Progressives and moderates tell the Guardian of competing visions for the future of the left. But they are united in one thing: resistance to Trump

On a sticky autumn evening, less than a month before the November midterm elections, more than 200 left-of-center New Yorkers packed an uptown auditorium for an Oxford-style debate on a central question animating Democratic politics: will progressive populism save the party?

For nearly two hours, Democrats from the progressive and moderate wings sharply defended competing visions for the future of their party as it clambers back from the political wilderness.

“They have wrecked the party,” said Jeff Weaver, a senior political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and his 2016 presidential campaign manager, jabbing a finger in the direction of the moderate panelists. “They have destroyed the coalition that undergirded the Democratic party for decades and we can’t let them have it back.”

He clashed with Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of the centrist thinktank Third Way, who said the left’s revolutionary policy aspirations “might look good on a bumper sticker” but are removed from political reality. If Democrats ran on a populist platform in 2020, he warned, Donald Trump would be re-elected.

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As tensions flared, the moderator interjected playfully: “I have to keep reminding myself, you guys all belong to the same party.”

On election day 2016, Democrats suffered one of the most stunning losses in modern presidential history. Twice in less than two decades, they won the popular vote but lost the presidency – this time to a historically unpopular candidate. The House and Senate remained in Republican control, as did a majority of state houses and governorships. In Washington and around the country, their grip on power had slipped to its weakest point in nearly a century. Democrats were left wondering: What now?

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Since then, the party’s center of gravity has shifted sharply away from Washington, toward an emboldened activist base, as its politics drift to the left. Across the country, a rising coalition of women, young people and minorities are crashing the gates of the Democratic party and demanding a seat at the table while liberal insurgents rattle the establishment in a forceful rejection of politics as usual. At the same time, a sprawling field of potential presidential candidates are rushing to plant their stakes in a shifting political landscape.

The debate, hosted by Intelligence Squared US, underscored the fierce contest of ideas taking place within the Democratic party two years into the Trump presidency – and on the eve of the November midterm elections.

“What happened in 2016 wasn’t just a win for Donald Trump – it was also a moment of reckoning for Democrats,” said Jahana Hayes, a first-time candidate who beat a veteran politician in the Democratic primary for Connecticut’s fifth congressional district. “There’s a strong appetite right now for change. People are looking for something different and they want candidates who are not afraid to articulate that change.”

Interviews with more than two dozen elected officials, candidates, strategists and activists describe a party in the midst of extraordinary transformation – a composite of competing interests and priorities united by a resistance to the Trump administration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jahana Hayes, national teacher of the year, at the White House in 2016. Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Hayes is at the vanguard of that cultural upheaval.

The former social studies teacher, who was named national teacher of the year in 2016, never expected to enter politics. Hayes launched what was considered to be a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination in May, running on progressive priorities such as single-payer healthcare, known as “Medicare for All”, and stricter gun laws. She highlighted her life story: a childhood of poverty, a brief period of homelessness and a pregnancy – all before graduating high school. But she continued to pursue her education and eventually became a teacher in the community where she grew up.

In August, Democrats defied the party and nominated Hayes. Now she is poised to be elected Connecticut’s first black congresswoman.

Her victory was one of a handful of primary-night surprises that ushered in a wave of fresh faces. The most dramatic of those upsets were in deep-blue districts, where liberal insurgents challenged the Democratic hierarchy and brought down long-serving incumbents.

This summer in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young Democratic socialist and former bartender, wrested the nomination from congressman Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat and a potential contender for House speaker.

Months later, in Massachusetts, Ayanna Pressley, a Boston City council member, ousted the congressman Michael Capuano, a 10-term progressive who had the backing of many of the state’s political leaders.

In all three primary contests, the candidates were propelled by a sense of urgency, encapsulated by Pressley’s campaign slogan: “Change can’t wait.” They harnessed mounting frustration with the status quo and a strong desire for bottom-up regeneration.

“Let’s expand what our party looks like,” Hayes said. “Let’s engage more people. Let’s broaden our depth of understanding.”

‘Not even a ripple’

The spirited primary season ended last month in New York, with a decisive victory for Governor Andrew Cuomo over his leftwing challenger, Cynthia Nixon.

The next morning, at a press conference in his Manhattan office, Cuomo, the two-term Democratic incumbent, whose corporate ties and dynastic status epitomize everything the left despises about the party elite, gloated that the “wave” of progressive victories expected to sweep the Democratic party never materialized.

“Not even a ripple,” he said, dismissing Ocasio-Cortez’s win as a “fluke”. Cuomo touted his progressive accomplishments as governor: raising the minimum wage, creating a paid family leave program and legalizing gay marriage.

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“I’m not a socialist. I am not 25 years old. I’m not a newcomer,” he said. “But I am a progressive, and I deliver progressive results.”

For the centrists watching, Cuomo’s victory lap was a welcome reality check on the narrative that the progressive left had taken over the Democratic party.

Unlike the Tea Party wave of 2010, when Republican voters replaced establishment favorites and moderate dealmakers with fire-breathing conservatives and ideological purists, no sitting Democratic senator lost a seat this cycle. Far from the rule, liberal dragon-slayers were the exception.

According to the Brookings Institution’s Primaries Project, which has analyzed congressional primaries in every election cycle since 2014, non-incumbent establishment Democrats did marginally better than their progressive counterparts. Establishment Democrats won 140 primary races – or 35% of the contests – compared with 101 – or 27% – for progressive Democrats, many of whom are running in solidly Republican districts where the party doesn’t expect to compete.

But in a possible sign of where the party is headed, the number of self-identified progressives running for office this year spiked dramatically compared with the previous two election cycles while the number of moderates declined slightly. In 2014, just 26% of Democratic House candidates referred to themselves as progressive; in 2018, the number rose to 44%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Cuomo votes in the New York Democratic primary. ‘I’m not a socialist … I’m not a newcomer,’ he said of his victory. ‘But I am a progressive.’ Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

“The progressive movement is energized,” writes Elaine Kamarck, a senior Brookings fellow who led the project, “but there is not much evidence that it is taking over the Democratic party or pulling it far to the left.”

The liberal insurgency that roared to life in the wake of the 2016 election shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Already, progressive activists have demonstrated their strength in confronting leadership and driving party’s internal policy debate.

They count among their achievements the fact that more than half of House Democrats and one-third of Senate Democrats, including a handful of potential 2020 contenders, have co-signed Medicare for All legislation. This summer, the Democratic National Committee reformed its presidential nominating process to reduce the influence of party elites, which was a source of contention during the bitter 2016 primary campaign. There is an emerging consensus around a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. And dozens of Democratic candidates – including more than half of the candidates in districts the party is targeting – are taking a page from Sanders and refusing donations from political action committees, or Pacs, that are sponsored by corporations or industry groups.

The revolution, they say, is just beginning.

How deep is the divide?

How the Democrats fare on Election Day will set the stage for the next battle: how they should approach 2020.

In several competitive House districts where Republicans are defending their majority, Democratic voters have nominated left-of-center candidates who stopped short of embracing positions like Medicare for All and a federal minimum wage. If Democrats win the House on election night, moderates will point to these results as evidence that a moderate message, and not leftwing populism, is the best strategy to win voters beyond the liberal bastions where the party still holds power.

Progressives see the electoral map differently. They argue that the depth of Democrats’ losses in 2016 proves that the only way to defeat Trump and Republicans is with a set of radical economic ideas that mobilize liberals and non-traditional voters.

“Our swing voter is not red-to-blue,” Ocasio-Cortez told an audience of progressive activists at the Netroots Nation conference earlier this year. “It’s non-voter to voter.”

Yet as Democrats look ahead to 2020, new research argues that the party is not as riven by ideological conflict as it appeared to be during the 2016 primary campaign.

The difference between Bernie Sanders voters and Hillary Clinton voters on issues of taxes, trade and healthcare was a “matter of degree [rather] than kind” and it was “harder for Democratic primary voters to choose between them based solely on policy”, write Lynn Vavreck, John Sides and Michael Tesler in their new book, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

The best predictors of whom a Democrat would support in the primary, they found, were race, age and whether the voter identified more strongly with the Democratic party or being liberal.

Aspects of identity could play an even bigger role in the next presidential election cycle. The prospective 2020 candidates will likely be diverse in terms of gender, race and age. Trump’s potential rivals traverse the ideological spectrum of the left and have demonstrated different strategies for confronting the president.

Deep-seated differences do exist, however, over economic and foreign policy, and on issues of regulation, trade and how aggressively to challenge corporate power. There are also long-held philosophical disagreements over whether rising income inequality is “the defining issue of our time”, as Barack Obama once said.

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Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and a strident critic of Wall Street, credits Sanders with amplifying the issue of economic equality. But he recalled that Hillary Clinton launched her campaign with a video message in which she declared that the “deck is stacked in favor of those at the top”.

“That was a shocking statement for an establishment candidate to make,” he said.

‘The real Democratic party is the activists’

On 19 October 2016, Bob Bland, then a fashion designer in New York City and nine months pregnant with her second child, was one of the nearly 72 million Americans who tuned in to watch the third and final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. As Clinton expounded on her plan to fund social security, Trump leaned into his microphone. “Such a nasty woman,” he sneered.

The phrase immediately struck a chord. Bland pulled open her laptop and started designing a T-shirt that said “Nasty Woman”. The next morning, she put the shirt online for sale. By noon that day, she was receiving a new order every second, with the proceeds going to Planned Parenthood.

“It was my first foray into political activism,” she said. “I suddenly had this group of nasty women who were constantly contacting me and asking me what they could do to help.” They decided to share photos of themselves wearing the shirts at polling stations on election day. (“It was a voter mobilization effort – but I didn’t know the term at the time,” she said.)

The next morning, in the fog of despair, Bland proposed the idea of a march in Washington on Facebook. Within hours, her community of “nasty women” expanded into thousands. When she discovered another woman in Hawaii had a similar idea and had already collected 12,000 responses, she quickly made contact. They joined forces and the Women’s March was born.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory, at the microphones, Bob Bland, second right, address a rally against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the supreme court. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If the November midterm elections deliver a “blue wave” of Democratic victories in Congress and state legislatures, it will have been fueled in large part by an energized network of newly motivated liberal activists who, like Bland, have thrown themselves into political activism over the past two years.

One in five Americans have protested or participated in political rallies and demonstrations since 2016 – and the vast majority of those activists are hostile to Trump.

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“The real Democratic party is the activists,” said congressman Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona. “Our victories this year have not come from one central figurehead leading the charge and knocking down Trump policies. They come from the people themselves – regular people and Democratic activists who are hitting the streets, protesting at the Women’s March or showing up at the ACA [Obamacare] town halls. That’s the spirit we need to embrace.”

What began with meetings in living rooms and public libraries grew into “the Resistance”, a sprawling web of loosely knit national, local and hyper-local grassroots groups dedicated to thwarting Trump’s agenda and electing Democrats. They are aided by national organizations such as Indivisible and Action Together, which formed after Trump’s victory and help coordinate and support the work of the countless smaller groups that have sprung up around local campaigns and issues.

The movement’s political ambitions have only expanded since the Women’s March, as they clash with the Trump administration over its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a decision to separate immigrant families at the border and the controversial confirmation of the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

‘This isn’t about one election cycle’

The Resistance is led by mostly white, college-educated, suburban women from across the ideological spectrum of the left, according to Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard who is studying the anti-Trump resistance. Though united in opposition to the president, this movement is distinct from the progressive insurgency. Activists are far less concerned with the party’s internal debate over ideology and strategy and much more focused on getting out the vote for Democrats in November, Skocpol found.

“This will not look like a far-left reinvention of Tea Partiers or a continuation of Bernie 2016,” Skocpol and Lara Putnam write in the journal Democracy. “It will look like retired librarians rolling their eyes at the present state of affairs, and then taking charge.” Or, as Bland put it: they are “soccer moms who suddenly sound like revolutionaries”.

Their political resurgence has helped repopulate local and state Democratic parties, many in suburban and conservative stretches of the country, that had atrophied during the Obama years.

It has also been a source of candidate recruitment for the party. Two years ago, 27 House Republican candidates ran unopposed in their districts. This year, Democrats will contest all but three House districts, according to Ballotpedia.

That charge is being led by a historically diverse field of candidates. Democratic women shattered records for gubernatorial and congressional nominees this cycle. Three African American candidates are running for governor – two in the old Confederacy. Elsewhere, Native Americans, Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, and LGBT candidates will be on the ballot in November.

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“It started on November 9, 2016, as a reaction based on anger – a feeling that I’ve got to make a change. I’ve got to fight Trump. I’ve got to fight everything that’s going to happen,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List. “But then it became so much bigger.”

During the 2016 presidential election cycle, her group – the largest national organization dedicated to electing women to office – heard from 920 women interested in running. Since Trump’s election, the organization has been contacted by more than 42,000 women who want to run for office.

“This isn’t about one election cycle,” Schriock said. “What we’re seeing is a sea change.”

Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts liberal who is exploring a 2020 presidential run, traveled to Jonesboro, Georgia, to work the phones on behalf of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

If elected, Abrams would be the country’s first black female governor. Her historic campaign has managed to excite both the progressive and moderate wings of the party. During the debate in New York earlier this month, the panelists argued over whether she was running as a “pragmatic leader” or an “ultra-progressive”.

If Abrams can win in Georgia, a state with a tortured history of race relations and where Democrats hold no statewide offices, her victory could provide clues for how the party can unite voters across the geographic, demographic and ideological spectrum.

After placing a few calls to Georgia voters urging them to vote for Abrams, Warren addressed the volunteers at their cramped field office outside Atlanta. She acknowledged the depths from which Democrats would have to come to wrest power from the Republicans, but she urged them not to despair.

“They got the White House. They got the House of Representatives. They got the Senate,” Warren said, holding her left fist in the air. “They got the statehouses all around the country. They got the money. They got the big, big, big donors. They got the coordination. But I’m gonna tell you this: I’d rather be us than them.”

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After two years of soul-searching, marching, protesting and organizing, the midterm elections on 6 November will test Warren’s optimism in the future of her party.

If history is still a guide in 2018, election night should produce gains for the opposition party. Polling data favors Democrats to win control of the House and a handful of governor’s mansions, including in states Trump won. That would be a start.

But some of the most critical challenges lie ahead. Democrats will soon choose a standard-bearer from what will almost certainly be a broad group of diverse candidates. That decision will involve complex questions of ideology and identity – distinguished by race, gender and age.

They will also have to make choices about strategy, tone and temperament. Does the party embrace leftwing populism or return to consensus-oriented pragmatism? Do they want someone who embodies change but doesn’t fit into a strict ideological box? How forcefully do they confront Trump? Above all, the candidate – and it is as likely to be a she as a he – must have a vision with broad enough appeal to oust a president who has defied convention and rewritten the rules of engagement.

The stakes could not be higher for the party out of power. Democrats are either on the verge of a comeback – or teetering on collapse.

