Alex Wong/Getty Images Fourth Estate The Democrats’ Civil War Is Over Before It Began But political journalists are refusing to jump on the peace train.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Some reporters—especially those who have never seen a mortar round fired in anger—love to describe politics as “war” and portray any contentious intraparty dispute as a “civil war” or a “battle for the soul of the party.” Even before the November elections, which sent a majority of Democrats to the House, our political war correspondents were filing dispatches from the purported conflict being waged inside the Democratic Party between the upstart progressives led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the party’s establishment.

Presenting the clash in combat terms, a bevy of recent pieces carries headlines like “There Is Going to Be a War Within the Party. We Are Going to Lean Into It,” “The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party Has Begun,” “House Democrats Get Ready to Fight Trump. And Each Other,” “How Democrats Can Avoid Turning Their Presidential Primaries into a Circular Firing Squad,” and “Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?” The image of a fracturing, fratricidal party likewise stands at the core of my colleague Tim Alberta’s recent piece, “The Democrats’ Dilemma.”


Are the Democrats really waging war on each other? Is Bernie Sanders about to loot and pillage Joe Biden’s nascent campaign? And is Elizabeth Warren getting set to sack Amy Klobuchar’s Iowa headquarters? Or is all this noise just politics by the usual means? The voters don’t seem to be preparing for war. A recent nationwide poll by Morning Consult of Democratic primary voters put centrist Biden in the lead with 31 percent, which is to be expected, given his name recognition, and self-described democratic socialist Sanders second, with 27 percent, also a gimme considering voter familiarity with him.

But the answers to a second question asked in the poll suggest a degree of unity among primary voters not very well captured in the war dispatches from the Democratic front. Among Biden voters, the No. 2 choice for president is Sanders. Among Sanders voters, the top No. 2 pick is Biden. Kamala Harris supporters pick Biden second. Warren supporters pick Sanders second, and Beto O’Rourke supporters pick Sanders, too.

The Democratic Party is obviously split along progressive and establishment lines, but the polling data render the brother-against-sister hysterics of a civil war as overblown. Warren, one of the most progressive candidates, labels herself a capitalist! Democratic voters appear to be much more open to candidates from other wings of the party and political compromise than you’d expect given the raucous combat reports.

If the presidential race isn’t riven with internecine bloodshed, Congress' hallways must be red and moist, right? Wrong. Ocasio-Cortez and several other newly elected lefty members have captured the media with their “Green New Deal” proposal. Their resolution has attracted 100 congressional co-sponsors, but party stalwarts who control the flow of legislation have stalled the policy smorgasbord without igniting much unrest in the party. I’ve witnessed food fights that were more vicious.

It’s true that progressive candidates are clotting the presidential contest, that Ocasio-Cortez and her compatriots are hogging headlines and that the Democrats now control the House. But if we’re really going to posit a war within the Democratic Party, we should be careful about overestimating progressive power, especially in Congress. A Pew Research Center study from December found that 23 of the 30 defeated House Republican incumbents in 2018 were more moderate on average than reelected House Republicans. These electoral results signal a shift by voters in most of the formerly Republican districts, not necessarily a leap. Nor are most of these seats now solidly Democratic. “Most of the freshmen come from swing districts,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who beat four-term incumbent Republican Rep. Leonard Lance by 5 percentage points in November. (Lance, like at least seven other Republicans who lost their seats, belonged to the centrist Republican Tuesday Group.) These swing seats could easily rebound in a Republican direction in 2020, returning Democrats to minority status in Congress and perhaps putting a brake on fervid Democrat-against-Democrat politicking.

Democrats have always fought one another. The Southern Democrats fought the Northern Democrats. The rural Democrats mixed it up with the urban ones. But with genuine enemies in the Republican Party to contend with, today’s Democrats aren’t likely to start fragging one another, no matter their considerable policy differences. When you support more of your adversary’s positions than you oppose, peace has a way of breaking out.

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Many thanks to the king of Macomb County, Zack Stanton, for his insights. Did I need to add a link to the word “fragging”? Send your view via email to [email protected]. My email alerts are fighting a forever war against my Twitter feed. My RSS feed is fighting a long war against both of them.