AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
In an op-ed for the New York Times last week, Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed pundits on both sides of the aisle in warning of impending disaster for her party in November’s midterm elections. Her solution? Not moderation or appeals to independent voters, with whom Democrats are deep underwater, but rather a furious charge to the left and an even more full-throated embrace of progressivism, all led by the White House and historically unpopular President Joe Biden. While following this advice seems by all accounts to be nothing short of political suicide, Warren is just the latest high-profile Democrat to publicly counsel President Biden that more wokeness, not less, is the key to saving Democrats’ majorities.
In her piece in the Times, Warren warns that “Republicans are betting that a stalled Biden agenda won’t give Democrats enough to run on in the midterm elections — and they might be right.” To remedy the matter, she calls on Democrats to aggressively enact as much of their progressive agenda as possible before November, a feat that would involve Biden invoking sweeping executive powers to do so.
Specifically, Warren says Democrats should “use every single one of the next 200 days or so before the election to deliver meaningful improvements for working people.” While that may sound admirable enough, it’s worth remembering that progressives like Warren also consider the massive socialist spending policies passed during the first months of the Biden administration, which caused the runaway inflation now wreaking havoc on the American economy, to be “meaningful improvements for working people.”
But Warren isn’t the only Democrat urging Biden to go for woke. Late last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also slammed Biden over not selling out enough to the progressive agenda. In an interview with a local New York newspaper, Ocasio-Cortez criticized Biden and Democrats generally for catering to “middle of the road, increasingly narrow band of independent voters.” Instead, the 2nd-term Congresswoman said that Biden should be more concerned about “the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, feeling like they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren’t necessarily being seen.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal has also sent not-so-subtle signals to the White House that a hard pivot even further left is the right move. Following Democrats’ annual retreat in Philadelphia earlier this year, Jayapal released the CPC’s “Recommendations for Executive Action,” a series of Executive Orders that progressives believe Biden should sign before the midterm elections in order to boost Democrats’ chances. Leading progressive activists have also threatened that an insufficiently woke direction from the White House between now and November might result in low turnout from Democrats’ base of progressive voters – a situation that would be truly disastrous for Democrats given their low favorability among more moderate voters.
That progressives think Biden has governed “middle of the road” is the first sign of just how out of touch the left is with the experience of working Americans today. Biden promised to be a “transformational” president, and has fulfilled that promise in the worst possible way. Through ill-advised economic policies and massive spending bills, Biden and his allies in Congress have slowed the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and sent inflation and gas prices soaring. Progressive open-borders policies have led to the worst immigration crisis in history. Biden’s complete capitulation to anti-police radicals who want to “reimagine” the criminal justice system has mired America’s cities in the worst wave of violent crime in a generation. The White House has also sided with a small niche of left-wing radicals on social issues, including education, even using the FBI to imply that parents who spoke up at school board meetings were domestic terrorists.
Warren’s assertion that Democrats are struggling in the polls because “they don’t have enough to run on” also underscores another fundamental problem with how progressives are approaching the midterm elections; namely, that they believe voters are upset with them because they aren’t woke enough rather than the reality that they are far too woke. It’s not Democrats’ lack of action which is giving the party problems, but rather that all of their actions have made life generally more difficult, more costly, and more dangerous for millions of Americans.
Ironically, if Biden had eschewed wokeness, he may have been able to spread several key aspects of his progressive Build Back Better plan more surreptitiously.
Instead, the woke agenda has left Biden with three significant legislative losses, struggling to find a scapegoat for inflation, and approval numbers in the low 30s. There are many things Biden has failed to do in his first two years. Going woke hasn’t been one of them.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.