Folding a winning hand isn’t moderation

Just take positions that people agree with!

Senators Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego are both members of Majority Democrats. (Photo by the American Hospital Association)

I mentioned this in last week’s brief thoughts on the end of the government shutdown, but I was kind of annoyed to see “moderates” widely used as the shorthand for the group of eight Democratic senators who decided to back down from the fight with Republicans. I’m annoyed because of course it’s a bad look for “moderation” to be identified with a decision that highly engaged grassroots Democrats hate.

But I’m also annoyed because I think using that terminology to describe what happened during the shutdown genuinely misstates what the broader argument is about.

I think the moderation argument is primarily about:

• Do you prioritize the issues the public says they care most about?

• Do you take positions on issues the public agrees with?

• Do you prioritize delivering on what the public cares about in your governance?

Elissa Slotkin bucking Chuck Schumer’s whip to vote with Republicans on a vote about letting California ban gasoline-burning cars is moderation. Michael Bennet denouncing the Biden administration’s pause on natural gas exports is moderation. Bennet, Cory Booker, and the late Diane Feinstein fighting the Biden administration on behalf of charter schools is moderation. Ruben Gallego backing an immigration reform plan that limits a path to citizenship to Dreamers and the spouses of U.S. citizens — a far narrower approach than the 2007 and 2013 bills — is moderation. Joe Manchin insisting that the Build Back Better plan be pared down to something that was less inflationary was moderation.

Even moderation that I don’t approve of, like Kyrsten Sinema demanding that the legislation scale back its revenue aspirations, can be a meaningful form of moderation. Jared Golden backing the SAVE Act is moderation. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez denouncing student loan forgiveness and fighting with the Biden administration about the regulation of table saws is moderation.

Even those on the left can manifest acts of moderation. Zohran Mamdani disavowing “defund the police” and committing to retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner is moderation. That doesn’t make Mamdani “a moderate” in some absolute sense. But he was trying to move to the center relative to his prior image, to reach out to the middle ground of New York City public opinion (which is way to the left of national opinion), and in doing so he successfully got himself a hair over 50 percent of the vote.

I don’t think Chris Murphy would want me to characterize it this way, but taking the lead on negotiating a border security bill with James Lankford last Congress was moderation. He broke the interest group taboo that said hawkish moves on immigration had to take place in the context of a deal for dovish moves on immigration. And, of course, Joe Biden belatedly moved to the middle on this topic by eventually shutting down the asylum system. Earlier, though, back in 2023 Gallego broke with Biden on the border along with Senators Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and Sherrod Brown, but Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan declined to join them.

I know Shaheen and Hassan think of themselves as moderates, as does Catherine Cortez Masto, and probably some of the other members of the surrender caucus.

But I can’t think of major examples of them fighting with the Biden administration or progressive interest groups about issues or ideas. And in keeping with that (and not meaning this as a defense of the decision to surrender), I don’t think they ended the shutdown for particularly moderate reasons.

If you ask them what they’re up to, they’ll tell you very plainly that they were trying to safeguard the interests of federal employees and low-income Americans. I think a big part of the subtext of the fight is that they wanted to preserve the filibuster. This bit of Senate procedure is something people have been arguing about for decades, but it’s clearly not something that normal voters care a lot about or that has tons of relevance to electoral strategy or party positioning. The case for moderation is a case about aligning with public views and priorities and just has nothing to do with the inside-baseball Senate stuff.

The real stakes of the decision

Understanding of this is unfortunately distorted by the number of opponents of the deal who were posturing in Congress, insisting on painting a picture where the likely alternative to striking a deal would have been for Democrats to score a win on the policy issue of health-insurance tax credits.

There is certainly a universe in which Donald Trump responded to the licking Republicans took in the off-year elections by opening the door to a deal on this topic. That, in fact, might have been the smartest political move for him.

But it’s not the direction he went. If anything, it was the opposite. While the White House’s original posture had been to refuse to indulge Democrats’ demands under threat of a shutdown, the administration was not expressing that much hostility to the idea of extending the tax credits. But evidently there was some kind of internal debate, and Trump started mouthing off hostility to the idea of the tax credits and indeed hostility to the entire idea of government-subsidized health insurance. Wavering Democrats were clearly eager to see what would happen in the elections. If the party underperformed polling, that might be evidence that the shutdown was backfiring and it should end. If Democrats overperformed and Trump seemed open to negotiating, that would have been the time to work on a deal. But Trump made it clear that no deal would happen.

This gave Democrats a choice between reopening the government in exchange for nothing (what the Shaheen Team did) and simply pushing the country into a cascading series of air-traffic-control problems, loss of income for SNAP families, and financial hardship for federal workers.

I think the “push the country into hardship” option made political sense because, as far as we can tell, voters were blaming Trump for the shutdown, so hardship would reduce his popularity and reduce his political power. I’m not sure how Trump would have handled the scenario of escalating national economic pain and unpopularity. Perhaps he would have persuaded Republicans to nuke the filibuster. Perhaps he would have rescinded the Carter-era interpretation of the Antideficiency Act that led to government shutdowns and tried to unilaterally reopen the government. Either way, the shutdown would have eventually ended after some amount of pain for the American people, likely with no concessions on health care.

I was happy to bite that bullet. Just as I’m always urging progressives to abandon some of their policy rigidity for the sake of defeating MAGA, I think it would make sense for progressives to be a bit cold-hearted about this tradeoff for the sake of defeating MAGA. I’d have loved to see Democratic Party politicians and progressive donors mobilizing resources to support SNAP families to further make the political point. And I think the fact that it would’ve ended without concessions on health care anyway would mean that Democrats would still have the issue to run on.

But those of us who criticize the decision to fold should be clear about what we’re asking for.

The shutdown was a winning political hand vis-a-vis Trump — but the mechanism of action is that people suffer. Shaheen was acting in solidarity with federal workers and their labor unions, and in solidarity with SNAP recipients and anti-poverty advocates.

The Shaheen Team also made the point that the bipartisan appropriations bills — which the deal has now cleared the deck for — will set spending levels higher than the continuing resolution, and considerably higher than the levels that would be set if Republicans nuked the filibuster. This wasn’t the Washington Generals blundering away a game for no reason. It was earnest progressive Democrats trying to deliver the least-bad substantive policy outcome. This is the exact same impulse that has Senate Democrats filibustering federal voter ID or the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act — they’re declining to accept short-term policy losses for the sort of political gain that might let them do more good in the long run.

Procedural hardball trades off with policy

The luxury of being a progressive senator with a safe seat is you can live in a world with zero tradeoffs, where you tell everyone that if it were up to you, 100 percent of their dreams would come true.

The problem with this is that even the most ideologically extreme members tend to get bored playing pure fantasy politics and not actually doing anything. Elizabeth Warren, for example, made real concessions of substance — including some very in-the-weeds stuff about consumer protection regulation of mortgage lenders that was probably a bitter pill for her to swallow — to Tim Scott for the sake of getting the ROAD to Housing Act written, passed through committee, and out of the Senate. It’s now pending in the House, where a different set of stakeholders has its own hang-ups, and it may collapse.

But if it passes, it won’t pass because it represents Warren’s pure ideological vision. It represents some ideas she believes in, paired with some other ideas that sealed the deal. And good for her! But imagine that it does pass, and Donald Trump gets to say he’s signing historic bipartisan legislation to address housing affordability. That’s pretty great politics for Trump. Someone, somewhere, who is not as much of a housing supply head as Warren and I both are is going to be asking, “Why did Democrats give Trump this win?”

And in the real world, this is a common tradeoff.

A lot of progressive fighters have a kind of envy of the extreme procedural hardball that Republicans played in the mid-Obama years. It’s worth recalling, though, that this hardball involved Republicans rejecting offers from Obama for meaningful cuts to both Medicare and Social Security.

In formal terms, the reason they didn’t do the deal is that it would have raised taxes. But in truth, taxes were scheduled to rise anyway (and, in fact, did) due to the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. They just didn’t want to do anything that would let Obama run for re-election as having achieved a major bipartisan deficit-reduction deal. They wanted to beat Obama and then run the table in 2013. But instead Obama won, and they lost the opportunity to lock in policy gains.

One reason Obama was optimistic that the fever would break if he won the election is that he thought Republicans would see it was a mistake to prioritize hardball over policy wins.

What happened instead, of course, was the rise of Trump, who is certainly a huge fan of hardball politics. Progressives often look at that and characterize Trump as an ultra-conservative. But part of Trump’s whole deal was just completely giving up on G.O.P. policy goals with regard to Social Security and Medicare. He didn’t make the tradeoff go away; he just chose definitively to prioritize crushing the left over cutting federal transfer payments.

Fighters versus policy-demanders

I also want to clarify here that I’m not just talking out of my ass. The faction urging the Democrats to be more moderate isn’t saying they should be like Jeanne Shaheen.

Third Way President Jonathan Cowan denounced the deal in a press release. Note that the shutdown fight itself — which was about health-care tax credits rather than authoritarianism or ICE raids — was from the get-go moderate in its conception. Moderates want Democrats to fight on their best issues rather than tilt over stuff the public doesn’t care about, and incremental expansions of the health-care safety net are one of Democrats’ very best issues.

My favorite group of elected officials is the Majority Democrats. If you look at their Senate members (Gallego, Slotkin, and Bennet) and their members who are running for Senate (Angie Craig and James Talarico), none of them were for the deal.

I also think the exceptions here prove the rule. The party’s two successful gubernatorial candidates this year, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, are both Majority Democrats. They’re also similar politicians — elected in the same House class, roommates in D.C., good friends by all accounts — and have broadly similar approaches. Sherrill, like the rest of the Majority Dems, was against the deal but Spanberger came out for it.

Is that because Spanberger is more moderate than Sherrill? I don’t think it is. It’s pretty obviously because the cost-benefit of sacrificing federal workers’ paychecks for the sake of getting over on Trump looks different from Richmond than from Trenton.

Precisely for that reason, I kind of wish Spanberger had come out swinging against a deal days before it was announced to show that even though a deal is narrowly good for Virginia, she still wanted to fight.

But I bring up the difference because I think it illustrates what the actual tradeoff is here. Tim Kaine was on the bubble, but joined the dealmakers at the last minute because he got Republicans to make concessions protecting federal workers from Trump’s efforts at mass layoffs. Again, I think it’s totally comprehensible that a Virginia politician would consider this concrete policy win very important. I wish he saw it otherwise, but it illustrates the actual dynamic here, which is that dealmakers were prioritizing policy outcomes while rejectionists wanted to accept a worse policy outcome for the sake of political combat.

I will also say that I am not fanatical about this. There is a universe in which Trump said “yes” to Chuck Schumer’s proposal to extend the tax credits by one year, and I think a bunch of Democrats would have voted for that deal. I bet hardcore partisan brawlers would have been pretty disappointed with that outcome, too, because they are true fanatics about the ethic of fight fight fight. But that would just turn it into a losing fight.

Either way, though, there’s no getting around the basic tradeoff of fighting versus policy wins.

National party leadership matters most

One bit of nuance here is that moderates do genuinely value politicians who can win in Trump districts. I think Henry Cuellar and Tom Suozzi, both of whom fit this bill, are valuable to the Democratic Party because ultimately the road to a majority requires winning those seats.

These guys tend not to be big partisan brawlers on process questions; Cuellar and Suozzi weren’t involved in the dealmaking or the strategic decision to throw in the towel. But, once the deal was sealed, they voted for it because people in mismatched districts like to have bipartisan voting records.

This is why, even though I personally admire our brave Blue Dogs holding down red districts, I do not think that “recruit more moderate candidates” is the only solution to Democrats’ problems. I’ve been trying to be more conscious in recent months about the need to be clear on this. I think these are good politicians, and Democrats should recruit more like them. But recruitment doesn’t magically solve problems. That’s because:

1. It’s incredibly hard for politicians to credibly differentiate themselves from national party brands.

2. It’s incredibly hard for politicians representing red districts to engage in the kind of partisan hardball that would genuinely cripple MAGA.

The solution is that instead of just recruiting candidates who can win in red districts, national Democrats need to try to be a national political party that can win in red districts, such that those districts are no longer red.

My go-to example of this is that if Democrats won’t accept that the Democratic senators from Pennsylvania and Colorado and New Mexico won’t vote for a fracking ban because those states have oil and gas industries, then obviously Democrats aren’t going to win in redder Ohio and Texas and Alaska while banning fracking either.

The solution is for Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and — yes — Jeanne Shaheen to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking. That makes life much easier for Sherrod Brown. It makes it easier to recruit Mary Peltola. It means that Talarico and Colin Allred can wage a vigorous primary without either of them committing to anything politically suicidal.

I don’t want to re-do my whole schtick about this. But the point is that a more moderate Democratic Party, to me, means a national party with leaders and safe seat members who are genuinely trying to become more popular — who are more willing to align with majority opinion on major issues and less in hock to progressive policy-demanders. It’s not a party that relies on candidates who distance themselves from the party to win tough seats, but a party that positions itself such that candidates don’t need to distance themselves so much in order to win. And it’s definitely not a party that reflexively abandons the public-opinion high ground in order to secure obscure policy wins about appropriations levels.