy but of Serious-vs.-Not-Serious.

The policy disputes will often, though not necessarily exclusively, line up as progressive-vs.-conservative intraparty alignments. The disputes of priorities and tactics are likely not to line in in quite so clear a left-right divide.