Just Win, Baby

Why Democrats are more committed than ever to political pragmatism.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

The quote in the title comes from the late Al Davis, the controversial owner of the Oakland Raiders in its glory days; it illustrated his commitment to victory at almost any cost. But it could describe how almost every Democrat is feeling right now. For those of us who spent so long frustrated at “Dems in Disarray!” headlines and the truth they reflected, it’s a sight to see. For all their joy and relief over Kamala Harris’s candidacy and the degree to which she is supposedly running on “vibes,” the Democratic Party has become remarkably pragmatic, more than it has been at any time in living memory, even as it has moved left on policy. Both these developments are notable; the fact that they have occurred in tandem is extraordinary.

Remember the PUMAs? Short for “Party Unity My Ass,” they were Hillary Clinton supporters embittered over the fact that she lost the 2008 nomination to Barack Obama who threatened to sabotage Obama’s general election campaign (eventually they came around). But there are no Joe Biden dead-enders today; even those who argued that he should remain the party’s nominee have lined up behind Harris. 

At the Democratic convention, there were plenty of things lefty Democrats could have complained about. There was a lot of emphasis on showing support for police and the military. There was almost no talk of climate change from the stage until the final evening, and Harris only mentioned it in passing in her speech. But expressions of disagreement were muted, other than some resigned objections on social media. There was a justified controversy over the convention not featuring any Palestinian-American speakers, but the part of Harris’s speech that discussed Gaza — in which she went farther in proclaiming support for Palestinians’ self-determination that Biden ever has, but still used the passive voice to describe the death and destruction Israel has imposed there — was met by most with something like That could have been better, but I guess it’s about as far as she can go right now. 

The same is true of Harris’s new emphasis on border enforcement when she talks about immigration: Liberals may not be very comfortable with it, but they realize it’s the politically smart thing to do, so they aren’t objecting very loudly. In fact, liberals aren’t objecting all that loudly to anything Harris is doing; in a Gallup poll released a week ago, she scored a stunning 93 percent in both favorability and job approval among Democrats.

How we got here

The current combination of progressive substance and political pragmatism has its roots in the 2020 presidential primaries, which I bring up regularly because it was so important in defining what the party is right now, in two critical ways. First, it made clear how significantly the center of gravity in the party had moved to the left on policy. There were intense debates during that campaign about health care, immigration, cannabis legalization, and a host of other issues, all of which were about not whether the party should move left of where it was under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but just how far it should go. Obama was president only four years before and still popular among Democrats, but even the supposedly moderate candidates like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg were proposing policy programs far to the left of what he had carried out during his time in office. 

There wasn’t a perfect consensus that emerged, and Biden didn’t follow up on all of it when he took office. For instance, even though Biden rejected single-payer health care (which was advocated in various forms by many of the other candidates, including Kamala Harris), he proposed a public option plan that was far more progressive than the Affordable Care Act, yet he never put it into legislation as president, no doubt because it would have died a quick death in Congress and been taken as a defeat (though a few of its elements, including Medicare prescription drug price negotiation, made it into bills). Nevertheless, that campaign demonstrated how far the party’s center of gravity had shifted. 

The second way the 2020 primaries redefined the Democratic Party was that despite all the talk about single-payer health care and making crossing the border illegally a civil violation, the Democratic electorate did not choose one of the avatars of progressivism who had long been where the party had now moved, like Elizabeth Warren. Instead, they went with Biden, precisely because he was perceived to be the more moderate candidate. It was a choice based on pragmatism, in which the base picked Biden because they thought he’d be most palatable to a general electorate.

It turned out to be a wise decision on both political and policy grounds, because not only did Biden win the general election, he governed as an extremely progressive president on a range of issues — by any reasonable measure, the left-most Democrat in the White House since at least Lyndon Johnson. Not on every issue, but in more ways than you might have predicted knowing how over the course of his career he hugged the center of his party (some of us even saw this coming).

And when it became clear this year that Biden wasn’t going to be able to beat Donald Trump, the party — its leaders and its voters together — once again chose a pragmatic course (though not one without risk), convincing him to step aside. Perhaps it should have happened earlier, but the fact that it happened at all is what matters. 

Then the party lined up quickly behind Harris, without the mess of an open convention, and now she is being given plenty of latitude to modify the policy emphasis of her campaign in whatever way she judges maximizes the chances of winning in November. Yes, there are people on the left who are unhappy with some elements of Harris’s campaign. But the last few years shows that political pragmatism and progressive policy making are in no way incompatible.

Republicans have gone the opposite way

I could write a whole post about how Republicans went through a similar process but came to a different conclusion, but briefly: They had their critical presidential primary in 2016, when after eight years out of power most of the party’s elites thought they had to become more inclusive in order to win. But Donald Trump showed that the party’s base actually wanted to move in the opposite direction, toward an intense white nationalism and a politics based exclusively on grievance and anger. 

At the same time, Republicans maintained a steady move to the right on policy that had begun during the Obama years with the rise of the Tea Party, a movement that rejected pragmatism in favor of purity tests and internal purges. The result was a rapid replacement of old-style dealmakers in the mode of John Boehner and Paul Ryan with the likes of Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan, extremists who consider compromise to be treason because they believe they are on a religious crusade to destroy leftism.

That remains the dominant political style of the Republican Party. Perhaps that will change in 2028 when, win or lose this year, they have to have a non-Trump presidential primary when their identity and political strategy will have to be litigated. But for now, they are committed to Trumpism even as it threatens to deliver them yet another defeat of the kind they suffered in 2022, 2020, and 2018. Meanwhile, Democrats just want to win.